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An Ace up our sleeves
Content: In this blog post, we'll take you on a tour through the gigantic update we just released for unmasked.poker. Whether you're playing at the tables or navigating through the club area: With massive changes to the inner workings of the site, it's now much more responsive, stable and ready to offer players and club owners an incredibly enhanced poker experience. We'll let you know about a selection of new features (club chips, late registration, mobile version, ...), improvements (better logging, dead blinds, ...) and bug fixes (tournament breaks). Finally, we will talk about the ace up our sleeves that has been crucial for the whole unmasked.poker project from the very beginning.
Feel free to find out everything on your own. But, if you like, you are invited to have a little overview about what happened to our favorite, free-to-play poker platform with integrated video chat.
-
It seems like an eternity since we released the last big update, around christmas 2021, which brought us a much more professional design. This time, in late summer 2022, the update brings along a lot of nice features, like late registration in tournaments or dead blinds, but the biggest changes happened beneath the surface. We are very happy with what has become of the unmasked.poker platform and we hope you will now enjoy playing here even more. It's been a wild ride and we're so glad we had you, the community of unmasked.poker heroes ... and villains, by our side. Now, before we start playing some poker, we want to tell you a little bit about what's new here, so let's dive right in.
A quick look under the hood
As mentioned, the biggest changes actually took place under the hood, if you will. We replaced big parts of the unmasked.poker “backend”, something like the engine, to make the platform much more scalable and thus, for instance, potentially allow tournaments with thousands of registered players all over the world. During play and also while navigating through your club, things also happen in a much more synchronized manner now. This will reduce the number of times you have to refresh your page drastically. Everything should feel much more responsive now.
Another thing that changed “behind the curtain” is that we replaced our video chat tool. An update to the browsers architecture caused the video chat at our tables to suffer as soon as there were too many participants at the rail. This problem should be solved for now and the foreseeable future with our new tool of choice, livekit.
The Clubs
The Club area is planned to be the way to actually monetize unmasked.poker. And now, after the duration of one half-cooked pandemic, we are almost here. Founding a club is still free, but the club will be limited to only 5 members in the near future. Soon you will find the prices and corresponding club sizes. But for now let’s see what else is new in the club area. As you will see, it’s a lot.
Club Chips
Club chips are an instrument to measure a player’s performance. No, wait, that’s what all poker chips are. Let me try again. From the beginning. Every Club owner can now open the ledger in his club lobby and create club chips, which he then can distribute to his club’s members. They can then use those club chips to pay tournament entry fees, place bounties on tournament players, or they can wager them at the club’s cash game tables. If a member finally runs out of club chips, she or he is going to have to request some more from the club owner. If the club owner feels like he could use some help organizing the flow of club chips, he can appoint members as “treasurer” who will not be able to create, but to transfer those tokens. So yes, that’s it. That’s what club chips are. You can still play tournaments without a fee and cash games for training chips. But, if you like, you can also bring club chips to your tables.
Two ways to play: Cash games and Tournaments
We now have a more clear structure of the two types of poker you can play at unmasked.poker. In your club lobby, you will find the tab “games”, which you can use to create or join cash games, and the tab “tournaments'', where of course you can play single- or multi-table tournaments, whichever you desire. To be clear: before this update, we offered single tables, at which you could start cash games and single table sit-and-gos. And, on top of that, we had MTTs. Now, creating a game in your club lobby or opening a private table outside of clubs, will let you play cash games. Tournaments will only be starteable from a club’s tournaments tab. Again: you can still play single table sit-and-gos. You just need to create it in your club’s tournaments tab and set it up to be only one table.
Tournaments
Speaking of tournaments, those have probably been worked on the most, aside from the “engine”. There is a long list of new features and improvements:
Late registration
Oh, what a pleasure it is to tell you about this. You can now late reg to tournaments. For those who aren’t familiar: Late registration lets players join a tournament after it has started. You’ll just have to try it, it is so much fun when players join late, and tables are re-balanced automatically, it’s amazing.
Scheduled Tournaments
You can now let your tournament start automatically at a fixed point in time. It is just so convenient compared to starting it by watching the clock, worrying about the tournaments settings, and pressing that start-btn at the same time. Of course this does sound manageable, in my ears, too, when I think about it, but whoever has to do this regularly knows what I am talking about.
