You are right. Expect this feature to be added soon. Thanks for the feedback.

Just a home game with friends. Not big stakes, e.g. 10c/20c.
Would be great to define the blinds, min and max buy in.

But we'll give it a go later in the week as it is.
Thanks.

hosted a home game using the playcards site (+zoom).
Thanks - it was good fun.

A couple of suggestions:
1) allow the blinds, buy-ins and top ups to be specified rather than preset.
2) Make the winning hand show for longer, e.g. 10 seconds - sometimes it disappeared too fast to see.
3) Give the option of showing losing cards when folding

Also, as the host I won 10 buy-ins, mostly by lucky rivers... it's not rigged, is it?

Great suggestions. I'll consider them. Thanks a lot. I'm glad you won, but no it's not rigged. I have no incentive to do that. Like mentioned in a previous comment I will switch to a more secure RNG soon, but even with the current one it's 100% just variance.

I've brought my home game to Stars the last two Tuesdays and it's been a blast. While we normally play a cash game with $100 buy ins, but my games have always been a 'beers and BS' atmosphere, so most of us are fine with the 11 cent Turbo STTs. I start one at 7pm and a second at 705, with another pair at 745 and 750. The whole evening is a little under 2 hours.

If your game is a social one more that a gambling one, Zoom or google hangouts is a must. One of my guys has zoom pro and we all join the same chat and whoop and holler over literal pennies. I'm in close to total isolation, and I can honestly say these games and the banter that goes with it is the most fun I have all week.

I know you can't do live money on Stars in much of the USA, but people can but a montain of play chips for like 5 bucks, if you're not finding other good options.

Stay safe y'all

Yeah the rake and the speed of stars home games and no hand histories all suck. I guess they’re hoping to make money selling play chips?

You can try the playcards site above. The pace is much slower, which is good for friendly games. And no rake.

Thanks for making this thing. We had our 3rd game on it last night and I noticed that you added the choice of small blind size so thanks for that. We play 5p/10p blinds so if you could reduce the minimum down from 10 to 5 that would be ideal!!

Also a top up option would be good. I found myself going all in when I got shortstacked just so I could rebuy.

Anyway, thanks again.

I thought of something similar to leverage Zoom's ability to build group poker experiences under CoVid circumstances.

I'd like to learn more about others' experience with poker using zoom conferencing.

pm me ?

They make a ton of money selling play chips ....

I set up the same system + used Zoom to see real players. I'm having a great time with it. Some of my buddies also thought the game went too fast at showdown (we're quinquagenarians). You don't get a chance to gloat about your win. Sadly, they left the game. They just couldn't handle it. If anyone has a better system, let me know.

As a regular poster in Home Games, so many of my posts have the caveat, "It all depends on what type of home game you're looking for."

My (pre-COVID) home game is built for the recreational player. A couple times a month, for a few hours on usually a weekday (occasionally a weekend), blinds .25/.50, buy in $100, most people are a 2-bullet max type of player. It's basically for people looking for a social poker experience. Only a couple of us are even once-a-week types at the casino, none of them play above 1/3. None have extensive online experience; 2-3 of them had never even opened an account before. Ages are mostly around 30 but a couple of us are north of 40.

In short, almost none of them are gamblers, and none of them are missing gambling.

So when setting up a Stars home game, I could have replicated the structure of the poker game, but it would have been impossible to replicate the social interaction and feel of hanging out in my living room. And considering the times we're going through, I felt like what we all need is some laughs. The poker is basically an excuse to (virtually) hang out with each other for a short while.

So given what I was looking to create, the Stars games would suck without the zoom chat. The actual structure of the evening is 4 turbos, 2 that start at 7 and 7:05, and another pair that kicks off at 7:45. I get 8-10 people a night. Turbos take about 45 minutes each, and having 2 on the go is a good rhythm: having just one table is way too slow, but the couple of times someone is still battling at the end of the first tourney when the final two start up, they now have 3 tables going and they get frantic!

What makes it all a total laugh is that the buy in for each tourney is...11 cents. That's the minimum BI you can set up. (As mentioned above, navigating Stars play chip system is a bit of a hassle.) I chatted with one of my regs who is possibly the only one who actually does miss the gamble, and we both agreed that we are surprised that the games are played decently. There's no shoving in level 1 with J4o or dumb stuff like that. People do play to win, but there's no soul-crushing loss of a couple hundred bucks if you get sucked out on.

The second two tourneys are always NLHE, but if you win the 7PM game, you get to pick next week's 7 and 7:05 poker variant. So the first week all 4 games were NLHE, but the last three weeks we started with PLO twice and O/8 once. My people have virtually no idea how to play these games! But 11 cents is the perfect time to learn.

The zoom chat allows for fun railing and some rapid-fire smack talk between us, basically the usual poker BS. But when a couple of people are all in, and the ace inevitably hits the turn, the crowd goes bananas. The guy who got sucked out on gets to erupt in faux outrage, and before you know it, we're doing it all again. It is fast paced so there isn't time to ask how the kids are doing or chat like that, but it is nice to see some friendly faces. As a single guy who lives alone and isn't working atm, I can say that these two hours are one of the highlights of my week.

