One thing that just crossed my mind: it would be awesome to offer real multi-platform support in the long run. And i mean not only Windows+Mac+Android but also Linux and Windows Phone. Currently there is only one (!) poker room offering clients for all major platforms (winamax). I think especially the Linux and Windows Phone market is highly underestimated considering the fact that they show solid growth rates, especially in emerging markets, where cheap mobile products (windows phone) and free open source OS's (Linux) are more widespread.

I know this might be difficult due to other budgetary priorities but you should at least think about this in case you haven't already done it anyway

It would be a chance to niche a market neglected by all major competitiors...

Edit: One more thing: Would it be possible to get the full mtt schedule in a downloadable format like a google doc or something similar? Would be cool

couple of things

im wondering why the low stakes NL leaderboard keeps on disappearing from the leaderboard menu. it seems to be there a few days then its away again. not that im aiming particulary high on it, and with the flat payout steps its more curiosity as to where i am.

the other thing i want to discuss is the playthrough bonuses earned thru the challenges. i know for this month you added more bonus in the way of playthrough as opposed to cash and tickets.

for me i think its a little over the top with the amount offered as way of playthrough. last quarter i passed the 1m points and i started this quarter with 350 euro of playthrough already there to clear. the 100 euro for 800k and the 250 euro for 900k so i had a chunk to go thru before i even get started on this quarter. im now getting near the bigger playthrough bonuses for this quarter (200k+) and if im honest im never gonna be clear, i believe i was always have a decent sum stacked waiting to activate. by my reckoning im still gonna have 150 to clear from last quarter by the time i get to 200k and then they come every reward point after that.

as said earlier i got 1m last quater and that was my aim again this quarter as it was a nice boost getting the 1k cash. now to see that the reward has been halved cash wise and replaced with yet another playthrough bonus. i cant imagine how much i would have stacked again should i get that far. in the space of 100k you accumulate 750 euro playthrough and less than that in cash (900k + 1m rewards) surely the balance is wrong somewhere. to clear those 2 steps alone is 3750 euro in rake.

i can understand why theres playthrough bonus awarded, you want to keep people playing and i dont mind them, i just think its a little excessive at the minute especially when you pass the 400k mark.if i was to reach the 1m mark again this quarter i can truely see myself having the best part if not more of 1k to clear at the start of next quarter. its only now having acheived these threshold last month that i can see it only get worse as the quarters pass and im likely to have more and more accumulating over time and then lose out as some will expire even tho im playing most days but the bonuses are idle because their are so many stacked.

hope that makes sense,

small idea:
possibility of mandatory straddles, meaning there's a box you can tick, and if all players at the table tick it, then all players auto-post straddles (so you don't jsut see player X post and know he's a fun player)

I actually do recall that one was able to straddle on the old software of WPN, actually made the tables quite juicy.

Hi Andrew,

can you change my 4x €1 MTT NLHE tickets to a €4 PL Omaha ticket?

One of my profiles: Capt_Bait

Thanks

hi andrew

i have 58 euro of tickets, could you exchange them for 1 50nl cash ticket and 2 4euro sng tickets please.

alias edgehead

many thanks

I know the reason - it's because they're great!

It's true that there are trademark/copyright issues, but we can have avatars that are inspired by something else. You could argue that was the case with the "video game" themed avatars of late. I'll pass your suggestions on.

Sure, done.

Whoops, sorry, done.

There are a lot of different things that you can do along a spectrum that starts at PokerStars and runs towards keeping the games as new player friendly as possible. We're most the way down the other end from PokerStars.

We don't do things like segregate player pools, and we do offer a loyalty scheme that rewards higher end players, but we do almost everything else with the aim of staying down that end of the spectrum.

HUDs and alias-changing are factors on that spectrum too, and our choice was to go towards new-player-friendliness. I think that right now in the industry we're seeing other sites decide where they want to be on that spectrum too, instead of just going straight in at the PokerStars end.

I don't think it's the winrate that matters so much, it's the fact that good players are much better than new players. Winrate in terms of bb/100 doesn't really compare very well between NLHE and LHE because the bets will be smaller in the latter. But if you look at winrates in terms of average buyins I expect them to be pretty similar given a similar skill distribution (which you won't get).

I think you're right, but not for us yet. We need to spend development time, CRM time and promotional time on this kind of thing and there are places that we can spend that better right now.

Like I said before - if we can do well attracting some more of the PLO market then I think it's definitely viable to aim for other non-NLHE markets too.

A slight tangent, but I think it's a cost to have empty tables. I think that having empty Fast tables hurts us right now. People come with a favourite game and if they see it's on offer but not running they feel worse than if that game didn't exist at all. It also makes us look bad as a site: seeing that a site is busy is a good first impression to make.

For this kind of thing I'd definitely bow to what our mobile team says. My understanding is that the Windows Phone is 10% or under global market share, but it's an interesting point that perhaps it's better in emerging markets.

I guess it depends how much effort it would be to make. Unix would be a bigger problem though (and this is my understanding if the situation, without me having the developers confirm it, so all mistakes are mine). Our client runs in Adobe Air, which is why it's so similar between platforms and why we can make regular updates without a huge development team. Unix doesn't have up-to-date Flash support, so Adobe Air doesn't work there. Unix is also ~1-2% global market OS share so I think we'd have trouble justifying it.

I'd love to see how well Winamax do from Windows Phone and Unix, has anyone seen anything on it?

For now our developers are going to be busy with Android tablet, then maybe we can do any Android phone optimisations that are required, and maybe we can get iPhone support too. After that, I see no problems with looking in to Windows Phone too.