Entry fees and split
Tournaments can have an actual club chip buy-in now. For example, you can say every participant has to pay 100 club chips to register. When the tournament is over, the winnings will be paid out according to the split that you chose before the tournament started.
Player Bounties
The host of a tournament can now choose to put a bounty of club chips on certain players of the tournament. This option can be found in the tournament lobby, more precisely the participant tab:
Synchronized breaks
Yes, the breaks are working again. You can set up tournaments to have break intervals that start at :55 every hour and finish synchronized at all tables (of a given mtt). Isn’t it a good feeling to walk to the bathroom instead of running? We certainly think so.
Coaching Tables in Tournaments
This feature was already working for single table sit-and-gos. Now, the host can set up a Multi-Table-Tournament in a way, that coaches or the whole audience can see all hole cards from the rail. Of course all players will be notified about this the moment they sit down. Here you can read more about how to stream your tournament with delay to protect its integrity.
Improved Tournament Panel
You can now find much more helpful information in the tournament panel. For instance, you can take a look at your current position in the field or the settings the tournament has been set up with:
Club Roles
If you open your members tab, you can see all the club roles a member can hold. True, the roles were here before the update, but now each one has some actual functionality attached to it. Treasurers will process club chip deposits and withdrawals. Branding officers can change the club's look. Floormen can open new cash games and create and manage tournaments. Coaches can turn normal tables into coaching tables, and inviters can create and send invite codes.
Email Sign-Up
You now do not have to log in to unmasked.poker using a google account. Because who really likes to have a google account? Fun aside, instead, you can now create an unmasked.poker user account by punching in your email address and choosing a password. Bam.
Improvements to the gameplay
And now to the fun part: changes and improvements you actually will see and feel during your session. Okay, you will mostly see them, but don’t be afraid of all those little, positive emotions. They are a part of you. So please, enjoy…
Dead Blinds
Honestly, this one was a tough nut to crack. Some of you may have stumbled upon situations, where the same players have to pay the blinds twice in a row, or sometimes players would be skipped by the blinds, which understandably caused some discontent, especially in tournaments with shallow stacks. We now employ a mechanism that prevents those things in almost all cases. There actually are still some rare edge cases, but those should hardly ever arise. If you find that something looks off, do not fear: the next hand will have the correct blind structure again. Yes, sometimes new players have to wait a few hands to be dealt in, but this is the price for only paying one pair of blinds per orbit. We will have to keep an eye on this one though, and we count on you to keep telling us if you find some strange behavior. Thanks!
The mobile version
We know that many of you are often forced to play with a mobile device, for instance because they don’t have access to a laptop or pc at all times. Well, this should now be much more fun, because when you are playing on mobile and holding it in portrait mode, the unmasked.poker table will switch to the mobile version, which is just so much easier to handle.
Main- and side pots
If there is a situation, where one or more sidepots are opened in a hand, you can now check the size of those pots by hovering over it:
Better Log/Hand Protokoll
The log will now give you more, and also more clear, information about what happened in a hand. For instance: Whenever a player shows a card, voluntary or in showdown, this will now be reflected by the log. Winning and losing hands are displayed in a more clear way.
Kick me once…
If an active player is kicked once (by vote in a cash game or by vote or floorman in tournaments), he will be sitting out and her or his hand will be dead. If a sitting-out player is kicked, he will be removed from the table or the whole tournament, respectively. He will not be able to re-enter the tournament, obviously, so beware of this freshly sharpened instrument. Also, kicking in heads-up situations is not possible for the two involved players anymore.
Other things
There is a long list of other small changes to improve a player’s experience. For instance: Whenever you open a club game or a private table, a table configuration wizard is available to help you with the most important settings you need to make before starting a game. Pressing F9 or hitting the clubs btn in your sidebar will take you either to your club’s lobby or the club page (where all the clubs you are a member of are listed), depending on whether you are in a club game or at a private table. The Club lobby has lots of tiny new improvements like filters for tournament lists, “scroll up” btns, or schedules in the game tab, with which you can arrange games with other members in the future. Also cool: When logged in you can customize your unmasked.poker profile and choose your own avatar. The list does go on, but for now, you are very much invited to try and enjoy the new version for yourself...
