This patch introduces an addition of some basic "first touch" attribution tracking, which will apply to all newly created accounts.

It essentially assigns a new anonymous visitorId to every guest, which contains some basic data on that first visit (& eventual signup if user signs up later). Such as UTM parameters, referring info and the IP.

This data will allow us to have some basic soft-signals for multi-accounting, which we can in the future use as one of the signals, to help us mitigate that issue. It also contains some anonymized info on origin of traffic, which will help us better evaluate and optimize our marketing campaigns we continue to look for ways to grow Poker Patio, and with that improve & extend its functionality.

IMPROVEMENTS:

• Earlier today we had a redis database crash, which caused a crash of all services for a few minutes. We've now improved handling of temporary redis unavailability more elegantly - should a similar situation appear again, things should self-recover within 10s of seconds, instead of ~5 minutes.
• Increase sizing of Auto Actions area, to be clickable for the full 100% height of the footer bar with actions. Makes it more convenient, especially on mobile.
• To reduce impersonation and "hiding" attempts, we've reduced username change frequency from 2 every 14 days, to 2 every 30 days.

Hello!

Today's update firstly introduces an important central system we call "Game Control Service". This system gives us more control of how we can manage games (actively played or inactive) - for example, it gives us control of a game, outside of being in that game - to be able to control it via Admin/API calls, and not run into issues where the game's state in memory/Redis/DB could get into an "overwrite loop".

The first use case for this is - we now have an admin panel, which allows us to edit settings of public lobby games, change their settings, show/hide them, change their names... Something which was an extremely convoluted process before, typically requiring maintenance/server restarts.

More importantly, this system sets a groundwork in place, that will be necessary for management of games as we introduce tournaments in the following months - tournaments will need to have control of all of the games within them, so such a service becomes mandatory.

And beyond that, it will in the future give us ability to improve our process of rolling out updates, such as being able to pause and unpause all games before/After an update, vs games being potentially cleaned out during the update. And many more useful situations...

Please note, that immediately after the update, a different set of public lobbies might be (not) available - this is something we'll adjust in the coming day, as we utilize the new system to have full control manually of which rooms to display and their settings.

The update also has some other changes mentioned below:

BUGFIXES:

• Fix for admins/Unseated players chatting and typed message not clearing.
• Waitlist typo fix/link.

IMPROVEMENTS:

• Chat showing just last 6h aged messages or minimum of 3, of any age.
• Added message ago text on hover to all chat messages.
• Adjusted dimness of non winning cards, to be a bit more dimmed.
• Auto actions increased size & tap area slightly, to make it more useful on mobile.
• Other misc typo, UI adjustments.

- Poker Patio team

Hey everyone,

We’re writing to inform you that as we continue shifting our long-term focus toward chip rooms and the surrounding ecosystem, we’ve made the decision to discontinue free lobby stats and gameplay (private lobbies remain open to all). It wasn’t an easy choice, but it’s a necessary step as we continue moving the site forward. We believe simplifying the public lobbies will encourage more players to join chip lobbies and create a more connected and consistent gameplay experience, especially with the recent release of leaderboards and tournaments coming next, where all gameplay ties into the same stats and hand log systems.

We truly appreciate all the support and activity in the free lobbies over the years, it has meant a lot. As a token of appreciation, we’ll be awarding the following chip rewards based on free lobby hand activity and profit:

• 5,000 chips for every +500,000 in profit

• 2,500 chips for every 500 hands played

Example: A player with +2.3m profit and 3.2k hands played would receive 35,000 chips. ((5k × 4) + (2.5k × 6))

Additionally, once we introduce badges later this year, players who supported these games early on will receive a permanent legacy badge as a thank you for being part of the early community.

Best,

- Poker Patio team

Hey everyone!

As many players have been anticipating since the launch of our chip lobbies, we’re excited to

announce that our ranking and leaderboard system is now officially live: https://pokerpatio.com/leaderboards

Leaderboards are based on both monthly and all-time chip profit, making things more

competitive overall.

Along with this, stats can now be toggled between monthly and all-time, with player rankings

now visible directly on profiles.

How to Rank: To earn a ranking, you must play a minimum of 150 hands during the month.

Rankings are displayed on both your profile page and in-game player popup. Players with

negative monthly profit will remain unranked.

