Power up poker - General discussion

The news about the 8% rake is good, I thought it would be 10%, but now it's lower than in Spin & Go Max, perhaps to deter regs from the latter game.

Power Up must be comfortably beatable, the only problem is that the stakes for which people will want to play it are rather low - young video gaming fans typically have less spare cash than middle-aged splashy gamblers.

And of course Power Up is very slow (a tourney lasts 10-12 min on avg as per my data), so there may still be merit to playing more Spin & Gos per hour even if the ROIs are a bit lower in the latter.

do you think its easier or harder to multitable than classic spin and goes?

Power Up is way harder to multitable - there aren't even any hotkey scripts capable of automating the use of the left / middle / right power held, and of course no HUD yet. I find it hard to play more than 2 PU tables at once, can play 3 of 'normal' spins or 5 of max spins without ever timing out.

Also, those power up moves makes it less easy to multi table I think.
Time will tell if it will be a success or not.

Cheers,
SDK1987

so from what I see for powerup to be worth playing, (atleast from an hourly perspective,) the roi on the games need to be times1.5 that of a regular spin and go due to length of game and then times1.5 again because you can play 1.5xmore games.

From my own experience 3%roi is seen as a fairly good spin winrate at the 50/100 euro spin games... does any1 know what kind of roi the best players at the 15's get?

Basing on that 3% if you were able to get an roi of more than 6.75% then it would seem viable.

In terms of the average number of hands played per game, PU isn't longer than spins, let alone 1.5x longer. The avg no. of hands played by me in a spin (i.e. not counting the HU hands if I bust in 3rd) is 22 or so, in PU - also around 20, iirc. The 1.5x difference in durations is due to the need to spend extra time on using powers, triggering their animations during which the betting buttons become unclickable (except when EMP is used).

PU may allow for a bigger ROI because there are more decision points (whether to bet + whether to use powers), especially in the early months when regs will be making rookie mistakes, but in the long run, higher stakes will be needed to compensate for the lower speed of dealing, just like live poker needs to be played for higher stakes than online one.

Also, I don't think a spin reg should play at a limit where his/her ROI is 3% - it's better to move down one limit and have a 6% ROI there. Compare not the ROIs of the best regs of a limit, as their strengths differ and a strong reg tends to move up upon excelling almost every opponent at the limit (by moving up, s/he departs from the category of the best regs of that limit to the list of the average regs of the next one), but the ROIs that the same player would have if s/he played at various limits right now (a strong reg of 50s would mop the floor with most opponents at 10s).

It looks like people are too attached to the idea of playing higher stakes because they're subconsciously likening it to being promoted in the real job setting. A promotion indeed usually results in a salary increase. A move up at poker sometimes doesn't increase the hourly. Poker is a business. Compare it to sales: sometimes it's better to sell a ton of Fords than a small number of Ferraris. Hourly profit = BI * EV(ROI) * games_per_hour, and one should maximise the whole product of the three factors, not necessarily the buy-in factor.

You're advocating for the same thing by suggesting a hypothetical $30 spin reg to move down to $15 Power Up, just I've reminded you not to forget about the profit that can be made at $10-15 spins by a reg who's strong enough to make a profit at $30-100s.

Nothing so far in Canada.
Even the play money version is gone.

If you're on discord, there is a promo where you get some free tix to play it. After that, we'll see...

Peace,
VS

I got this message from the pokerstars discord chat.

Earlier today we were alerted to a bug which, in some situations, caused our mobile lobby to show
no games other than PokerStars Power Up when using the search and filter functions. All other
games were directly accessible at all times.

As a result, we have removed Power Up from our desktop and mobile platforms in order to ensure
players continue to have a high quality experience. It is important to note that the Power Up real
money experience was not impacted and performed as we had expected.

PokerStars takes player enjoyment very seriously and, particularly during launches of this scale, we
take steps to minimise disruption of the player overall experience. We anticipate bugs of this kind at
beta stage, which is why we commonly execute staggered product and service launches, as we have
been doing here.

We apologise to our players, who we know were excited to play Power Up, and reassure them that
this had no effect on games that were live at the time, or funds in circulation. An email will shortly
be sent to every player affected. We are currently working on a fix and expect Power Up to be back
up and running early next week.

You're advocating for the same thing by suggesting a hypothetical $30 spin reg to move down to $15 Power Up, just I've reminded you not to forget about the profit that can be made at $10-15 spins by a reg who's strong enough to make a profit at $30-100s.

From talking to the developers it seems the stakes will increase once their is enough demand and all bugs have been ironed out.

