If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you’ll remember that I sometimes like to kick back with a little bit of online poker. I don’t play on a high level as I don’t have enough time to maintain my skills. If you want to get the most out of your money playing online poker – without counting too much on luck (which is bad) – you’ll have to continue to educate yourself and study your own game by analyzing hand histories using poker tracker software or similar in order to figure out what your flaws are so you can fix them before it’s going to cost you a lot of money.
So, with that little intro and “disclaimer” out of the way, I’d like to introduce you to PokerStar’s new concept – Online Home Games.
Online poker is fun because it’s fast and you can play in front of the computer in your underwear and nobody will think bad of you (not that I’m doing that!) – because they can’t see you. Home games are fun because you get to socialize with your friends, deal the cards with your own hands and feel the poker chips within your fingers.
PokerStars Home Games tries to combine some of both worlds, by allowing you to create clubs within the PokerStars poker software so you can invite your friends to join you and play home games with them – online.
You can define seasons (monthly/quarterly/yearly) and the software will automatically issue points for the season leaderboard, so you can compete with your friends on who’s the best overall poker player.
As for games, you can set up both tournaments and cash game tables within your home game club. If you set up a cash game table, it will always be accessible within your club, so club members can sit down and play whenever there are other club members online. Tournaments will have a scheduled date and you decide the buy-in as well. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to create Sit and Go tournaments (yet?). It would have been nice if you could have, say, a $5 or $10 SnG tournament always ready to go whenever there’s enough players online in the club, without having to first create a tournament and schedule it for some date and time.
If you’re into poker and your friends are as well, check out PokerStars new Home Games feature.