I'd be interested in doing this if we could come up with some good filters etc for a webpage. We're in the process of redesigning the general tourney lobby at the moment, perhaps we could make a webpage with the same filter settings and so on, and we could set it up via a feed so that we don't spend all day editing it.

Meanwhile, I copy/pasted from a spreadsheet I was using to analyse the guarantees. It's not great as it won't show you what days of the week things are, but it's going to be fairly accurate. No freerolls, regional tourneys or UO:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...lZQ/edit#gid=0

Number is the number that ran over a 40 day sample period, so you can infer the days of the week it ran from there.

Does the page disappear entirely? There's a problem with the NL poker promo front page, but I wasn't aware of leaderboard problems.

The aim at the end of the quarter is to encourage higher volume players to want to come back the next month, but I agree that in some cases you can get a bonus backlog that I'll need to fix for Q2 Challenges.

Could you post your alias or PM me your login name please? I'll cancel some of the backlog and credit a ticket or something.

There's also a problem where the payout schedule had larger playthrough bonuses than it was possible to clear before hitting the next payout - this'll be fixed before people get to 2.5m.

Also, queued playthrough bonuses never expire - the expiry date only kicks in when the bonus starts.

I figure this is a good place to mention again that we aren't spending less on Challenges this quarter than last - it's just that some of that spend is going to be on people carrying points over quarter-to-quarter.

I don't mind the idea of 3-blind games where this is always on because those games should be looser as a result. This would also let us set the buyin and rake accordingly. I don't really want games where players are effectively able to buyin 25bb deep because I think shortstacking makes the games much more boring.

Sure, done.

Sure, done.

Hello Andrew, i have sent you a pm about a concern of mine.

Will be traveling the next three weeks for work reasons, just as a warning in advance in case I forget to use my cash tickets.

Thanks a lot for your answers and the MTT Schedule, Andrew Amazing job you're doing here!

hello andrew,

regarding the leaderboard page, its only the low stakes nl board that keeps going missing. the page itself is there but shows high nl, high omaha and has low omaha twice, meaning the low nl board isnt available to view. ive checked both both the low stakes omaha tabs and they do duplicate one another

on the other topic my alias is edgehead

Little glitch / temp cache issue: Say you have two cash tickets and open two new tables at the same time. You then want to buy into both tables one after the other. The system always tries to use the same ticket on the second table, which basically forces you to close and then re-open another table again if you want to use the second ticket.

Hi,

Can you please convert my MTT and SNG to a 10NL ticket, Andrew?

Username: halvestad

What's your username again? I'll add 7 days or something to make it easier to keep them alive.

Welcome, and thanks.

Thanks, we're investigating.

You have 30 in queued bonuses at the moment - OK to cancel 25 of them in return for an NL25 ticket?

Thanks, reported. I think that might not be a cache thing, I think it might be something a bit deeper than that so it may be hard to fix.

Sure, done.

I love what Unibet is doing. Keep up the good work Andrew. And btw, I want to convert some tickets aswell, but I am not able to send messages over 2+2 forum yet..

Thanks, and it looks like it works - I converted the tickets.

Should be good for now, just have to remind myself to check again every other day when I have a little free time. Will message you before I fly to France though as that will be 8 days and .com should not allow me to play over there.

Hello Andrew!

I've sent you and email last week(12-01-2015) about converting Unibet open package into cash game tickets, you did offer an alternative solution but I sent an answer that i rather take the cash tickets this time. Nothing happened since(I've sent another mail about this 16-01-2015). Can you please look into this?

Thank you!

I've been a bit frustrated by the challenge where you have to act after two people in front of you have put in the same amount preflop. I feel like tons of instances of that are not counted. Is there a trick to it I don't get?

I encountered a bug today where i couldnt register to any sngs although I had enough funds in my account. I always got the error "You dont have sufficient funds. Please deposit".

Anyone else? Maybe you could have a look into this. Wasnt a big issue though. After reconnecting it worked again.

hey, would be very much appreciated if you could convert all my tournament tickets to highest possible SNG tickets, i guess that would be 1X€100, 1X25 if possible (i have €128 worth in tickets. would let the extra €3 expire.)
a screenname: No_Surrender

not that i'm aware of.

i'm not just talking about disconnections on your end. my internet, just like most players', isn't perfect. it sometimes times out for a split second or a couple of seconds. on other sites this is pretty much never a problem, whereas on unibet it makes me lose the hand.

thanks. but partly the problem is that often i have no cards when i get back despite not being d/c'd for long.

ok, thanks for the info. i'm aware that unibet is small atm, fwiw what i meant was that sites might see you as a future problem/competitor and attack you instead of trying to improve their own product.

thanks

i meant a button on the table, so imo it wouln't make sense for a player to join a pool with 50bb with the intention of shortstacking with 25straddles, as it would be unlikely that he gets sat on a table where all players happen to have the box ticked. don't think that would be viable to pro shorties. also, in my experience, online straddled games are far from the point where people know how to take adapt to the blind structure. instead, things just get really weird/interesting.
of course, another option would be something like adding a 100-250bb buyin + antes table/pool with that straddle option that would be very nice

In my last session, the "cascade tables" button suddenly stopped working...just another minor bug, you may want to look into.

Hello again Andrew!

Could you convert my tickets into 1xnl50 cash ticket and 3x 10e sng.
One of profiles: IAmWar

Hi, could you convert my tickets to a 10e cash game ticket. Thank you.

Alias is Xss

Hello Andrew,

I didnt receive double trouble ticket .. my account GeoGhost