Party poker starts software transformation
At the end of May, Mike Sexton was introduced as Party poker’s new president. In his new role, Sexton announced that Party poker would not fight for second place behind Poker stars. Our goal is not the second place. At the time, we were writing about Party poker’s high-flying goals:
Party poker has to make massive improvements to the client in the shortest possible time, in order to achieve success in the battle for market leadership. Party poker’s client was mostly confusing and reminded of an unfortunate design experiment of the past decade big gray white surfaces. Black-orange symbols and everything was somehow chic, but also bleak and bloodless and above all not particularly functional.
Now Party poker has this week, the first major update for years, and it looks as if you wanted to make the massive improvement we have advocated. “Phase 1” Party poker baptized the update and missed the client a significantly changed painting. Functional has also done a little. The filters for the cash games are clearer, the spin-and-go lobby (jackpot sit-and-gos, called Party Hero-SnG) has been reworked and the player profile with the missions and rewards has become more compact.
Furthermore, one seems to be concerned not to repeat errors from the past. One of these mistakes was immense overlays at some of the biggest tournaments on Party poker. At the last Power fest, you had to pay a hundred thousand at individual tournaments. For the weekly $ 215-Title-Fight, additional satellites have been introduced, which run in the phase mode.
These phase satellites cost $ 2.20 and you play 14 levels. Then you take all the chips into so-called semi-final satellites. This is where 15 levels are played and 10 tickets to the $ 215 title fight are guaranteed. Similar phase satellites are already running for all Live Tournaments from Party poker and will be offered in abundance at the next Power fest in September.
How much better is the new software?
The update of Party poker makes at first sight something somewhat, but still is no reason to stand out. Party poker still has an extremely long way to deal with Poker Stars with regard to the quality of the client. So far, Party is what it has been doing for many years in many ways: you copy the market leader. The black color and the organization of the lobby look as if you had just made Copy pasta of Poker Stars.
This is not necessarily bad, because Poker Stars certainly offers by far the best software of all online poker providers. It is to be hoped that Party poker will bring their own ideas for the features and functions in the future. Because only Poker Stars 2.0 with more rake back worse rags and much more bots. Already now, Party has announced further updates, called “Phase 2”. This is to go online in autumn and bring more visual improvements. There are plans for full-screen views, optically revised tables and better filters.