The ace up our sleeves
We, the unmasked.poker team, did not arrive here just by ourselves. In the beginning Korbinian set us a goal: We wanted to give everyone a place to play poker, simple as that. But once we achieved that goal, technically a few updates ago, we saw an opportunity to create something more: a polished poker platform that offers features we didn't know about ourselves in the beginning, and a sense of security that you can actually play a serious and complete game of poker with. Sure, there are still a million things we want to implement in the future. Fun stuff like re-entries, straddle, or the rabbit hunt. But unmasked.poker is already so much more now than we ever dreamed of. With managed mtts, club chip fees, optional rake, real functional club roles and many more features, poker club owners should now hopefully feel comfortable inviting their members to play.
The most important thing that helped us raise unmasked.poker to this level was you yourselves though, the players, the unmasked.poker heroes and villains, the ace up our sleeves that we didn't know existed at the beginning! Not only during our freeroll MTTs and the Hero League, but also via Whatsapp (shoutout to the Early Access group and the Ultras!), Discord, email and directly from our tables, we received countless suggestions to effectively improve the platform. Many times we had to consult you guys about stuff you were just much more knowledgeable about, and your interest and helpfulness pushed us to where we are right now. We are very excited to see where the journey goes and hope that you continue to accompany us. But in any case: Thank you guys, you are awesome!
An Ace up our sleeves
Content: In this blog post, we'll take you on a tour through the gigantic update we just released for unmasked.poker. Whether you're playing at the tables or navigating through the club area: With massive changes to the inner workings of the site, it's now much more responsive, stable and ready to offer players and club owners an incredibly enhanced poker experience. We'll let you know about a selection of new features (club chips, late registration, mobile version, ...), improvements (better logging, dead blinds, ...) and bug fixes (tournament breaks). Finally, we will talk about the ace up our sleeves that has been crucial for the whole unmasked.poker project from the very beginning.
Feel free to find out everything on your own. But, if you like, you are invited to have a little overview about what happened to our favorite, free-to-play poker platform with integrated video chat.
-
It seems like an eternity since we released the last big update, around christmas 2021, which brought us a much more professional design. This time, in late summer 2022, the update brings along a lot of nice features, like late registration in tournaments or dead blinds, but the biggest changes happened beneath the surface. We are very happy with what has become of the unmasked.poker platform and we hope you will now enjoy playing here even more. It's been a wild ride and we're so glad we had you, the community of unmasked.poker heroes ... and villains, by our side. Now, before we start playing some poker, we want to tell you a little bit about what's new here, so let's dive right in.
A quick look under the hood
As mentioned, the biggest changes actually took place under the hood, if you will. We replaced big parts of the unmasked.poker “backend”, something like the engine, to make the platform much more scalable and thus, for instance, potentially allow tournaments with thousands of registered players all over the world. During play and also while navigating through your club, things also happen in a much more synchronized manner now. This will reduce the number of times you have to refresh your page drastically. Everything should feel much more responsive now.
Another thing that changed “behind the curtain” is that we replaced our video chat tool. An update to the browsers architecture caused the video chat at our tables to suffer as soon as there were too many participants at the rail. This problem should be solved for now and the foreseeable future with our new tool of choice, livekit.
The Clubs
The Club area is planned to be the way to actually monetize unmasked.poker. And now, after the duration of one half-cooked pandemic, we are almost here. Founding a club is still free, but the club will be limited to only 5 members in the near future. Soon you will find the prices and corresponding club sizes. But for now let’s see what else is new in the club area. As you will see, it’s a lot.
Club Chips
Club chips are an instrument to measure a player’s performance. No, wait, that’s what all poker chips are. Let me try again. From the beginning. Every Club owner can now open the ledger in his club lobby and create club chips, which he then can distribute to his club’s members. They can then use those club chips to pay tournament entry fees, place bounties on tournament players, or they can wager them at the club’s cash game tables. If a member finally runs out of club chips, she or he is going to have to request some more from the club owner. If the club owner feels like he could use some help organizing the flow of club chips, he can appoint members as “treasurer” who will not be able to create, but to transfer those tokens. So yes, that’s it. That’s what club chips are. You can still play tournaments without a fee and cash games for training chips. But, if you like, you can also bring club chips to your tables.