I agree with what you said about maximizing hourly.

I was just hypothesizing and making as bare bones a model of what it needs to be worth it to play it obviously has a lot of holes in though ::f_biggrin:

I've been talking around and might be looking at doing a prop-bet regarding roi's as a lot of people are referring to it as a slotmachine type game or as ike haxton put it a "carnival game".

This is pretty much the only way itd be viable for myself atleast until they offer $60+

Originally posted by jmackenzie
I've been talking around and might be looking at doing a prop-bet regarding roi's as a lot of people are referring to it as a slotmachine type game or as ike haxton put it a "carnival game".

Loool, it must be the easiest bet that you've ever made.

It turns out that I'm so bad at this game that even 1 table is enough to overload my brain I'd need to write a long list of stupid things that I should avoid doing and post it on the monitor.

I think I'm going to run from this game of immense skill back to some 'good old poker' variation where I can still autopilot safely.

The lack of variance in Power Up is disturbing. It's more like chess than like poker. And there's too little money in chess for all but the very best players.

Originally posted by tonypmm
I'd need to write a long list of stupid things that I should avoid doing and post it on the monitor.

Tried that.
The list was so big it covered up the table. ♠_biggrin"

VS

Here's my rotten egg of the day (a blunder worth ~$7, or ~2.5 BIs). I don't know what I was thinking, some kind of winner's tilt took the best of me after the opponent replaced a neutral card for me with a good one.

Seat 1: Villain (2640 in chips, 14 energy) [used EMP in the prev. hand]
Seat 2: Hero (3360 in chips, 15 energy, Intel, Scanner, Upgrade)

Hero posts small blind 300
Villain posts big blind 600

Dealt to Hero 7♥: K♥:

Hero plays Intel (3) and peeks at J♥: on top of deck.
Hero raises 600 to 1200

Villain plays Reload (5) and redraws 1 hole card.
Hero peeks at the K♠: on top of the deck (from Intel).

Villain raises 600 to 1800
Hero raises 1560 to 3360 and is all-in :facepalm::facepalm::facepalm:
[every good $3 reg knows what Hero should have done instead ]
Villain plays Engineer (5) ♠_cool: revealing Q♠:, K♠:, A♣:. Villain selects Q♠: and discards K♠:, A♣:

Hero peeks at the Q♠: on top of the deck (from Intel).
Villain calls 840 and is all-in
Uncalled bet (720) returned to Hero

RIP, my poker career, if I continue making disgusting spews like this every day

Prior to that, there had been some funny Disintegrate levelling in that tourney, though

Seat 1: Villain (1960 in chips, 15 energy)
Seat 2: Hero (2880 in chips, 13 energy, Disintegrate, Scanner, Upgrade)
Seat 3: Villain2 (1160 in chips, 8 energy)

Villain2 posts small blind 60
Villain posts big blind 120

Dealt to Hero 4♦: 4♥:

Hero raises 120 to 240
Villain2 folds
Villain raises 240 to 480
Hero calls 240

Flop K♠: 3♠: J♣: (Pot: 1020)

Villain checks
Hero plays Disintegrate (4).
Disintegrate destroys K♠:

New Board -- 3♠: J♣:

Hero bets 420
Villain plays Clone (2) and clones the Disintegrate ♠_cool:
Villain plays Disintegrate (4).
Disintegrate destroys J♣: ♠_tongue:

New Board -- 3♠: --

Villain plays EMP (3) ♠_evil:
Villain raises 1060 to 1480 and is all-in (and freezes the current board cards)
Hero insta-calls 1060

Villain shows A♣: T♣:

Turn Q♠:
River A♦:

Villain collected 3980 from pot

easy call pre and almost always checking flop back hand1.

I sometimes do something similarly stupid where i leave 1 chip behind so i can play power cards if they have no mana themselves. then sometimes i forget about checking that and give them a really nice spot to engineer etc.

hand 2 love the amount of levelling in that hand .

what i love about this game is there is soo much spots where you feel like this ..... or this...

Link to interview with developer

Just incase any1 missed the news section, Barry Carter did an interview with one of its developers Chris Straghalis.

I just played one power up and when I join the table Stars is using 80% of my CPU and fans are spinning like hell.. Anyone have the same problem or any idea what causes this?

Well, the game is definitely more resource-intensive than traditional poker.

Have you recently updated your graphics driver? If not, consider doing so. This action sped up Spin & Go Max dramatically for me. My driver was 2 years old, and the pre-game spinners were lagging a lot.