If you have any f/u questions, here or PM is fine. GL to all!

We have started using the Faded Spade card room for our online home game.

Our home game was using Stars but as mentioned, playing a ring game is not easy to track with the rake of play chips.

Also, we like playing PLO/8 and the minimum play chip games offered in ring format are 250k/500k blinds, which require purchase of a ton of free chips.

Neither of those are an issue at Faded Spade.

Browser based, no desktop application to use. People are playing on tablets and different browser and OS combinations.

We are paying for the reserved table.

Stars is wonderful, and we are still using it for tournaments. But play money games is not their bread and butter. Totally willing to pay for a service that fits our needs better and wants to keep us engaged and satisfied.

That looks really promising. Some questions:

1) is the $19.99 monthly charge per table or per person?
2) can you slow down the game play or is it as fast as stars?
3) are hand histories available?

Hey, Brian.

1. the charge is per table per month. players register with no charge

Right now you cannot easily switch the game settings for the table (you can request a change in limit structure or game, but it goes through support). We are generally happy playing PLO/8, so not as much of an issue. They say that game rotation (mix games) are coming soon, and that would be very welcome for us (as they have Stud and Razz available, and we would like to throw those in the mix).

2. The game moves about the same pace as Stars. There is a time bank, though. At a full ring game, it feels like a good pace. If you are short handed it moves fast.

3. Yes! Hand histories are available and they are super helpful for tracking action, but be sure to save while your session is active.

It is a browser based client, not a desktop app, so it not saving anything locally automatically.

Not sure about the ability to request hand histories after the fact.

I can say that our players like the HH feature. It is very easy to call it up on screen and page back and forth to see what happened.

As the group admin, I appreciate that the history has the info I need to track player activity.

I have written a Python script to take a saved log and spit out that transaction info.

If you give it a try, reach out I am happy to share the Python script with you.

donkhouse.com

has been somewhat ok

I had a quick test ahead of game #4 tonight.

Thanks for changing the min blinds. That part is perfect now. I also see the the showdown time is longer - so another good change.


If you have the patience, I think there's still some finessing to do on the buy in an top up size. I see that you can rebuy for less than the max, but then it rounds the total amount you're in for, so we'd need to record the amount outside of the site.
Also, it would be good if you could buy in and top up for whatever you want subject to host's max and min.

So i.e. host sets blind size and min/max buy-in, and you choose what to buy-in for when you join the game (rather than a set #bb for all players).
Then all players can top up to the max at any time, and this gets recorded without rounding.

Edit: this is on his playcards.live site.

Hey, have you noticed the total buy-in amount on the player list, with a dollar sign? Is that what you are looking for?

Auto top up is on my list. I haven't had time to work on it.

Is there a program that I can run with Pokerstars play money cash games that will save my hand history or record it?




Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

They now rake the play money..

We have been playing $0.01/$0.02 on pokerstars home games as $1/$2 and settling up by etransfer or stars transfer, keeping track of buyins and time in a spreadsheet to get all rake back. Been going on for over a month now and is working really well. Big swings in 1/2 PLO8!

I should also add that we play $20 r/a holdem tournaments on Fridays and sometimes on a couple other days a week which brings out some of the non-cash game players. We're in Canada so pokerstars real money is pretty straightforward.

Which "tournament structure" did you choose (ultrasonic, regular, deep)? And how long did the tournament last?

I'm trying to set up a game for 9 people, and want to keep it around 2 hours tops

Thanks@

I think you're wrong about why they're raking play-money games.

First, you can get some free play money chips every few hours. If they didn't rake, people's balances would grow and grow over time and they would have to provide bigger and bigger games, with no end in sight. (That is unless sufficient players abandom their play money balance.)

Second, there is a cost to hosting play-money games. They partially mitigate that cost by selling play-money chips. Again, you don't want those chips sold not to live forever so it makes sense to rake the game.

They could be raking the game to facilitate collecting rake for the player that sets it up? Nah, that's just a bonus.

I've been told about a few games on apps, that are all play money chips and raked. People use money transfer services to buy into the game. Game is raked, so the guy who collected the money pays out less money than collected, and keeps the rake.

If my home game needed to play on a site that raked, I suppose we'd figure out a way to disburse the extra money leftover in some fair and equitable way. It wouldn't be by going through the hands to determine how much rake each player actually paid. It might be by time at the table distribution (unfair for those with fewer chips), or a multiplier for chips left (probably best measure of fair and easy).

The best way to do it is to set up a game start and end time. You then track initial buy in and any rebuys/add ons. At the conclusion of the game you get the final stack counts and then if you have a spreadsheet set up you can easily divide the rake. I'm in a group that has been doing it and it works great. Rake is then divided equally between all the players. We settle up once a week and pay out using Venmo/Paypal/Zelle.