Two ways to play: Cash games and Tournaments
We now have a more clear structure of the two types of poker you can play at unmasked.poker. In your club lobby, you will find the tab “games”, which you can use to create or join cash games, and the tab “tournaments'', where of course you can play single- or multi-table tournaments, whichever you desire. To be clear: before this update, we offered single tables, at which you could start cash games and single table sit-and-gos. And, on top of that, we had MTTs. Now, creating a game in your club lobby or opening a private table outside of clubs, will let you play cash games. Tournaments will only be starteable from a club’s tournaments tab. Again: you can still play single table sit-and-gos. You just need to create it in your club’s tournaments tab and set it up to be only one table.
Tournaments
Speaking of tournaments, those have probably been worked on the most, aside from the “engine”. There is a long list of new features and improvements:
Late registration
Oh, what a pleasure it is to tell you about this. You can now late reg to tournaments. For those who aren’t familiar: Late registration lets players join a tournament after it has started. You’ll just have to try it, it is so much fun when players join late, and tables are re-balanced automatically, it’s amazing.
Scheduled Tournaments
You can now let your tournament start automatically at a fixed point in time. It is just so convenient compared to starting it by watching the clock, worrying about the tournaments settings, and pressing that start-btn at the same time. Of course this does sound manageable, in my ears, too, when I think about it, but whoever has to do this regularly knows what I am talking about.
Entry fees and split
Tournaments can have an actual club chip buy-in now. For example, you can say every participant has to pay 100 club chips to register. When the tournament is over, the winnings will be paid out according to the split that you chose before the tournament started.
Player Bounties
The host of a tournament can now choose to put a bounty of club chips on certain players of the tournament. This option can be found in the tournament lobby, more precisely the participant tab:
Synchronized breaks
Yes, the breaks are working again. You can set up tournaments to have break intervals that start at :55 every hour and finish synchronized at all tables (of a given mtt). Isn’t it a good feeling to walk to the bathroom instead of running? We certainly think so.
Coaching Tables in Tournaments
This feature was already working for single table sit-and-gos. Now, the host can set up a Multi-Table-Tournament in a way, that coaches or the whole audience can see all hole cards from the rail. Of course all players will be notified about this the moment they sit down. Here you can read more about how to stream your tournament with delay to protect its integrity.
Improved Tournament Panel
You can now find much more helpful information in the tournament panel. For instance, you can take a look at your current position in the field or the settings the tournament has been set up with:
Club Roles
If you open your members tab, you can see all the club roles a member can hold. True, the roles were here before the update, but now each one has some actual functionality attached to it. Treasurers will process club chip deposits and withdrawals. Branding officers can change the club's look. Floormen can open new cash games and create and manage tournaments. Coaches can turn normal tables into coaching tables, and inviters can create and send invite codes.
Email Sign-Up
You now do not have to log in to unmasked.poker using a google account. Because who really likes to have a google account? Fun aside, instead, you can now create an unmasked.poker user account by punching in your email address and choosing a password. Bam.
Improvements to the gameplay
And now to the fun part: changes and improvements you actually will see and feel during your session. Okay, you will mostly see them, but don’t be afraid of all those little, positive emotions. They are a part of you. So please, enjoy…
Dead Blinds
Honestly, this one was a tough nut to crack. Some of you may have stumbled upon situations, where the same players have to pay the blinds twice in a row, or sometimes players would be skipped by the blinds, which understandably caused some discontent, especially in tournaments with shallow stacks. We now employ a mechanism that prevents those things in almost all cases. There actually are still some rare edge cases, but those should hardly ever arise. If you find that something looks off, do not fear: the next hand will have the correct blind structure again. Yes, sometimes new players have to wait a few hands to be dealt in, but this is the price for only paying one pair of blinds per orbit. We will have to keep an eye on this one though, and we count on you to keep telling us if you find some strange behavior. Thanks!
The mobile version
We know that many of you are often forced to play with a mobile device, for instance because they don’t have access to a laptop or pc at all times. Well, this should now be much more fun, because when you are playing on mobile and holding it in portrait mode, the unmasked.poker table will switch to the mobile version, which is just so much easier to handle.
