The Home Game is PokerStars‘ newest innovation in online poker. Anyone can set up a private Home Game, invite your friends, and play whenever you want. If you haven’t heard about it yet, all you have to do is look at the PocketFives banner ads… or watch any TV show focused on a male demographic…my morning SportsCenter had Daniel Negreanu’s face almost every segment.

Here’s how it works…

The main tab of the PokerStars lobby now includes a “Home Games” tab. You can create a club, of which you are now the administrator. If you don’t wish to solely own such an awesome responsibility, you can give permission for other club members to also be administrators. You assign a club name and invitation code, and PokerStars e-mails you all the details you need to invite other players.

Within a club, you can create one or more cash game or tournament tables. PokerStars provides a wide variety of games…any type of game in their lobby – Hold’em, Omaha, Razz, Stud, Badugi, mixed games – is available for you to play in the home game. For “big bet” cash games, like NLHE or PLO, you also have the ability to define buy-in limits, so you can force a game to play short-stacked (< 40 BB), deep (100-250 BB), or in-between. For now, the Home Game offering is in beta test, which means that a full range of stakes is not available. If you’re looking for some high-stakes action…sorry. The biggest NLHE or PLO game available at the moment is $.25/.$50; the biggest Limit game is $1/$2. Some games, like Limit or Pot Limit Hold’em, or Limit Omaha 8/b, are play money only. I assume this will change as PokerStars concludes their beta testing and moves forward with the concept. When creating a tournament, like with cash games, you have enormous flexibility to customize the tournament experience. You schedule a tournament to start at a given time, and can select the game, buy-in, table size, blind structure (turbo, rebuy, knockout, shootout), starting stack sizes, and more. A nice feature for the future would be to allow customization of the payout structure…for now, you’ll get the standard Stars payouts. If I want my tournament to be winner-take-all, that would be cool to have. You can mark tournaments to be included in your Home Game standings. I expect the League feature to be the most popular use of a club. Over the years, there have been several leagues associated with PocketFives users, with results tracked by hand. In the Home Game, PokerStars does all the results management and tracking for you. Pretty sweet. Along those lines, however, league management would be much easier if you could schedule tournaments to repeat daily, weekly, bi-weekly, etc. For now, an administrator has to go in and schedule the next tournament every time.

So, if I got together with a group of friends every Thursday night to play, would I move our game over to PokerStars instead? No, for a couple of distinct reasons.

On PokerStars, I’m paying a rake, which I normally wouldn’t do in my home game (unless we’re taking up a collection to buy beer and snacks). Now, you could work around this by setting up your Home Game with play chips, and then settling up later. If I normally played a $20 buy-in cash game in my basement, I might set up a 2000 play-chip buy-in game, and treat each point like a penny when the game is done.

To me, one of the most fun parts of the basement home game is playing “dealer’s choice.” You can mix it up, based on what people don’t play well, how you’re doing in the game, or just for the hell of it. In a PokerStars Home Game, you’re stuck playing whatever is active for that table. Now, you can have multiple tables with different games within your club lobby. But I think it would be incredibly fun to have a “dealer’s choice” option for a Home Game cash table. Before each game, the player with the button gets to pick what game is played for their blind structure.

PokerStars has done one nice thing in keeping with the spirit of a basement home game. The profanity filters are still on, but Stars chat moderators will not have access to the Home Game tables. You can talk as much smack as you want, try and tilt and annoy the others at your table, with no fear of moderator retribution. Getting your point across may take some creativity if you want to avoid seeing “****” all the time…but I think it was a smart decision on Stars’ part to let players in a private club say what they want.

Overall, I love the concept, and I think PokerStars will see a pick-up in player volume as players discover the idea. I also anticipate Stars will continue to add features in future software versions, to truly make the Home Game concept as revolutionary as Mr. Negreanu is pitching in dozens of media outlets.

grapsfan