PokerStars and Party Poker relaunching software

With Full Tilt Poker preparing to relaunch on November 6^th, the poker world is already in for a major shakeup. In addition to Full Tilt Poker’s resurrection there are plenty of other happenings in the online poker industry, including the sale of OnGame to Amaya Gaming (and the migration of bwin players to the Party Poker platform), IGT/Entraction closing down, iPoker segregating their poker skins, and Bodog closing some of their online poker operations! In addition to all of this, Nevada is gearing up to launch the first legal online poker room in the United States, AND both Party Poker and PokerStars have announced they are overhauling their software –which will be the focus of this article.

Full Tilt Poker

There is no word yet on what advancements or tweaks PokerStars is planning for the Full Tilt Poker (if any) but with the site having been offline for over a year there has to be some changes and upgrades in store for returning FTP players.

Party Poker

Party Poker was the first major site to announce that they are going to overhaul their software in an effort to boost struggling revenue in the oversaturated and dwindling online poker market. The site has announced that the overhaul will be dramatic and designed to improve user experience.

According to a corporate statement bwin.party sent to shareholders:

Repositioning of PartyPoker – having integrated our poker liquidity we will then be in a position to launch an all new version of our world-famous PartyPoker product. Having last relaunched PartyPoker in 2009 we have been working on the next generation version that will be rolled out during the first quarter of 2013. Comprising many new features and a new look and feel, our objective is to once again make PartyPoker the world’s favourite poker room and return poker to growth.”

You can read the full shareholders message here if you are so inclined: statement sent to shareholders

PokerStars

PokerStars 7 is now officially in the works, and several outlets and players have access to the beta-version of the revamped software. This will be the first major change to the PokerStars platform since the site was launched, and is designed to make the user experience simpler and the lobby easier to navigate.

You can read a complete summary on the PokerStars 7 software written by Matthew Pitt for PokerNews UK: http://uk.pokernews.com/news/2012/10/uk-ireland-pokernews-are-part-of-new-pokerstars-client-beta-9264.htm

It will be interesting to see how the poker world initially responds to these changes, as the community is notoriously anti-change, although they usually come around to the advancements in short order.