OK, here's something that has been annoying me, like, forever. When playing in a multi-table tournament on PokerStars, the tournament lobby will only show you the relative chip position of the top 30 players. (See above.) So if you're not in the top 30 at the moment, it won't tell you exactly where you stand.
The information is obviously there. You can double-click on the name of a player, and a little box pops up that says "212 of 419" (or something like that). So why won't the standings display this?
It gets annoying if you're sort of hovering around that 30th place, so that you're in and out of the top 30. On Full Tilt and UltimateBet, if you drop from 30th to 31st, very little changes; your previous view of the standings will still show you. But on Stars, you drop completely out of view, unless your screen name happens to be at the top of the alphabet. Which leads to the other strange thing: After the top 30, the rest are displayed alphabetically.
Sure, it's useful to be able to scan the list alphabetically, but you could do that even if the default view were to show the players left in order of current chip stacks--just click on the "player" column to see them alphabetically. In other words, if I wanted to be looking at the names alphabetically, I would be. But unless I'm looking for somebody in particular, what I usually want to see is the standings, and I want to be able to look at the entire list, not just the top 30.
I can't see any good reason that Stars does it this way, when I can't imagine that this "30 by order of chips and the rest alphabetically" is really what anybody wants. I have heard a suggestion that it reduces the strain on the servers not to have to continuously update the whole list. But if even the UB servers can manage it--at the same time that they are straining to awarding pots to the best-known player with the worst hand, and allowing the site owners to look at your hole cards while they play against you--why can't the PokerStars servers manage it?
To be fair, the new DoylesRoom platform does the same trick, and Bodog's tournament lobbies give you even less information as to standings. But Stars bills itself as the biggest and best. It shouldn't lack a basic utility that some of its chief rivals have built in.
I don't get it.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Irritating feature of PokerStars tournaments
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3 comments:
I could not agree more.
Horribly annoying and just not necessary in this day and age.
FTP and PS have been shamelessly stealing updates from one another for some time - you would think PS would have changed this ages ago.
Now if only FTP would upgrade to the shadow folded hand feature like PS I think they'd would have the perfect software.
Another annoying "feature" of PS: in split pot games the hand replayer doesn't include the numerical pot amount awarded to each player showing only the stacks of chips. Sometimes, when multiple players are awarded chips you can't tell who won what or why. I wish they would put the next to the chips as well as what portion of the pot they won (high or low.
/end rant
I'm sure when they get efficient enough code written that this will happen. As it stands right now, just loading the initial list of players in a huge MTT is enough to make the client hang until the list is loaded on slower computers. Every player in the lobby requires data sent over the network and interpreted by the client, to update all players in real time would really slow the client down and would probably break the client on older PCs. From a coding standpoint this is the only way they can do it and keep their system requirements low.
It sounds like you are irritated about not know your position as opposed to the entire tournament. You don't even need to pull up the tournament lobby for that. You just click the info tab on screen with the tournament table.
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