If you have player poker online, then you have gone through the experience where you are enjoying the game but you have that one player who run out of their time bank and this makes you and other players at the table to lose precious time and this results to seeing more hands per hour. This has been one frustrating experience but PokerStars are trying to device a way to minimize on these delays.
This new feature comes after the trial of the ‘seat me’ feature that is used to prevent online players to select tables and seats based on specific players at the tables. This new features will be meant to fulfil the company’s primary goal of making games on the site sustainable. This was explained by the company’s Director of Poker Innovation and Operations at Stars Group.
The Seat Me feature was brought to life in 2017 in Portugal, Spain and France where Stars tested and tried it for some time and proved that this is a great feature optimized to make sure that the player experience and game sustainability is maintained. They hope that their new move to introduce the Seat me feature in Italy will be taken positively.
As they are testing the Seat Me feature in Italy, they hope to try the six table maximum multi-table limit. They will use this in the move to see the impact it has in Italy before they introduce it to other countries. This six-table max limitation will be applied on regular cash games but the current limits for Zoom and other games will not be affected.
Rasset mentioned that this will not affect a lot of the players since most of the players are playing six tables or fewer at a go. The Stars group hopes that this new move will in a great way assist in speeding up the games and make better the overall poker player experience.
The table limit feature has been introduced after players complained that there were players who were taking too long to act and this slowed the games. When the average time was looked at between multi-tablers and those players who played one table, there was not much difference but after a closer look it was revealed that there is an importance difference in the two groups’ speed of acting data.
Multi-tablers have a greater standard deviation when it comes to their acting time. As they act fast, there are times when they will drastically slow down action on a couple of tables. Without doubt, multi-tablers will attest to the fact that when one has an important decision on one table the speed is slowed down to act on other tables and this makes the players on the table suffer.
During this trial period, The Stars are expected to collect data to compare any changes in deviation from average time to act. This will limit players to playing a maximum of six tables or fewer. They will also put into consideration player feedback to assist in determining whether the change is positive for the games, as well as the players.