So, now that v40 is out and I have used it for the last week on Coolbet, here is my promised post about what could (should) be improved to the Prima software.
As a background: I am a hobby poker player, living in Estonia, and therefor have access to 3 different poker clients: MPN, Unibet and Pokerstars. I might use Unibet and Pokerstars as examples below, but as I have no experience with any other poker clients I can’t refer to them.
Additionally; I am an experienced software developer myself and while I obviously have no access to your code, I know damn well that some of the issues mentioned below don’t take weeks to fix.
Lastly, I am playing on Mac and my findings are therefor related to the Mac desktop client of your software.
#1 UX Improvement: hide the big banner
When you open the application you see this big banner. This takes up a lot of space. Now, I do understand why this banner is there. The poker rooms can use it to advertise their own tournaments, promotions and whatnot. And it’s completely fine to show this banner upon opening the application. But, make it possible to hide the banner after that, or at the very least make it scrollable. You could win so much space with that, you could show more tournaments / cash tables. Why does a permanent banner need so much screen space?
#2 Poker lobby improvements
This is what I posted in my first post a few weeks ago already, but will have it now spread out over a few points and this will keep it all in one post without referencing to 3 or 4 pages back:
With the poker lobby I am referring to the page you see when you click either Hold’Em or Omaha and then choose Tournaments, although most points below are also valid for Cash.
Info and filters are key here.
First of all, merge Omaha and Hold’em to the same page (more on that in point #3).
Then, add more columns:
- show how many players have registered and how many are still in. So, just show (35/50) if 35 of the registered 50 players are still in.
- show how long the late reg is still open
- show the current prize pool
- game speed (normal, slow, turbo, hyper-turbo etc)
- table size (HU, 4-max, 6-max, etc)
Now the filters:
In addition to the existing filters, we should be able to filter on:
- buy-in
- game type (omaha or hold’em or both)
- game speed
- table size
And of course, filters should be saved so you don’t have to redo it every time you reopen the app.
Just look at Pokerstars for this, really.
#3 UX Improvement: make the menu and structure consistent
Look at the menu you have in your application, what do you see? Home - Fish Party -Blaze - Hold’em - Omaha - Casino.
Now look at Pokerstars’ menu: Cash - Zoom - Spin&Go - Sit&Go - Tournaments
The key difference here is that in your menu you have added a mixture of game types (fish party, blaze, casino) and poker types (hold’em, omaha) where Pokerstars has only game types.
Why is Pokerstars not listing the poker types in their menu? You might think it’s because they offer way more poker types than you do, and while that is certainly true, that is not the main reason. The main reason is that Pokerstars understand how the users are behaving, how to show the most info while still keeping it user friendly and with the least amount of clicks.
Let’s break that down. If I am a recreational player who only plays Hold’em, and I want to play a tournament, what do I do?
On Pokerstars: I go to Tournaments -> filter by game type ‘Hold’em’ -> choose a tournament of my liking
On MPN: I go to Hold’em -> choose ‘tournaments’ -> choose a tournament of my liking
So far so good, right? It takes 3 steps on Pokerstars, and it takes 3 steps on MPN. So what’s the difference?
The difference comes when you are interested in playing more than one poker type. Let’s say I am now a player who plays both Hold’em and Omaha, and I want to play a tournament:
On Pokerstars: I go to Tournaments -> filter by game types ‘Hold’em’ and ‘Omaha’ -> choose a tournament of my liking
On MPN: I go to Hold’em -> choose ‘tournaments’ -> see the available tournaments, try to memorize them -> go to Omaha -> choose ‘tournaments’ -> see the available tournaments, try to remember the ones that Hold’Em was offering -> if I want to play one of the Omaha tournaments, I can click it right now, but if not, then I have to go back to the Hold’Em -> Tournaments screen again
Here it’s clearly visible how the current structure isn’t working for those who like to play both Hold’Em and Omaha. Pokerstars understands this, they make it equally easy for both single-game players as multi-game players to see all the info in the same screen, with the same amount of steps. MPN doesn’t do that.
You should definitely implement this the same way as Pokerstars does. For the recreational players who play only 1 game nothing will change! They still can find all they are looking for in 3 steps, but for the multi-game players this will give so much more power to see what games are on offer. So this goes together with the improvements from #2 above.
And of course, this all works for cash games as well.
#4 Tournament lobby improvements
This is the big one, and by far the one that should have your highest priority. This also discussed in my first post a few weeks ago, but also here, adding it to have everything in one spot.
If there is only thing you are going to change to the tournament is lobby, please make it possible that they can pop out. This is absolutely a must. When playing more than one tournament at once, it must be possible to see information from both tournaments at the same time. The current “i” icon is not sufficient, you can keep the button but at least make it a separate screen that you can drag and drop wherever you want, not that it overlaps the current table.
