PokerStars prepares major software update, partypoker about to restrict HUDs
The online poker landscape is evolving quickly with private applications taking a growing share of the cash game market and Asian poker sites like Natural8 investing massively in expanding their tournament offerings.
In response to this increased competition, the market leaders PokerStars and partypoker have too keep innovating and double down on safety and trust.
Major software update for PokerStars
As revealed by pokerfuse.com, new game engine is being rolled out market by market. From players’ perspective most of this will probably not be visible at first. However, online giant PokerStars is showing off what can be done on the surface alone.
Currently only available for the .net client, a first real money rollout of project “Aurora” will be available for the Portuguese market with new animations, sound effects and interactive elements. The old game engine is planned to be retired by the end of the year.
The possibilities are almost endless. Once the new engine is fully in place, we can expect PokerStars to be a lot faster, more creative, fun and innovative.
Restriction on HUDs on partypoker
And while PokerStars makes the headlines with a more stable and faster game engine, partypoker takes another step towards players in gaining their trust with more safety measures..
Recently, partypoker had announced a big move against bot accounts, shutting down 277 of them and paying back players more than $735,000.
The discussion around the use of HUDs and other third party tools has been going on for a long time. Many online poker sites have already decided to ban HUDs, but up until now the two big leaders in poker held off any changes to current policies.
This will now change for partypoker. It was just announced that the world’s second biggest site will drastically reduce the use of tracking tools or HUDs starting early May.
Busy plans @partypoker and @partypokerlive in this extract with Rob Yong.
If you want to see the entire 1hr40 min podcast head over to the @JeffGrossPoker podcast channel: https://t.co/4T9L11HMIS pic.twitter.com/m95SKnyeGF
— partypokerLIVE (@partypokerlive) April 2, 2019
In order to prevent people from using backtracked data, everybody logging into the partypoker client in the first week of May will be asked to create a new screen name.
So far there has not been an official confirmation on these changes and the above had only been mentioned by partypoker partner Rob Young on a podcast and partypoker representative Colette Stewart in a Discord chat.
All for the players?
After a massive overhaul of their VIP program that is offering now up to 60% rakeback to its biggest players, partypoker now also seems focus on protecting recreationals.
PokerStars efforts to protect the recreational players are often unseen or miscommunicated. There is no doubt though that a lot is being done in many areas to create a better and more safe experience.
Credit cover photopokerfuse.com