Chip Awards: The top 50 players by monthly profit earn chip awards each month. As activity

continues to grow, we may expand both the number of rewarded players and the overall prize

pool. You can view the full prize distribution by clicking “chip awards” on the leaderboard page.

IMPORTANT: Any players found farming chips or artificially inflating profit will face account bans and be removed from the leaderboards.

Please report any issues you notice here: https://pokerpatio.com/contact/feedback-and-bugs

Blog post: https://pokerpatio.com/blog/rankings-and-leaderboards-live/

Good luck,

- The Poker Patio Team

We're happy to introduce tiered rake caps in chip games!

As you know, we have a 4% rake on chip games, as part of game economy balancing, preventing chip inflation, and keeping chips relevant/valuable.

Rake caps prevent excessive rake on large pots, and rates decrease at higher stakes to keep gameplay fair. Depending on stake level it falls between 4bb-10bb.

You can see the rake cap for a specific room, on top of the in-game chat.

Find the full rake cap tier structure here: https://pokerpatio.com/blog/tiered-rake-cap-structure/

- Poker Patio team

Today's update brings:

BUGFIXES:

• Fixed an issue where if a user got dedicated to join server A for room X, while server B was owner of room X, the user's connection attempt will now be rejected. This will help prevent cases where multiple instances might be trying to run the same game, causing all sorts of issues. We're still investigating the root cause of why a user might even be pointed to a wrong server, but this check should help prevent various issues from happening in the first place.

CHANGES:

• Guest users will no longer get any extra avatars to choose from - all extra avatars will now require to be logged in. This change was done with the goal to get more signups and direct more users from private rooms to public lobbies. It's one of the small changes that add up over time in helping improve retention and engagement rates at Poker Patio, which is super important to help support our continued growth!

- Poker Patio team

Today's upgrade brings:

BUGFIXES:

• Fixed one of the major remaining "full game freeze situations", that could happen with 4 or more players in the game, in specific circumstances.

OTHER:

• Ad watch rewards for chips increase from 150>250. Wait time before 2 watches reduces from 3h>2h.
• Showdown display time increased from 4s to 5s, due to continued requests.
• Improved display of non-winning cards in showdown, to have consistent opacity for all cards (your, non-winning player, community....)

Please let us know if you still experience any bugs or issues, and report them (with exact hand ids when possible) - this helps us a ton when trying to fix them.

The past 2 weeks we have vastly improved stability and got rid of a ton of bugfixes already, but we're still looking to get rid of as many as possible :)

Hey everyone!

We're excited to announce our first chip giveaway event in the form of a video challenge.

To participate, create a short video about Poker Patio’s chip lobbies and share it on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels. The top 5 posts with the most likes will receive chip awards from a 10 million prize pool. The competition ends on April 1st.

We encourage you to get creative with your video, and we wish you the best of luck! 🎥

Prize pool: 1st: 3,500,000 🥇 2nd: 2,500,000 🥈 3rd: 1,750,000 🥉 4th: 1,250,000 5th: 1,000,000

Participation: Participation is open to everyone, just make sure your post clearly references Poker Patio. Please submit the video link here: https://forms.gle/nooAxPYxWqkbSFXX8

More info and video ideas: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yLTSkvg6-FDv8zUB_-pgJyL53KmI_blQH5hxs3fHDhg/

Today's update brings:

BUGFIXES:

• Several issues with payments sorted (some frontend, some backend crashes)
• Several game & web server crash fixes.
• Fixed an issue, where an away player at seat "s1" could get charged a blind, if another player joined the room and started a game. Potentially also resolved some other weird edge cases with blind payments.
• Reworked how some disconnection work at the end/Start of hands - potentially resolving the "game froze for me at showdown" issue. If you still experience this issue, or get a "disconnected" popup after a hand ended (while you were actively playing on the tab), please submit a bug report, with the hand log information - as we now have some additional logging available for this.
• Added several more backend logs, to help us continue getting deeper into some bugs.

IMPROVEMENTS/CHANGES:

• New memberships pricing ($4.99 vs $3.99 before) takes affect today - any existing subscriptions will retain their old pricing, as long as you keep your subscription active.
• Added "10k bonus gold on signup" badge on "login required popup" from lobbies.
• Profile page, reduced size of rankings & staking icons, to not require as much scrolling.