Hi Andrew, not sure if you saw this - if you did no worry but you usually post to everything so just in case you missed it.

Not sure if this is compensatory or not (I've done fairly well out of your support with adhoc entried to DT etc so am in no way complaining if it's not.)

RAKE RACES CAUSE MORE HARM THAN GOOD.......DISCUSS

I've played for 30 mins this afternoon and I'd normally still be playing but it's too much for my limited skill level (nl10). It's raise, re-raise, button shove, steal, re-steal. Don't get me wrong this is all good poker play, but when you're limited like me how am I ever going to make any money playing? More to the point it's not the beatable game that it sometimes is and for me it's not fun, which is the key. There are currently 157 playing but that could be as little as 30 or 40 people. I'm not a fish but I'm no genius either. I am very well rolled for what I play, but I hate losing. It does concern me that if these rake racers carry on they will do more harm than good. This is when the lack of notes etc. really hurts on Unibet. Like Hatebreedd I would guess these guys will take their profit and run in Feb and for me goes against the whole ecology of the site you have built so well.

Andrew if you're looking to make this fun for the recreational player then it's a thumbs down from me. These guys will hoover up the fish (and regs like me) and then move on. The issue this time is the race goes down to nl10. For me, bonuses, freerolls, cash tickets, free spins etc. all build the player base and make the game fun and interesting (along with challenges and missions). Rake races at nl50/100 and above I could understand but I believe this time around this is counter-productive. This subject is always going to polarise opinion. Thanks for everything you do Adrian.

hi Andrew,
yesterday i deposited in the pokerclient but the money is appearently only for casino games (shows up in the browser inkl bonus, but my software-client shows 0€), nothing from support so far... could you poke them pls or give me a hint what to do
ty

It's one discard per Challenge type per month. I talked to the developers a bit more and apparently there's a block to stop the same Challenge appearing twice in a row, regardless of circumstance. You can still get it after a one Challenge gap of course.

That's how it already works for the current cycle.

It looks like a lot of stuff that I thought was scheduled hasn't happened, which is why there's no banner for it at the moment. We'll investigate on Monday (the person who I thought was doing it isn't in then either, but we'll figure it out). The mission page is: https://www.unibet.com/promotions/po...anuary-mission

I'm interim head of poker for now. Basically my job now includes persuading other departments to work closer with us (and us with them). If I do that, then I'll be "full" head of poker.

It's important that other departments work closer with us because we need them for getting new players. There's a limit to how big we can get with word of mouth and a bit of advertising here and there.

Yeh, they're playthrough bonuses. They're all 20%, so require 5x the rake to clear. It'll be roughly 500x the points to clear them (as 100 points is ~€1 raked).

I don't know much about this promo because it's run by someone else, but are you placing £10 bets? If you do 2x £5 it won't work.

I'm not sure if this is feature or bug. It's the way I think most Europeans would expect it, but I don't know a great deal about the sportsbook. I'll pass this on and let you know what they say.

We've done races in the past and they don't appear to harm the ecology, at least in terms of daily churn and VPIP. I don't think that those are the only measures of ecology that we could use, but it's what I've made so far. Races also have a longer lasting effect in that they build up games and the games appear to stay built up.

We'll keep track of how it does here of course.

This was another scheduling problem. They'll be updated fully from Monday but some have started to update already (Sweden for example). Sorry about that.

Sorry, it's not really something I can compensate you for. Nobody could tell what would happen if you kept on playing etc.

I agree that the ecology is the most important thing. Previous races didn't hurt it, but they built liquidity. We made this one have a very flat payout schedule because we wanted to avoid only appealing to the guys who play 20 tables.

I think we definitely have to limit how we use races, but for us to see what does and does not work we have to test quite a wide variety of options. This is one of those, and if it doesn't work (or harms us), we won't run it again.

Also, is this a good time to bring up "fold or call when facing a 4-bet"? again

Sorry, no idea. What's your alias? Support are probably a better bet though, I know next to nothing about the rest of the site from a support perspective.

wasabix. but going with support, thx anyway

I heard back from Sportsbook - it's an intentional decision to remain consistent across all sports. If we teach customers that the home team is always first but change it for American sports, it can work out worse in the end. It's also useful for technical reasons, like if we say that the first team is always the home team in the T&C.

I found a small mistake in Step 2 description.

"At 19:00 CET on any day, play one of the multi-table tournaments with “Steps” in the name"

They are at 20:00 CET. I created a brilliant screenshot to demonstrate it.

yes i think brilliant is the correct adjective here. Nicely done ;p

Good job with all those replies Andrew, must have taken a while

Now that I know about it I approve of the system you have for cash tickets that drop under 50bb.

Happy New Year

Hey Andrew, can I please get my mtt/sng tickets changed to one 10 euro sng ticket.

alias: ScubaDiver

Switch that to two NL4 tickets please.

On ipad if I am inactive for a while the ipad will go to sleep and I have to start unibet poker again, and relogin. Inactivity period is not very long - it happens sometimes if i fold early and don't touch anything until next hand. Problem might be a setting in my ipad though?

Andrew, I think you mentioned it at some point; when is tournaments coming to ipad?

Definitely a setting of the iPad and not related to the Unibet software client.

Go to Settings -> General -> Auto Lock. Most likely it is still on the default 2 minutes.

