*edit* – Not long after I posted this review, Betfair fixed a few things. Including the HH issue. Read the update here
Well, as mentioned earlier, I’ve been dabbling with Betfair again, and it seems to have improved somewhat. Of course, it would take a concerted effort from a large team of developers to have made Betfair Poker any worse, so that wasn’t a particularly informative opening sentence. Just how improved is it, then? And perhaps you’d like to know a load of tedious (and quite possibly spurious) details about the history of Betfair Poker? Of course!
Back in “the day”, the nascent Betfair decided they needed a poker site, presumably because they weren’t making enough money from their phenomenally successful (and excellent) exchange betting operations. So! They did what people always do in these situations, which is to run a skin of an existing poker network. They plumped for Cryptologic, which is a fine bit of software, and also home to William Hill, Littlewoods, and a smattering of dedicated poker firms. And this was a very good thing, for when you bring the punters of one of the biggest high street bookies in the world (Will Hill) together with the punters of one of the biggest online bookies in the world, you get A LOT OF FISH. Seriously, loads. Thousands of them, everywhere, at all levels. It was beautiful, man.
It was also where I cut my teeth as a poker player. I grew up on those tables, and I have the same nostalgia for those halcyon Betfair-on-Crypto days that I would probably have had for my childhood, if my childhood hadn’t been so unremittingly bleak, or blighted by psychotic nuns, or largely located in the fecking 1980s… anyway, I digress. SO. Imagine my disappointment when Betfair announced that they were sick of paying their dues to Crypto, and were consequently developing their own network. “The greedy buggers”, I thought to myself, but I had no idea of the damage that Betfair were preparing to wreak on my cosy online poker life.
You see (and I should stress that the following is largely based on things I have read on the internet, and should therefore be treated with a degree of scepticism) Betfair weren’t developing their own software at all. What they actually did was buy the software of an obscure, failed poker network, rebrand it, and pass it off as their own. And there’s only one phrase that can adequately describe that software – fucking terrible. Alright, there are other phrases too; mindblowingly awful sums it up quite well, as does who the hell approved this buggy joke? and I’ve shat better poker software than that. You get the idea.
“But what was actually wrong with it”, you’re probably asking. That’s a question that could literally take weeks to answer, but I’ll restrict myself to the three main issues with the original release. In no particular order –
1. It had a gimmick, which was being all resizable and customisable and stuff. The client allowed you to open loads of tables, which could either be popped as separate windows or attached to your existing tables, and resized to your hearts content. Two problems here; firstly, the whole floating/anchored tables concept was ineptly implemented (with a horrible set of menus which are sadly still in place), but secondly, and this is pretty incredible – although the tables were resizable, the fonts weren’t. Honestly. So when you resized the table (and this would usually be by accident, because you wouldn’t do it on purpose a second time after you’d seen the results), all the player names, bet sizes, tournament information…. everything… were completely illegible. Even when you tried to return the table to it’s original size. And if you returned to the lobbies after resizing a screen… you couldn’t read those either. Brilliant.
2. That wasn’t the only problem with the lobbies, of course. For some reason, the developers thought it was highly important that when you clicked on a table, you could see a little map of where the other players on the table were located. (I don’t think this even worked properly, but I obviously didn’t care enough to check. I may also have imagined this bit). Sadly, they didn’t think it necessary to allow you to sort the lobbies by limit, buy-in, number of players, etc, meaning that navigating the lobbies was an absolute nightmare, assuming you could read the damn things in the first place.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you let Noomeedja people loose on something that isn’t pop-up advertising.
3. No hand history support. Anywhere. None.
And so, following a great deal of hoo-hah and fanfare and sundry rigmarole (including a promotional email every bloody day for about a month), the New Betfair service launched, and everyone took one look at it and thought “you must be bloody joking”, and stayed on Crypto. Everyone except the fish, that is. Most of the fish left, and Crypto was never quite the same, and Betfair, while fishy, was so horrendously unusable that all the dead money that went with it may as well have been actually, factually dead, for all the use they were.
That was (guesstimate) eighteen months ago, ish. Since then, I’ve occasionally opened the client to see if they’ve improved things any, but it’s only recently that there’s been any sign of an attempt to make the site usable, and it’s only in the last week or so that they’ve solved the fonts issue to my satisfaction. Hooray!
