If anyone has specific questions about Duel, I've tried it. I'd be happy to try and answer them.

What I will say, having read through the thread, is that you're all correct in believing that grinders are not the intended target audience. The app is "targeted" both at people who have never really played poker before (acquisition of brand new players dipping their toes in the water) and at casual poker fans and recs to give them the easiest, "friendliest" type of poker experience.

Anyhow, if any of the game's details are unclear or if you want to genuinely know more, ask away.

BTW, there's a difference between a "shill", as someone here put it, and an affiliate. PokerUpdate is an affiliate site, as are Pokerlistings, PokerNews, etc. Pokerfuse is not an affiliate site.

Also, here's the PokerNews video about it:
https://youtu.be/px5_cx-zm3w

What is the maximum possible time length of a game 1 player can force it to take, if you strung it out for as long as possible each turn?

Does the app allow 'multitabling' (playing with several friends at once) to users who are not sponsored pros? If yes, what's the limit on the number of games played simultaneously (I guess, 1 per friend and hence 100 overall)?

I've seen how the list of friends look like (@1:13 in the video), but it's not clear whether it was the list of ongoing games or just the total list of friends.

Edit: also, can a sponsored pro refuse to play with me if s/he is not overloaded by other games? Or is there just one lifetime chance to play a certain pro given to each player and, beyond that, it's up to the pro's personal choice of friends?

Not surprising, since majority of userbase is already mobile (or at least majority of new users is mobile), they even removed mobile indicator from the tables. You gotta remember guys, Amaya's job is to make money and there is no money to be made from regs. Mobile market is way bigger than online poker, Candy Crush is worth more money than entire poker combined.

Also I'm really surprised you guys don't realize what's happening and what's next. Amaya releases new P* mobile app, they buy ****ton of traffic, as you do - and by ****ton I mean spending millions of dolars on new users. You get new poker boom on P* and it's made entirely of casuals.

Like all things in poker, that depends. When first starting a duel, you can select from a few general time setting options. I believe the Max is four days until there's a "timeout" that would cause the opponent's hand to fold.

The wording of the question is just strange, I think. The point isn't to force an opponent to go on tilt by taking forever. It's the opposite...recognizing that an opponent is usually busy doing 100 other things in life, you're just giving them enough time to keep on playing you.

Indeed, like Words with Friends, a single duel could likely take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending on how much time a player has available...

Sorry I don't have a more exact answer.

In my experience of correspondence chess, the opponent's stalling does cause a bit of tilt, especially when I'm not sure if I'll have access to the Internet in the coming days, but otherwise keeping up with the pace is quite easy (just making normal moves to prevent timing out), and unlike in real-time games, there's enough time to calm down and make moves when I can think well.

I wouldn't call it "multitabling", but yes, you can be engaged in numerous duels simultaneously. These can be against the same opponent or any number of different opponents. Sorry, I don't know the maximum number.

As I understood it when presented to me, the process would be that you first had to issue a friend request to another user account. If that user accepts your friend request, you could then challenge them to a duel.

Thus, technically, anyone could send a friend request to a pro, but then it would be up to the pro to accept the request...and then further up to the pro to either challenge you to a duel or accept your challenge.

Speculatively speaking, I imagine that Stars would encourage their sponsored pros to engage in duels with random people from time to time. For recs, the thrill of possibly playing with e.g., Negreanu, Moneymaker, etc. is far more important than the money.

Unconfirned, but it's possible that getting to duel with a pro might be used as a prize for contests, etc.

It's ok, thanks for trying to answer. I know its not the point of the game to stall and I realise why they have implemented the ability to take days over decisions. I was more wondering what angry players who are going to lose could possibly do to annoy their opponent.

Yup, sounds about right. Tilt is inevitable if you're constantly waiting for an opponent to make moves. Just saying that I don't think taking as much possible allotted time makes sense as an intentional strategy with this product.

I doubt that it's worthwhile for anyone to invest significant amounts of time.trying to "solve" Duel. Even the Max stakes would be too low. This is meant to be a game played for fun and competition more than anything.

Headed to.sleep...will check thread again tomorrow...happy to answer any other questions.

Lol, nice 😃 Well, there's a chat box function in there, so, plenty of opportunities to vent haha.

Thanks for answering, Robbie! That's what I was supposing too (regarding the number of games and the pros).

In chess, they'd indeed be able to spend ages on each move until mate, but as the number of good moves in poker is very limited and you can close the action anyway by calling or going all-in if you want, the games won't last long anyway.

Upon some thought, I don't think the app will work well except for encounters of real-life friends. The issue is that my stats will be very visible to every challenger inside the app itself, there will be no need for them to know what Sharkscope is.

This means that the only sustainable profit opportunities are 1) milking real-life friends (from whom I'd be uncomfortable winning money), 2) inviting people via some non-poker source related to gaming (e.g. a chess stream) and 3) exploiting worse regs (but they'll give action for only a few games each).

It would be much easier to get enough games going if there were team matches (that's how most of the chess.com correspondence games happen, I don't know if it's true for lichess.org) or, better, scheduled tournaments. But in matches, people are sorted and paired according to the ratings, so it's not easy to bumhunt.

Westwood studios

Long live Red alert 2!

ya red alert 2 was dope as ****. classic school day off memories of playing that game.

You can still play it (for free) if you want to know you can PM me.

Now,thats what I call a timebank!!!

Don't poker pros enjoy OFC apps? The meta-mechanics of Duel seem almost identical to those OFC apps: long timeout periods, one-on-one challenges, etc. So it seems strange to me to see people here complain about those aspects of the new product.

You must be new here.

Yup should take it with a smile on the face guys because as nicely said here
Pokerstars is doing hard work for us of keeping boring recreational players from real poker games, how dare you people

This is like the first ever internet "poker by email" www.wrgpt.org - which is in it's 25th running this year - except that it's random HU games instead of an MTT. With that you tend to get one full-ring hand played per day on average.

I have a pokerstars play money home game against my brother and father every week, except that we're often busy so it doesn't happen (3 handed has happened about once in 6 months) so maybe correspondence style would work better - it's a shame about the arbitrary cap at 2 players though.

its all early stage it might evolve with time.. Also look at it this way it could be good to give all the playmoney guys a softer transition into real money game which means fake self confidence will eventually bring them down to your tables either hu zoom or ring..

Sure thing

4-day long slowrolls coming soon

I have a whole new batch of questions

1. What's the rake on $5 Duels?

2. Are VPPs earned by playing them?

3. Are the hand histories sent via email by request written as raw text, i.e. is it likely that tracking software will start supporting them soon after the game is introduced to a bigger list of countries?

4. Is there a fixed order in which hands should be played in a duel, or is it possible to skip a hand where's your turn to act in order to play the other hands of the same duel (while the clock is still ticking for the skipped hand) and return to it later?

5. Can you see what your opponent has done in the 10 hands where he has the button before you have acted in all the 10 hands where you have the button?

6. How exactly does the game clock work? Is the time limit set per action or is there a time limit for the entire hand (duel) regardless of whether it arrives at the flop, turn or river?

7. Are there 20 separate timers for each hand of the duel that are switched independently, or is there a united timer for the entire duel that ticks 10 times faster when 10 hands require your action than when only one does?

8. If a hand goes to showdown without an all-in, is its result shown immediately or, like for all-ins, after the action finishes in all the remaining hands?

9. When the result of an all-in hand is shown, are the odds (as of the street where the all-in happened) given?

10. What are the player stats that are displayed publicly?

Thanks!