Main- and side pots
If there is a situation, where one or more sidepots are opened in a hand, you can now check the size of those pots by hovering over it:
Better Log/Hand Protokoll
The log will now give you more, and also more clear, information about what happened in a hand. For instance: Whenever a player shows a card, voluntary or in showdown, this will now be reflected by the log. Winning and losing hands are displayed in a more clear way.
Kick me once…
If an active player is kicked once (by vote in a cash game or by vote or floorman in tournaments), he will be sitting out and her or his hand will be dead. If a sitting-out player is kicked, he will be removed from the table or the whole tournament, respectively. He will not be able to re-enter the tournament, obviously, so beware of this freshly sharpened instrument. Also, kicking in heads-up situations is not possible for the two involved players anymore.
Other things
There is a long list of other small changes to improve a player’s experience. For instance: Whenever you open a club game or a private table, a table configuration wizard is available to help you with the most important settings you need to make before starting a game. Pressing F9 or hitting the clubs btn in your sidebar will take you either to your club’s lobby or the club page (where all the clubs you are a member of are listed), depending on whether you are in a club game or at a private table. The Club lobby has lots of tiny new improvements like filters for tournament lists, “scroll up” btns, or schedules in the game tab, with which you can arrange games with other members in the future. Also cool: When logged in you can customize your unmasked.poker profile and choose your own avatar. The list does go on, but for now, you are very much invited to try and enjoy the new version for yourself...
The ace up our sleeves
We, the unmasked.poker team, did not arrive here just by ourselves. In the beginning Korbinian set us a goal: We wanted to give everyone a place to play poker, simple as that. But once we achieved that goal, technically a few updates ago, we saw an opportunity to create something more: a polished poker platform that offers features we didn't know about ourselves in the beginning, and a sense of security that you can actually play a serious and complete game of poker with. Sure, there are still a million things we want to implement in the future. Fun stuff like re-entries, straddle, or the rabbit hunt. But unmasked.poker is already so much more now than we ever dreamed of. With managed mtts, club chip fees, optional rake, real functional club roles and many more features, poker club owners should now hopefully feel comfortable inviting their members to play.
The most important thing that helped us raise unmasked.poker to this level was you yourselves though, the players, the unmasked.poker heroes and villains, the ace up our sleeves that we didn't know existed at the beginning! Not only during our freeroll MTTs and the Hero League, but also via Whatsapp (shoutout to the Early Access group and the Ultras!), Discord, email and directly from our tables, we received countless suggestions to effectively improve the platform. Many times we had to consult you guys about stuff you were just much more knowledgeable about, and your interest and helpfulness pushed us to where we are right now. We are very excited to see where the journey goes and hope that you continue to accompany us. But in any case: Thank you guys, you are awesome!
An Ace up our sleeves
Content: In this blog post, we'll take you on a tour through the gigantic update we just released for unmasked.poker. Whether you're playing at the tables or navigating through the club area: With massive changes to the inner workings of the site, it's now much more responsive, stable and ready to offer players and club owners an incredibly enhanced poker experience. We'll let you know about a selection of new features (club chips, late registration, mobile version, ...), improvements (better logging, dead blinds, ...) and bug fixes (tournament breaks). Finally, we will talk about the ace up our sleeves that has been crucial for the whole unmasked.poker project from the very beginning.
Feel free to find out everything on your own. But, if you like, you are invited to have a little overview about what happened to our favorite, free-to-play poker platform with integrated video chat.
-
It seems like an eternity since we released the last big update, around christmas 2021, which brought us a much more professional design. This time, in late summer 2022, the update brings along a lot of nice features, like late registration in tournaments or dead blinds, but the biggest changes happened beneath the surface. We are very happy with what has become of the unmasked.poker platform and we hope you will now enjoy playing here even more. It's been a wild ride and we're so glad we had you, the community of unmasked.poker heroes ... and villains, by our side. Now, before we start playing some poker, we want to tell you a little bit about what's new here, so let's dive right in.
