Of what I read in the discussion between coon74 and Bluffyou, it is possible that both clocks could be ticking at the same time, right?

As far as I understand, yes, and in fact, both clocks will inevitably be ticking at the very start of the duel, at least until one of the players finishes his first 10 moves on the button.

Was just giving the new app a try, and the game won't load up ...




It's showing a playing on another screen, '7Phenom1991' - any chance you're reading this? Will give it a try again later!

PS. Looks like Spring came early for a lot of us - so beautiful out! Hope everybody's having a nice weekend!!

^^

the app is lagish. wont show my profil or open the duel sometimes. try restart the app r your mobile

I've started thinking that the asynchronous format was invented as a solution to the pervasive mobile lag. When playing usual poker games, mobile customers have been at a serious disadvantage because of the increased disconnection risk.

Hey HotCosby, thanks so much for the help - it worked!


Also, since the timing of the game got all mucked up, wound up starting a second game ... and wound up running into a second bug. And the restart trick also worked for that one too - so that was nice to be able to keep playing. The writing on what was happening in the hand wasn't showing on the middle of the table - only knew it was missing because it was my second game, but even then it was kind of confusing ...





Sent my log files to PS, so guess they'll be taking a look at those - but was just thinking of how helpful it'd be if there were a way to personally invite someone like c00n to test out the app, if its something you might play quite a bit?


Between the Milestone Challenges, and this Duel app, think I've had my fill of HU for a while - guess the street by street play's quite different, but it still felt quite a bit like regular HU too?

Anyways, thanks Cosby!! It was nice to be able to give the new app a try in one sitting

Invitations to private beta-tests are definitely being sent out, but to customers who have been more loyal than me (an eternal Chromestar never hiding that I'm more than flirting with other poker sites)

Anyone else get a certified stars rep hitting them up via PM asking for feedback after posting ITT ?

Yes ...

Wonder if maybe they decided to PM instead of just post in this thread too - so we couldn't all just pretend not to see their requests for feedback and not say anything?


PS. C00n


Hope everybody has a nice day!

No, I've received no PMs from Stars reps recently, maybe they were tempted but my above post discouraged them, or maybe they have a sixth sense and know that I have no proper phone yet (I'm much more into laptops), though I'm ready to buy it on the day when I'm emailed about being eligible for Duel

Maybe there's a way to run mobile apps on a desktop/laptop, or something ... not sure (?)

I use Droid4X to emulate Android apps that don't require real money deposits, and it can even set an accurate custom location of the 'phone', but I'm afraid it's not allowed for use with Stars / Duel because it can be regarded as an anonymiser, in the same category as a VPN. I'll need to ask the support on this matter.

Was surprised the beta testing expanded to my area so soon, so hopefully it'll be in your neck of the woods soon too

Also, hopefully there'll be more promos in the regular client coming soon, to keep things interesting! My entry into the $1mil freeroll satty didn't last very long lol

(only did the free one, didn't deposit)

Has anyone noticed this app sucks a lot of juice? I have noticed my battery life seems to be worse than usual the last few days. This morning I spent a couple of hours on the pokerstars app, and may be 5 minutes playing on dual. In my battery monitor screen, it shows Dual used 24% of my battery, and the regular pokerstars app used 7%.

For this reason alone I am going to uninstall Dual as soon as my last match is finished.

Have you tried turning all the animation off? If the app eats so much charge even in its least demanding mode, then the developers have messed it up (Alas I can't check it myself as Duel is not available in Russia yet.)

Even with animation on, the app is more basic than World of Tanks or whatever video game, and the fact that it's so demanding is a shame.

On a side note:

Why didn't Amaya make Duel a browser app? It would be much more portable then, even to BlackBerry or desktop computers, and much less sensitive to the hardware and the OS version (recall that Android has a lot of vendors' own modifications).

I didn't try it with animation off. I don't think it would have made a big difference though, I only played for less than 5 minutes. When I looked at the details of power use for Duel, it shows the CPU was running in the background the entire 3 hours I had my phone turned on, and about 4 minutes in the foreground when I was playing the hands.

Just saw this in headline in the PokerScout news feed:

PokerStars Pulls Its Innovative Heads Up App, DUEL
App is “not commercially viable at scale,”


The Duel was so strange - and then wasn't the rake really high? Hope PS doesn't start increasing the rake to pay for new projects

If it failed due to not being a fun game, that's not all that negative, in a lot of ways it's positive, more sites should try new things (remember Irish Poker?).

If it failed due to execution/development/high rake, then that's another story.

I was looking forward to this coming for play money. I wanted to challenge my friends. I at least would've liked to have tried it. Maybe they can release it to play money so it's not a total wash.

If it failed due to high rake then hopefully it will get them out of this mentality of "lol gamblers don't even know what rake is."

There is no shame in trying something new and quitting when it's deemed a failure. There's only shame when you hang on to something that you know is a failure.

My hypothesis of Duel's failure is as follows.

I guess the rake was too low, i.e. recreationals were losing money at a faster rate than in Spins (had like -30% ROIs), especially due to the friend list feature (giving a green light to bumhunting) but Stars were raking in a much smaller % of the recs' loss than from Spins. They might have considered raising the rake to 15-20%, but this wouldn't have fixed the issue of recs losing too fast and too deterministically.

A poker game is the more marketable the more variance it has. Duel was a very low variance game, so Stars had to attract new players at an enormous rate to sustain the game, which they thought would happen due to its asynchronicity and its ability to fit into people's busy schedules, but the player acquisition rate turned out too low.

I was wondering internally from the very beginning why Stars would want to develop this game at all because it would be such a paradise, about as risk-free as a real job, for low stakes regulars if it were ever offered at the $5 level.

Or maybe it had something to do with having to wait days for your opponent to call or fold lol

I never got to play it but from the way it was described stalling to the max did seem like a potential problem with it.

Not surprised it failed, but at least they tried. Back to ripping off users like SNE's for cash now for Amaya probably.

The idea of this format is not totally dead on arrival, though - Head of Poker at Microgaming Alex Scott has confessed at the PKR forums that it's not in their 'plans for the immediate future' but is theoretically possible on their network.

They might cancel this idea too now that Stars have pulled it, but might instead see this as an opportunity to go ahead and make a unique selling proposition.