More details here: https://pokerfuse.com/news/poker-roo...kem8-actually/

The game does require a bit of strategy... namely, the avoidance of domination and the choice between high card power and connectivity, which is influenced by the number of players in the round. It would be easily solved by bots if it had low rake. The rake is definitely too high , so the botters won't even bother.

Judging by your article text, the game is between users (their hands, using 5 community cards shared by all the players plus 2 personal hole cards, are compared in a multiway showdown), not against the house, just the player count can be so large that they won't fit onto a single poker table. It just happened so that there was only 1 player in the pool in the gif (but it's remarkable that rake was charged even after no opponent showed up).

If there's a prize pool split like in an MTT, the probabilities of the hand being the 2nd best, 3rd, etc. may also come into play.

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If you're suspicious about Pick'Em8 being playable with casino bonus money, well, it might be just a cross-selling move. Regardless of whether the game is licensed under the casino or poker section, it's a multiplayer game of skill, though whether strong players' advantage will be enough to beat the 9-12% rake is an open question. After all, blackjack tournaments exist, so the 'casino game' and 'game of skill' categories aren't mutually exclusive.

I wonder how exactly the cards are dealt. I guess that the 5 community cards are selected at the start of the seating for a new round, then each player is dealt 8 cards from their personal deck that are ensured to be distinct from the community cards - if a drawn hole card matches one of the community cards, it's redrawn, until 8 cards are drawn that are different from the community ones and are only then shown to the player.

This way, duplicate hands are possible, but then the prize pool is simply split evenly among all those who have the same best hand. The advantage of using personal decks is that the number of players per round is unlimited.

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Judging by the gif, what's a bit annoying is that the game is played in the main lobby instead of a separate window, and apparently, there's no way of playing at more than one stake at the same time (e.g. both $0.25 and $1; or will it be possible to play one stake in the client and the other in the browser?), and one has to unregister to be able to open a poker table or a few on the side to keep oneself occupied (assuming that PE8 rounds will only start once a minute at each stake).

Never mind - it looks like splits between equal best hands will be so frequent that there's no need to reward any hand that's not the best on showdown - the variance will be quite low anyway due to those splits.

I assumed it would be the same 8 cards that everyone chooses from.

There are only 28 variants of picking 2 out of 8 cards, and the vast majority of them are obviously bad even to a beginner, e.g. in the example from the screenshots (which are already available publicly in the game description at 888's site) there are only 3 candidate picks that aren't obviously bad: Q9, 99 and the tester's choice QJ (if the rejected cards could reappear on the board, which I don't believe in - see below - then 98 would be another candidate). I guess that the Nash equilibrium strategy is mixed - to pick each of the 3 with some probability.

I have no idea how big the field is expected to be; I hope PE8 becomes at least about as popular as Blast, so there will be 20+ players in each $0.25 round and 15+ in $1.

The graphical design of the lobby hints that 2 more buy-ins are planned to be added later, presumably $3 and $10 or maybe $5 and $15

With so many players in a round, it would be undesirable to have the prize pool split among 1/3 of the field (or even the majority of the field if the 8 cards contain exactly 2 aces, which they will ~9.8% of the time), because 888 likely wants PE8 to have MTT-like variance, so I believe that the sets of 8 cards will vary by player.

What I've been wondering about is whether the cards that a player rejects can reappear on the board; I don't think they can, because 888 must have the capacity to deal to more than 20 players in a round, in which case a single deck wouldn't be enough, and it can't just use independent decks for the community and the players because that would result in awkward hands like 5 of a kind being dealt sometimes, hence my assumption about 8 cards dealt out of an individual 47-card deck for each player (stripped of the 5 community cards), but anyway, it will only take us a few rounds to find the dealing mechanics out when the game appears in the lobby.

But I haven't asked the most important question.

What's the expected timeframe for the rollout of Pick'Em8 to the .com player pool?

I mean, is 'any day now' the best estimate that you have?

The appearance of the description at 888's site does suggest strongly that the game will be live this month if not within a week

When we published the article, description of pick'em8 was still hidden from 888 website but now it can be seen. So I wouldn't be surprised if they launch by the end of this week.

888 told investors a new poker client was coming "this month" three months ago, so making firm predictions is hard :P

The landing page for Pick'Em now switches to a 'coming soon' message, but the detailed description is shown for a brief time at the start of the loading, and it's retrievable by the code inspection tools of browsers.

This 'coming soon' probably means 'not in the coming week'
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As for the argument about the casino nature of the game, I guess you haven't paid enough attention to its name.

Pick'Em is a standard name for fantasy sports competitions.

Moreover, though I don't play CS:GO, I see that it's had a long-standing tradition of Pick'Em jackpot games where prize money is pooled the same way (the bets are made in skins, not real money). See Wiki: Skin gambling.

Therefore, I think PE8 will be promoted heavily to video gamers on Twitch.