A separate screen is needed and all of this information should be available there:
- current blind level
- what will be the next level
- when will the next level starts
- the total amount of players in tournaments
- the amount of players still in the tournament
- our current position
- what is the average stack
- what are the highest and lowest stacks
- what are the payouts
- we want to see the position of every player - right now you only see the position of players when they are kicked out. - more on that below also
- we want to see how long it takes before late reg ends
Right now, almost all of this info available, but it's all over the place. Some things are in the lobby. other things you can see when you click the "I" icon.
#5 UX improvement: overlapping of hand history / replay
When you open the hand history, the list of hands are actually overlapping the left side of the table, so when you click a hand to replay you won’t actually see the cards from any of the players on the left side of the table. You have to manually close the overview of hands, which is an extra click, then if you want to replay a different hand, you have to manually open that overview again and then close it again - no need for that if you can just keep both open at the same without overlapping. Keep the list of hands on the left, the table on the right, and you’re good to go.
#6 UX improvement: overlapping of the “i” screen
Will not longer be an issue if #4 is implemented, but at least for the time being: can you make it so that the screen that appears when clicking on the “i” icon is NOT overlapping the left part of the table? You can’t see the info and keeping track of the players on the left side at the table at the same time.
#7 UX improvement: overlapping of the board when on break
When the break starts, and you are still in hand, the table shows a nice message that tournament is on break and return in X:XX minutes. Nice, good to know this info. But why oh why is this overlapping the cards?! Position that message a bit above, or a bit below, the cards and you can actually see which cards are on the board. Quite useful to know when you’re still in the hand.
#8 UX improvement: overlapping the “new table” message
This is similar to #7 but worse. When in a tournament and you get moved to a new table, you are shown a message that his happened. Ok, cool, that’s indeed useful info to know. But why is it overlapping the board, and even worse: why do you have to click on that message to close it before you can do something else?! When I play multiple tournaments I might not notice straight away that I got moved. I get the sound notification that something is happening on that table that requires my attention, I see I have AA dealt to me. I decide to raise but… i can’t. I can’t, because that message is blocking me from doing anything else on that table until I confirm that I have read that message. This can be the difference between being on time to raise, or being too late and cards get folded. This message should NOT be confirmed from players’ perspective. Show it, yes, but make it disappear automatically. Like your achievements work. Also, just like #7, make sure it doesn’t overlap with the board.
#9 Find finished tournaments in lobby
One of the reasons why I am using Coolbet a lot lately is because there is a tournament series for the Estonian championships of poker running on the MPN clients. On Unibet as well, but that’s a different story. For this series you can gather points every week when you finish in top 6. So naturally, for me it’s very interesting to find out which players are finishing in top 6. This tournament takes place on every Monday evening, and when I am kicked out of the tournament I am not going to keep the client open for hours to find out who scored points. No, I close the client and want to take a look at on Tuesday morning. However, this is not possible. This is a tournament I have played in myself, but I can’t find it in the lobby at all anymore. Why are results from previous tournaments unable to be found in the lobby? I understand you need to save bandwidth so of course not all tournaments should be there, but can you at least keep them for some 24 hours after they finish?
#10 UX improvement: show on which table players are
So, from tournament lobby it is possible to be a spectator, to see other tables. But there’s no way of seeing on who is playing on which table before opening a table. If I want to rail one of my friends who is in a MTT with 5 tables, I have a 20% chance of opening his table on the first try. Can’t you show table numbers next to the player’s name in the lobby? Or even better, just make sure you go to a player’s table when you double click his username?
#11 UX improvement: show current position in tournament lobby
This is what I mentioned in #4. Currently in the tournament lobby you can see the position of the players…. but only of them who are kicked out of the tournament. You can so easily fix this by just adding the current position in front of the player’s name. Kicked out players have their finished position after their name, so there is still a distinction between which players are in and which ones are out.
#12 Finish tournaments when all remaining prizes are the same (satellites)
So this one I am not sure if that is something done by you or if that’s a setting done by the poker rooms themselves. Also, it is not consistent, one time it did happen and one time it didn’t. But I have played some satellite and where top 4 got tickets, and when there were 4 players left, the tournament kept on going, even though all four of us would get the same prize. Not every player noticed that so even when I kept pushing all-in every hand, it took still quite a while before the tournament was finally over, which was unneeded.
It also happened once in another satellite where top 3 got tickets and when there were 3 players left, the tournament immediately finished.
So I am not sure if this is a setting somewhere, but I think it should be standard to just stop the tournament when remaining players all have the same prize, or at least make it optional to keep on playing.
This is all that I’ve got for now. I have spent about a week testing it, those are my main concerns for now. I know that things like the tournament lobby are not done in a few days, but issues like #7, #8, #9 and especially #11 are quick fixes you can have done in a very short period of time for some quick wins, if you would decide to do so.
like: EP, MP, CO, Hero, SB, BB.
I would also say 100 players minimum who play Micro daily also want to use a HUD. For those that do not want to be tracked - thats why the change alias function is there!