A quick look under the hood
As mentioned, the biggest changes actually took place under the hood, if you will. We replaced big parts of the unmasked.poker “backend”, something like the engine, to make the platform much more scalable and thus, for instance, potentially allow tournaments with thousands of registered players all over the world. During play and also while navigating through your club, things also happen in a much more synchronized manner now. This will reduce the number of times you have to refresh your page drastically. Everything should feel much more responsive now.
Another thing that changed “behind the curtain” is that we replaced our video chat tool. An update to the browsers architecture caused the video chat at our tables to suffer as soon as there were too many participants at the rail. This problem should be solved for now and the foreseeable future with our new tool of choice, livekit.
The Clubs
The Club area is planned to be the way to actually monetize unmasked.poker. And now, after the duration of one half-cooked pandemic, we are almost here. Founding a club is still free, but the club will be limited to only 5 members in the near future. Soon you will find the prices and corresponding club sizes. But for now let’s see what else is new in the club area. As you will see, it’s a lot.
Club Chips
Club chips are an instrument to measure a player’s performance. No, wait, that’s what all poker chips are. Let me try again. From the beginning. Every Club owner can now open the ledger in his club lobby and create club chips, which he then can distribute to his club’s members. They can then use those club chips to pay tournament entry fees, place bounties on tournament players, or they can wager them at the club’s cash game tables. If a member finally runs out of club chips, she or he is going to have to request some more from the club owner. If the club owner feels like he could use some help organizing the flow of club chips, he can appoint members as “treasurer” who will not be able to create, but to transfer those tokens. So yes, that’s it. That’s what club chips are. You can still play tournaments without a fee and cash games for training chips. But, if you like, you can also bring club chips to your tables.
Two ways to play: Cash games and Tournaments
We now have a more clear structure of the two types of poker you can play at unmasked.poker. In your club lobby, you will find the tab “games”, which you can use to create or join cash games, and the tab “tournaments'', where of course you can play single- or multi-table tournaments, whichever you desire. To be clear: before this update, we offered single tables, at which you could start cash games and single table sit-and-gos. And, on top of that, we had MTTs. Now, creating a game in your club lobby or opening a private table outside of clubs, will let you play cash games. Tournaments will only be starteable from a club’s tournaments tab. Again: you can still play single table sit-and-gos. You just need to create it in your club’s tournaments tab and set it up to be only one table.
Tournaments
Speaking of tournaments, those have probably been worked on the most, aside from the “engine”. There is a long list of new features and improvements:
Late registration
Oh, what a pleasure it is to tell you about this. You can now late reg to tournaments. For those who aren’t familiar: Late registration lets players join a tournament after it has started. You’ll just have to try it, it is so much fun when players join late, and tables are re-balanced automatically, it’s amazing.
Scheduled Tournaments
You can now let your tournament start automatically at a fixed point in time. It is just so convenient compared to starting it by watching the clock, worrying about the tournaments settings, and pressing that start-btn at the same time. Of course this does sound manageable, in my ears, too, when I think about it, but whoever has to do this regularly knows what I am talking about.
Entry fees and split
Tournaments can have an actual club chip buy-in now. For example, you can say every participant has to pay 100 club chips to register. When the tournament is over, the winnings will be paid out according to the split that you chose before the tournament started.
Player Bounties
The host of a tournament can now choose to put a bounty of club chips on certain players of the tournament. This option can be found in the tournament lobby, more precisely the participant tab:
Synchronized breaks
Yes, the breaks are working again. You can set up tournaments to have break intervals that start at :55 every hour and finish synchronized at all tables (of a given mtt). Isn’t it a good feeling to walk to the bathroom instead of running? We certainly think so.
Coaching Tables in Tournaments
This feature was already working for single table sit-and-gos. Now, the host can set up a Multi-Table-Tournament in a way, that coaches or the whole audience can see all hole cards from the rail. Of course all players will be notified about this the moment they sit down. Here you can read more about how to stream your tournament with delay to protect its integrity.
Improved Tournament Panel
You can now find much more helpful information in the tournament panel. For instance, you can take a look at your current position in the field or the settings the tournament has been set up with:
Club Roles
If you open your members tab, you can see all the club roles a member can hold. True, the roles were here before the update, but now each one has some actual functionality attached to it. Treasurers will process club chip deposits and withdrawals. Branding officers can change the club's look. Floormen can open new cash games and create and manage tournaments. Coaches can turn normal tables into coaching tables, and inviters can create and send invite codes.
