One of the interesting side effects of COVID-19 on poker is it has created a huge market of people wanting to play private online poker with their friends.
Online poker is booming in otherwise terrible times for the world. All the talk is on the record prize pools and guarantees being smashed across the board, but I think the long lasting change the industry will see will be the rise of Home Games online.
You may have noticed many operators have started offering some sort of function for you to host private games with your buddies, with PokerStars having had this feature in the form of Home Games for over a decade. You may have also noticed we have started increasing content related to online home games. The reason is that the appetite for them has grown dramatically. One of the most common poker related searches and most common forum topic on poker sites right now is where can you play private online poker games?
Necessity is the mother of invention, of course, and this is clearly a way for people stuck at home to enjoy a game of cards in a more social setting than being at a table full of randoms. I think, however, that this has exposed a gap in the market that has been there for a long time. There are a lot of user groups that have criminally been overlooked by online poker operators – older players, pub poker players, student poker players and now clearly home game players.
The new game selection
We live in a time of blind lobbies where we are randomly seated at a table with players we don’t know. This is an important innovation because it stops some of the more predatory practices in poker as well as the use of table selection software, but it does lose some of that social aspect of playing the same opponents regularly.
A home game is a good way for casual players to avoid being fleeced by superior players, just like in private cash games in live poker. A future game selection skill in online poker will actually be discovering and getting invited to juicy online poker home games that the other regs cannot get in. This has already existed for a while in the form of online ‘poker clubs’ but they are currently unregulated.
Home games need webcam poker
Once the world returns to whatever the new normal is, I think there will remain a ripe online poker home game market. Operators should adapt to this by offering more promotions exclusively for home game fans (adding prizes to poker clubs who are active at real money tables makes sense). Home games also had a bit of a renaissance anyway thanks to ‘fan communities’ for Twitch streamers and so on. This is another area where added value promotions tend to take place.
One final note is that the spoils really will go to the first operator who can offer webcam home games. There are a number of poker rooms who have some sort of webcam tables, but none yet (as far as I know) who offer them in private games. If you are looking to recreate your real life home game with friends, this will be a game changer. People really want to play virtual online poker with their friends that’s close to what they play in real life.
If we are lucky, when things get back to normal the online poker world will be bigger because more people picked up, and fell in love with, the game during the lockdown. One thing I think is inevitable is that there will remain a thirst for a more social, private online poker offering, even when we can all go back to playing on our kitchen tables.
Do you have a virtual home game with your poker buddies? Let us know in the comments:
source https://casinonewsblogger.com/the-future-of-online-poker-is-private-home-games/
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