This year has seen partypoker make a number of sweeping changes to its online poker room. The site which is arguably the second largest poker site has over the past few months implemented several changes that have included the removal of HUDs and the introduction of the requirement that all players change their aliases. All of these were part of the poker operator’s bid to make its online poker platform safer and fairer for all its customers.
As a result of its efforts to make its platform better, partypoker has over the past few months launched a crackdown on bot accounts. This crackdown has been very effective – hundreds of bot accounts were discovered and removed. During the said operations, partypoker also recovered huge sums of money. Now, with a majority of the bot accounts out of the way and better security measures in place, partypoker is once again making changes to better the gaming experience.
The Return of Antes
Rob Yong, one of partypoker’s partners, recently tweeted an announcement that antes would be making their way back to cash games on the poker site on October 3. In essence, the online poker operator intends to go back to the basics by introducing antes to cash games as an option for the players who are looking for more action-packed games.
As it turns out, this significant change is part of partypoker’s #FairPlay mission. The aim of the mission is to crack down on predatory behavior (such as the bot accounts mentioned earlier) and improve the online poker experience for recreational players.
The Debut of MyGame
MyGame is one of the features that the poker operator promised to look into in June when it banned HUDs and hand history export. partypoker has been developing it for quite some time now and it is set to go live as early as this month. The new feature will allow players to export anonymous hand histories and make room for better record-keeping of the gaming results. It will even allow session data to be exported to third-party trackers such as Poker Tracker and Hold’em Manager – these services assist players to keep stats on their play.
The Return of Anonymity
One of the most controversial aspects of the sweeping changes that partypoker implemented this year was the requirement that real names be displayed in heads-up cash games or those played at high stakes. Following massive backlash and negative feedback from the customers, partypoker will be returning the anonymous display options to those games.
Other notable changes included tweaks to the Fastforward leaderboards, the introduction of a “Run it Twice” option and a “King of the Hill” system to replace current heads-up format as well as new variants of poker.