Email Sign-Up
You now do not have to log in to unmasked.poker using a google account. Because who really likes to have a google account? Fun aside, instead, you can now create an unmasked.poker user account by punching in your email address and choosing a password. Bam.
Improvements to the gameplay
And now to the fun part: changes and improvements you actually will see and feel during your session. Okay, you will mostly see them, but don’t be afraid of all those little, positive emotions. They are a part of you. So please, enjoy…
Dead Blinds
Honestly, this one was a tough nut to crack. Some of you may have stumbled upon situations, where the same players have to pay the blinds twice in a row, or sometimes players would be skipped by the blinds, which understandably caused some discontent, especially in tournaments with shallow stacks. We now employ a mechanism that prevents those things in almost all cases. There actually are still some rare edge cases, but those should hardly ever arise. If you find that something looks off, do not fear: the next hand will have the correct blind structure again. Yes, sometimes new players have to wait a few hands to be dealt in, but this is the price for only paying one pair of blinds per orbit. We will have to keep an eye on this one though, and we count on you to keep telling us if you find some strange behavior. Thanks!
The mobile version
We know that many of you are often forced to play with a mobile device, for instance because they don’t have access to a laptop or pc at all times. Well, this should now be much more fun, because when you are playing on mobile and holding it in portrait mode, the unmasked.poker table will switch to the mobile version, which is just so much easier to handle.
Main- and side pots
If there is a situation, where one or more sidepots are opened in a hand, you can now check the size of those pots by hovering over it:
Better Log/Hand Protokoll
The log will now give you more, and also more clear, information about what happened in a hand. For instance: Whenever a player shows a card, voluntary or in showdown, this will now be reflected by the log. Winning and losing hands are displayed in a more clear way.
Kick me once…
If an active player is kicked once (by vote in a cash game or by vote or floorman in tournaments), he will be sitting out and her or his hand will be dead. If a sitting-out player is kicked, he will be removed from the table or the whole tournament, respectively. He will not be able to re-enter the tournament, obviously, so beware of this freshly sharpened instrument. Also, kicking in heads-up situations is not possible for the two involved players anymore.
Other things
There is a long list of other small changes to improve a player’s experience. For instance: Whenever you open a club game or a private table, a table configuration wizard is available to help you with the most important settings you need to make before starting a game. Pressing F9 or hitting the clubs btn in your sidebar will take you either to your club’s lobby or the club page (where all the clubs you are a member of are listed), depending on whether you are in a club game or at a private table. The Club lobby has lots of tiny new improvements like filters for tournament lists, “scroll up” btns, or schedules in the game tab, with which you can arrange games with other members in the future. Also cool: When logged in you can customize your unmasked.poker profile and choose your own avatar. The list does go on, but for now, you are very much invited to try and enjoy the new version for yourself...
The ace up our sleeves
We, the unmasked.poker team, did not arrive here just by ourselves. In the beginning Korbinian set us a goal: We wanted to give everyone a place to play poker, simple as that. But once we achieved that goal, technically a few updates ago, we saw an opportunity to create something more: a polished poker platform that offers features we didn't know about ourselves in the beginning, and a sense of security that you can actually play a serious and complete game of poker with. Sure, there are still a million things we want to implement in the future. Fun stuff like re-entries, straddle, or the rabbit hunt. But unmasked.poker is already so much more now than we ever dreamed of. With managed mtts, club chip fees, optional rake, real functional club roles and many more features, poker club owners should now hopefully feel comfortable inviting their members to play.
The most important thing that helped us raise unmasked.poker to this level was you yourselves though, the players, the unmasked.poker heroes and villains, the ace up our sleeves that we didn't know existed at the beginning! Not only during our freeroll MTTs and the Hero League, but also via Whatsapp (shoutout to the Early Access group and the Ultras!), Discord, email and directly from our tables, we received countless suggestions to effectively improve the platform. Many times we had to consult you guys about stuff you were just much more knowledgeable about, and your interest and helpfulness pushed us to where we are right now. We are very excited to see where the journey goes and hope that you continue to accompany us. But in any case: Thank you guys, you are awesome!
