I was a part of ToC and was there almost every week when BuffaloPrime did the 1st stream on ReplayPoker.
Puggywug is correct, pace of internet poker play is way too fast for the type of comentary SPG suggested. It would be better if players were allowed to show thier cards @ the end of a hand , even if they lose or fold thier hand. I also agree that currently, even Replay ( so they say ) doesn’t know what everyone has by design. Allowing them to know would prolly envite smart coders to hack the stream/table and cheat thier butts off.
The big draw for Buffalo’s MTT was being at the featured table. The other draw wasn’t anything more that being able to hear the stream, so you felt like you were part of the action. It also took alot of advertizing here (forum) to keep players playing. The host needs to be engaged with thier players to grow the tournament. So some time is required outside the actual MTT, if its gonna be a success. The host needs to both make it entertaining, and be connected with the community.
After talking to another player later after the tournament, I had a brilliant Idea. No matter how players are having trouble connecting to twitch , what if the video stream was somehowe embedd’d into the table view on the right side. Even tho it still would be technically be run thru twitch, players then only need Thier table open to have a pipeline to the stream, rather than having twitch open in the background. Some players , especially Mobile users ( mobile is the future, ugggg ), cannot multitask, therefore are stuck with 1 window @ a time, this solves that.
I am against hole-cams for replay. The biggest reason is that once players are allowed to see so much of other people’s cards, thier tricks become useless faster. On TV, the odds of 100,000 ppl watching , being able to play against top players is nill. Whereas on replay that would never happen, to have a stream weekly event be sucessfull, you have to make it accessable for as many ppl possible.
There was 2 problems with Buffalo’s Stream, and now in retrospect 1 of them isnt that big of deal…
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- the host(s) need to be involved with thier players/MTT/LB. As crazy as it sounds… when ppl feel involved, they tend to participate more.
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- the host(s) need technical knowledge of what really is happening, so they do need basic knowledge of poker and poker terms.
I felt like I was learning poker all over again watching the evolution of Buffalo’s hosting/poker abilities. It was fun, Buffalo was fun and funny. The other thing even Buffalo found out was, streaming demands a certain format to be successfull. When his weekly MTT had a format that allowed playability, it was much more enjoyable to both play and watch (listen to ). So as an example, the (2) Main Event MTTs had that playability, whereas ToC really didn’t because it was basically a turbo.
If you want a good stream you have to build playability into the MTT, otherwise its quickly devolves into a shove/fold situation. Noone wants to watch the final table where the chipleader has less than 15bb and the the median range of the table is 4-5bb. There was no chance in ToC to see or understand a 3-5! cause it never happened with such small chipstacks.
Doesnt matter if its Twitch or YouTube, hole-cams are not necessary to be successfull here. The Twitch stream is basically an infomercial for ReplayPoker. Show a crappy product and even more ppl will never come to Replay. Show a product ppl wanna play in and you just might attract more players to ReplayPoker.
Playing and hosting tends to be difficult. I know on my PC and a 17" screen, I couldnt quite fit 4 tables completely on the screen. That was NOT a widescreen display as many now have. I long for the FullTilt days where 4 tables on 1 screen was not only possible, but a special format allowed for 4 tables to be play’d simultaniously. IF the host could do that, then there would effectively be 4 featured tables.
As ReplayPoker is currently working on HTML5, I think this subject is ripe for vetting out all the great things necessary for a successfull stream, way before another implementation is tried.
We’ve had BuffaloPrime, then Alec, and now GoldenDonkey. Bust the staff, ToC and Buffalo’s MTT have been streamed. Lets take thesse 3 itterations, and combine the best from them all, to make streaming successfull.
Sassy