Thursday, 28th March 2024 08:59
Home / New look Home Games now live on PokerStars

Home Games on PokerStars have never been so popular. And with more players setting up their own Home Game Club we’ve listened to feedback and taken steps to improve the game options and overall player experience.

So, if you’re a home game player on PokerStars, or have always wanted to set up your own home game online, what follows is going to be of interest to you.

Here we outline what you can expect from our new look Home Games.

  • Home games will be available on mobile for the first time
  • Now including new game formats
  • Updated game structures and easier set up

Plus… a few other things. Read on to find out more.

The changes you asked for

More than 300,000 new home games have been set up in the last three months.

As you might expect, that brought with it a lot of player feedback. You may even have sent some yourself. That feedback has been invaluable to us and has shaped the way we’ve set about improving the playing experience.

So, while we’ve been looking at how we can improve home games for a while now, your feedback has, we hope, incorporated exactly what you wanted.

What changes did that include?

Here are a few examples…

You wanted to play Home Games on mobile (Now you can)

This has been our priority, and we’re delighted to say this is now available. In fact, it’s probably the biggest of all the changes we’ve made.

From now on you won’t need to actually be at home to play a home game. And if you are, you can play from the device in your pocket. That goes for whether you’re out and about, cooking dinner, or simply lounging on the sofa.

It’s available now on most Android clients, with iOS following in the coming weeks.

You wanted the same formats you can get elsewhere on PokerStars (Now you’ve got them)

Up until now Home Games have been limited to certain game types. Now that’s all changed.

While we’ve removed some of the less popular formats, we’re adding a host of new game options for tournaments including 5 and 6 card Omaha, 6+ hold’em, Showtime Hold’em and Fusion*.

All those apply to cash games too, along with the popular Swap Hold’em.

You’ll also be able to create games in Progressive KO and Total Progressive KO formats.

You wanted the process of setting up games to be easier (Now it is)

We’ve done this by making the options more intuitive and simplified things like game speeds and starting stacks.

That applies whether your home game is just you and a few friends (like most), or it’s one of the larger ones made up of hundreds of players.

Whatever the size, shape, and timing of your game, setting it up is now even easier.

We’ve updated the options for things like game types and speeds as well, giving you a bit more flexibility.

There are now four options:

  • Hyper (3 min levels)
  • Turbo (5 min)
  • Regular (10 min)
  • Slow (15 min)

You wanted us to fix the late reg situation (Now you can arrive late)

Yep, we get it. Late reg used to be set at ten minutes which, let’s face it, didn’t always work well when trying to get a group of people to the same place at the same time, even online.

Now late reg is available for the first 6 levels of all tournaments. Long enough to corral even the most lackadaisical time-keeper and get them to the game on time. We’ve also implemented better time banks, with added time as the tournament progresses, just like our regular schedule tournaments.

(I’m not sure if we can incorporate forfeits into the Home Games software to punish late arrivals… but we’re always open to hearing new ideas).

Before you start…

One thing to note. PokerStars operates around the world, and under different regulations, so it might be that some of our newer games are not available in your region.

But as for all the other changes, they’ll be rolled out across all our different licences in the next few days. So, check the PokerStars lobby for details.

Start playing Home Games now

That’s a taster of what you can now enjoy on Home Games.

The plan, based on your feedback, was to improve the overall Home Games playing experience, and give regular players, and new players, a place to sit with friends and enjoy the game in whatever format they want.

This is just an overview. You can find more details about the new look Home Games, on the Home Games homepage.

There you’ll find more details of the changes we’ve made, including how to play those new games, and a few other things. Go check it out.

Then let us know what you think.

*Please note that Split Hold’em tournaments will not be included in PokerStars Home Games. However you can play split hold’em in cash games. An earlier version of this article stated this incorrectly.

 

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