We had our first game of poker back in March 2020.
The games have been running weekly ever since. The number of cancelled games we’ve had in that time you can count on one hand.
The whole thing started as an idea which I wasn’t even sure was possible – to have a private game of poker online (because of Covid) with only friends invited. Through a bit of research I found that this was possible with an app called Pokerrr which is a pretty cool app using gestures to take actions in the game, such as folding your cards, checking and betting.
The app had a chat interface and worked fairly well and I handled all of the money (because the app didn’t have any facility to do so) via a simple spreadsheet system. The game started out as £1 to play and has always been at that level to make it accessible to all and affordable for everyone to try without getting worried about being ripped off by poker sharks (though some bizarrely still seem to have been).
With that setup we had people playing from abroad, including 3 players in the US (where you may know gambling laws are very strict). Because we were playing via an app and I was handling all of the money it really wasn’t an issue.
People loved the idea and I soon had a core of pretty regular players who looked forward to playing the game every week or at least nearly every week. People were also starting to wonder if there was a better platform we could use – though the app was pretty cool and easy to play on, the chat interface was terrible – too tiny and hard to write on and see what you were writing, hard to read and generally too much of a distraction from the game – and we all wanted to be social.
So I did some more research and found out that there were actually a couple of big poker platforms that had the possibility to set up private home games, one of which being the platform we now use, Pokerstars (which I also think may be the biggest poker platform there is).
Pokerstars has all kinds of advantages over Pokerrr, but there are also a few things about it that could potentially put new players off.
Being the big platform that it is, the chat interface is good, so we all saw and enjoyed an instant improvement there.
The game play is excellent as you’d expect of a top poker platform so once playing it all runs very smoothly. There is also an extra feature we didn’t have using the Pokerrr app that you can register and unregister for games in advance, both seeing who has registered in the game already and reserving your seat at the table – that is a really nice feature.
Again being the big platform that it is, it’s quite a shock compared to Pokerrr, lots of adverts, razzmatazz etc, it cries out ‘Poker!’ and looks very much like a big gabling platform which can be off-putting for some people and doesn’t look like a pretty timid little £1 home game which is what we use it for.
After a little while playing on Pokerstars we also added Zoom calls into the mix which have been a great addition to the set up. Now we have a game and a very social get together all in one every week. The zoom calls started out as free calls that work for 40 mins then have to be restarted but then thanks to one of the regular players we have access to a Zoom account allowing us to play and use a Zoom call without interruption.
In addition to all the above we have played around with just about every format of the game you can imagine. Changing game speeds, payout structures, number of seats to a table, start times, days we play (though pretty much stuck with Saturday as by far the most popular day), game type (though mostly stuck with Multi-Table Tournaments to accommodate any number of players), different rebuy and add-on options & different special formats such as knockout games.
The game we have now though it looks pretty simple ends up being a pretty well evolved and finely tuned game which works for the most people. It’s a £1 Pot Limit Multi Table Tournament with the top 20% of players in the prize pool, running at a normal speed.
Through this game and weekly get-together lots of old-friendships have been rekindled and lots of new friendships formed. As some of those new friendships had only met online, we also decided to arrange an in-person game. We did that back in July 2022 and it was really good fun. So much so that we did another one for those who couldn’t make the first. So much so that we’ll probably have more of these meetups from time to time. It’s good to meet up in person every now and then as well as via our online game even if it does take a bit of organisation. You can find out more about our in-person meetups here: Meetups.
If you’re interested in joining, you can do so here: Join AFC Online Poker Club