Thank you. You are right. That setting is now "never".

just a thought regarding rake-races:

i think mass-grinding, mediocre, tight players are one big negative factor.

maybe the prevalence of this factor can be reduced by making the points per raked hand difference between stakes larger. This is why: looking at nl100-400 for example: mass-grinding with a tight style and mediocre skill level is surely somewhat viable at nl100, whereas I play nl400 and i think that type of player, mediocre* nit-regs, would have a very hard time mass-grinding nl400. And I think nl400 getting 1.5 times as much as nl100 is a a very small difference. How about going the other way and giving nl400 3 times as many points or something, thus making unibet as a whole less profitable for nits overall?

*(of course 'mediocre' is relative. i'd say a lot of players at nl400 are mediocre, but realistically they're probably much better than nl100 grinders)

Everytime when i try to sit in table comes this error:
Some serious lag as well + money missing from my account.
----
Ok, seems to work again after booting sofware couple of times.

havent played much these days, but I agree with this. Nits kill the game :/

Here we go again with the technical errors. I guess it's only me since no one else is complaining here.

Hi & Happy New Year to All!

I olso have BIG problems with Unibet Poker Client...
1)I cant Login in Poker Lobby from 02/01/2015...
2)I Uninstlled and Installed over and over again the last version with NO efect...
3)I tryied to Download a version from the Unibet Poker Site but the Download Stop after he Download 3MB from 28MB...

Anyone have a clue what is goin on?

Originally Posted by cazzz
Its minus 145eu if you aim for half a million points, its minus 145eu if you aim for 1 million points and minus 1395eu if you aim for 2 million points.

I noticed that at 4M challenge points u did pay out 2000€ in bonus + 4000€ in cash, now its 1500€ +1500€ so at this point player is losing 3000 EUR comparing to last quarter. According to my findings it is at least 4500€ in total until this point? This cant have anything to do with the rolling of excess points?

Also you have said there wont be continous rake races so I can estimate there will be one bigger rakerace per quarter. Last quarter u did pay out 1200€ for the winner of plo rakerace and now you are paying out 700€ (at the same time u might be able cash in the small one but not in the top so u can estimate to get ~50€). Here the big rakers lose up to 500 EUR again.

Also after 2,5M points the bonuses are now 1500€ instead of 1000€ and they will queue up. Would you change these too Andrew? Otherwise this forces regs to keep playin in the next quarter to get paid. For example I have now 2000€ bonus in queue from last Q that I havent even started.

Looks like you have now taken a lot of money away from the players that put their effort to keep the higher PLO (and why not NL) games up and running, and actually bring lot of rake to the site. I personally havent even won anything from the games pre-RB because of playing these reg games instead of just bumhunting (Im down pre-RB) if this is the direction the vip program is gonna change I dont see the plo traffic getting any better in the future.

Any comments on this Andrew?

The thing with the rakerace is that it gives the illusion you build liquidity but the real fact is that on every table i see the same rakebackgrinders now. It is just not fun to play this month. I can beat those players but they just suck the fun out of the game for recreational players aswell. If i open tables now and i see the same 3-4 people on every table i just dont play because its not fun.

Rakeraces prolly generate alot of rake for you but i think in the long run it does more harm than good. I hope we will get some other promo's over the next month because now it is just not fun to play but that my opinion ofcourse If you do rakeraces i like the weekend races alot more. Its only a few days and after that the tables are fun again to play at. I came to unibet because i just didnt enjoy playing poker with the same regs on every table and just wanted to enjoy the game of poker itself instead of watching HUD's and minmaxing 3bet % and all the other crazy things that you can do with HM or PT4.

That why i am intrested in an analysis of the top 10 or 20 of the rakerace of this month. Do they stop playing when race is over ? Do they cash out and leave after the race ? I think that making of summary of that is something you should do in february.

Greetz

Hatebreedd

Pretty much agree with Hatebreedd there. I like all the innovation that Unibet has brought to the game but making rakeraces is so 2008. Yup, it gives a boost to earned rake but kills the games (and the fun) in the long run.

Also, regarding the reduction in rewards - players that dont earn 1M points per quater still earn less while their excess points are not carried over....

Two things:

Missions in january: Could Andrew or a friendly member post these for me please? I'm not able to find them on the Belgian site.

Rakeraces: Since the summer didnt play much online poker, last weeks played a bit of 4NL just for the sake of fun and splashin around so cant give my opinion on this rakerace. But the rakerace in the summer did the same thing as the complaints here: 25NL tables were terrible bad, nity and mostly based around pre flop play. The difference in skill @25NL between april/may/june and july/augusts was enormous. Shouldnt cry about the rakerace since I cashed €350 on it but I played a lot this summer and had to fight to be in the top 20 with seeing the top spots having 5x point as I did or something, def multi accounting imo. So rec players cant score a nice cash in these races. I think that rakeraces <100NL are a no go and that there are other possibilities to reward Unibet players instead of rewarding multiaccounting east Europeans. What these possibilities should be? This Unibet client showed and still shows you guys are creative enough ;-).

2008 or not, its still good way to reward players based on their activity. Multi accounting is not a problem at least in the higher stakes when the prices are still relatively low and the VIP program is quartely based. Nitty play isn't problem either in PLO since playing too NIT pre flop makes u losing player (all hands have lot of equility pre flop so in tough tables you can not fold too much pre flop otherwise u end up folding equility all the time). Also in these races rewards have been based on the # of flops seen so what does it help to fold all hands pre?

Races also make people to be more likely to play more tables which is needed to get the higher games up and running. At the moment there is often only 1-2 tables running per stake.

At least in higher PLO the rakeraces (at least from time to time) are more good than bad. Alternative ideas can always be brought up though.

There you go: https://www.unibet.com/promotions/po...anuary-mission