So, what we have now is a tolerably functional, low-traffic poker network. It’s still broken in many ways (more on that in a minute), but it’s now possible to highlight some of its strengths without choking on the neverending list of reasons why it was completely unusable. For instance, the generic MTT structure is probably the best around, at 2000 chips/15 minute levels and a fairly standard blind progression. It even avoids that nasty spike when the antes come out that blights the (otherwise lovely) Stars structure, and although the guaranteed prize pool MTTs on Stars start you with more chips (3000 to Betfair’s 2000), Betfair wins overall. PLUS! As the traffic’s fairly low, the fields are much smaller (typically about 100 players for a late evening 5.50 MTT), which I believe is a good thing, YMMV.
Incidentally, you didn’t read that previous paragraph. It never happened. You ain’t seen me, right, and stay the hell away from my fishy Betfair tourneys.
What else is good?
*pause*
Well, it seems a lot more civil than your standard poker site, although I haven’t been playing there long enough to form an accurate judgment on that. Otherwise… I’m struggling. It’s not so much that Betfair does more things well, now, it just does less things incredibly badly. And while this is commendable, it’s also a bit dull, so let’s get back to the bad stuff.
First gripe – the action buttons. First of all, the pre-clickers don’t always work properly, and indeed don’t even appear on certain hands. I can live with that. What’s particularly irritating is their positioning: the pre-click fold button shares a fair amount of space with the call button, which has caused me to misclick on three separate occasions in the last week (although the only one which had a serious effect on a game came when I accidentally called a huge preflop raise from the button and flopped two pair to crack his nines and send him out. On the bubble. Shouldn’t complain, really).
But the big flaw with Betfair, even today, is with the hand histories. Maybe someone at Betfair is obsessed with the idea of offering the worst poker software in the world. Maybe they have an award for just that achievement, and they’re trying to hang onto it. Maybe they’re all too coked out of their nut in Hammersmith bars to care. These are all viable explanations for the existence of Betfair Poker Buddy. Here’s another one – maybe there’s a weird, cosmic force of uselessness that surrounds the Betfair offices, and they need to channel it into something before it lays waste to most of West London. (This theory bears some similarities to my explanation for the continued employment of Colin Murray, incidentally).
Betfair Poker Buddy, in case you’re wondering, is Betfair’s solution to their inability to show hand histories within the BF poker client. It’s an entirely separate client, and it’s so shit that it makes the original release of New Betfair look like a masterpiece of software design. Bear in mind that all this thing has to do is read a text file off your hard drive, and then show it to you. It does this by locking up your computer for what seems like several hours while it painstakingly processes all that hugely complex information, and then presents it to you in the weirdest, most cackhanded way imaginable. I’m going to struggle to explain this one properly. Hang on a minute…
OK. You have the BPB window. Once you’ve commanded BPB to import your histories, it displays them in a tree view, similar to that used in Windows Explorer. Each individual hand history is listed by a title with various generic info about the hand, with an “expand” button next to it. Clicking on said button reveals the history for that particular hand.
Well. Most of it.
Because the hand histories are quite long, the full thing usually won’t fit on the page. (Not even on my 1600×1200 monitor). No problem, we’ll just use the scrollbar, right? Wrong. The scrollbar scrolls you through the individual hand titles, but not the hand histories themselves, so if you scroll, you’ll scroll to the next hand in the list. In order to see the nether regions of the individual hand histories (i.e. all the interesting bits, like who mucked what), you have to hover the mouse over the text, which will then reveal the whole thing in a pop-up window. For four seconds. And, of course, it’s incredibly slow, and a massive resource hog. You wouldn’t want something as complicated as a hand history browser to be quick and efficient, would you?
I’m a bit of a whore for mucked hand info. I don’t always have a HH browser open when I play, but I like to have one available so I can see what was mucked if needs be. Sadly, BPB is so horribly broken that I refuse to have it open on my desktop (I nearly uninstalled it on principle, in fact), but despite this, Betfair is currently my preferred site for tournament play. That’s how bad the standard of play is: as long as I can see the cards, stack sizes and bet amounts (which hasn’t always been a given with BP), I’m going to swim in this pool, rather than the much better designed ones in the surrounding area.
The Poker Moth 