If the rake isn't super abysmal I could see this game having high edges and being pretty fun for at least a few months. Don't know why everyone is so doom-and-gloom about this. Can't any of you guys get excited for anything that's not just increasing rakeback for 18 tablers?

Every gimmick so far has ridiculous rake - Spins 8%, Beat The Clock 10%. Given the trend 15% honestly wouldn't be surprising.

sngos have always had 10p rake, 5p rake in cash is essentially 10p rake because it's taken from the whole pot, not just profit, whats your point?

Sounds like it was really fun to create, you should go on the 2+2 podcast and talk about it!

Spin rake scales down to 5% and winning solidly is possible at every stake. Given the state of spins, I don't think it's fair to say the rake is "ridiculous." BTC does seem overraked pretty absurdly, though.

The powerups in this mode could create a ton of edge, hard to say.

You mean like a company that is in the business to make money?

Stars feels like they have to do all these things to survive, service their debt and stay afloat. Online pros can either whine about it or figure out if there's some way to beat the game. If not, move to another online offering that they can play profitably.

that game was announced last year (can't recall, but some Q-call with baazov. could also be late 2015 tbh [edit] was Nov 15 [/edit]). and Hands of Victory (poker with RPG elements and power ups) is now open beta, so long story short ... more than one person saw the massive esports trend and thought "hey let's try and make poker more appealing to the esports community". besides that, holdemx seems to be not going anywhere.

[edit]@rake ... i don't rule out there will be rm play (rake), but since they want to set a foot on the esports market, i wouldn't be surprised if this is free game, where you can speed up the process of level up, when you buy tokens or whatever (well, like most of the esports games)[/edit]

Hypers weren't 10% rake. No idea what you mean by "5p rake in cash is essentially 10p rake because it's taken from the whole pot".

My only point was that Stars are steadily increasing rake and decreasing skill edges, there's no reason to believe a new gimmick game wouldn't follow those trends.

I'd be willing to be more open-minded if they didn't essentially say that they want the game to be unbeatable in the blog post that was announcing it.

I can't imagine what you are defining as "the dream."

I liked HoldemX when I played it, if this is 10x better as one of the developer says, it should be fun.

Are these supposed to be games of skill??



The objective seems to be redefine what the world knows as "poker" and make as much money as possible in the process. Probably GTO for Amaya, and it will attract people to "poker" that never would have played poker before or might start off playing this version of "Poker" and shift to traditional poker.

It is sad to see poker being turned into "poker" for people who have played poker for years indeed but I do think it could end up being a long-term positive if another POKER site establishes itself as the place to play poker as it has been known for the past 60 years.

I personally don't think I can be bothered to learn a new game (after learning chess and NLH, I wasn't attracted by Omaha, or Spins or Hearthstone), but I think there are a lot of (younger) people who will be interested in this. I also agree with what Ryan and Duncelanas said about finding and exploiting edges. It's gonna be really interesting to see how this format works once a real money version is available. (Play money beta-testing a 'fun' game is obviously very different to grinding for rent).
A lot of regs might hate the Candy Crush-ization of poker, but making the game fun and addictive to casual players is the only way for the industry to stay afloat. There are so many new technologies competing for our entertainment dollars that vanilla poker (which - other than searching for porn - was about the most exciting thing you could do online in 2004) is starting to look very dull in comparison. 'Poker Power Up' certainly seems to have a better chance of reigniting interest in poker than 'Duel' or 6-card holdem or 'Beat The Clock'.

Seems like there are two ways this could develop:

1. A new form of our beloved real money strategy game which revitalizes the 'fun' element, in which the best and hardest working people will thrive

2. A new form of fun provided to customers who are willing to pay for it, i.e. the same as accepting the negative EV of playing roulette because you enjoy it

No wonder the poker pro's are sceptical, they tend to be decent at logic


PS: To the few people itt saying stuff like 'no you'd rather want more rakeback yada yada', that bs is getting old; there is plenty of stuff that would be good for traditional poker that wouldn't involve incentivizing 18-tabling rakeback grinders. Also, no one is forcing recreational players to get involved with good players for stakes meaningful to them, so don't take the 'poker pro's are bloodsuckers' line every time, it's pretty tilting especially if you fail to recognize how Amaya is sucking you dry

edit: want to make clear that I would have absolutely nothing against this if it develops in the first way

Agree with the above. If the game is decently beatable then I'd have no issue. At the end of the day Amaya can do whatever they think will make themselves the most money. It's just sad that this seems to involve diverting new players to low skill candy crush nonsense where the only winner is Pokerstars.

It seems good since it requires more attention and im all for that, less and less mass multitabling botish players.

That 7-hand poker or whatever it was called with the coins? That game was the best.

this. guys this is f*****g amaya, its gonna be another money grab that is hidden behind "innovation" or whatever. this game could be fun, but its also going to be unbeatable or close to it (even if its beatable amaya will raise the variance somehow to make it less attractive for good players as they have done with spins).

This would be a good laugh at home with friends in a live game. Not online, it would tilt the **** out of me if someone just swapped the river card when I got there.

Avoid playing drawish hand vs a high "swap river" player #powerupstrat #avoidance

I'm not a pro. I'm a rec player who plays most weekends and some week nights after work. From my point of view, I think this "innovation" is complete and utter sh*te to be honest.

Pokerstars should be a site for traditional poker. If you want all this arcade type rubbish, have a separate app and wack it all in there.

Beat the clock and those rubbish 18 man hyper SKOs are bad enough. This is another step in the wrong direction. I know a few people who no longer play poker online because of other commitments. The blog mentions re-attracting these type of people to poker by creating this. I can tell you now, there is no chance this is re-attracting anyone who used to play poker, because this offering is not poker, you may aswell go to the pub and play on a fruit machine.

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Where does it say this?

I think he means this: "..changes that all share the common goal of creating a more level playing field and a friendlier environment for new and inexperienced players."

That's a bit ambiguous. Most new games will have a learning curve for every player.

Spin and Gos were widely (and incorrectly) touted as unprofitable early on by many former winning players. Yet dozens of people made six figures profit yearly at them without big multipliers (and continue to do so).

Rake is a little higher than most players would like in Spins, but it's reasonable enough, and the same or lower than most other sites.

That's across the board though, gone are the days where you can automatically expect Stars to have significantly lower rake than the online casino companies that offer online poker. They used to use their size and poker-focus to offer more reasonable fees to poker players. But that clearly went away when they leveraged like hell to buy the company for big dollars.

so long as the rake is terrible (it probably will be) the game looks pretty fun and innovative.

What a joke! Amaya is run by morons. Combining poker with hearthstone and magic the gathering. Another Amaya cash grab by hiding what is the rake. Since the recent Pokerstars rake increase, I've dropped 2 star levels and attained higher Status on 3 other sites (888, PKR, and Party). Amaya is just pushing away mid to high volume players to other sites.

What other company on planet earth spends all their time trying to kill their best customers?

If I was an Amaya shareholder, I'd want upper management and the Board gone. Imagine if Toyota's management spent all their time trying to build cars that would make someone want to go buy a Honda?

same as always. would be good if the rake was like Hyper MTT rake in 2014