Leaderboard Promotions and Updates on Game Integrity

Juha, our Head of Game Integrity, has penned a very interesting blog about the current leaderboard promotions and game integrity. make yourself a drink, kick back, and check it out.

Leaderboards – Huge Value for Players

Since the beginning of March, the leaderboards have been advertised as our headline promotion with them paying out $1 million per month for fastforward and $100K for SNGs.

What do we do to keep cheaters out of the leaderboards

With such a huge headline promotion, we want to make sure that every player, who receives a prize from the leaderboard, has done so fairly without breaking the terms and conditions.

The Game Integrity team understands that when it comes to leaderboard-style promotions, it may be attractive for some players to attempt to share their accounts in order to generate more leaderboard points.

Let’s be absolutely clear here: partypoker has a zero-tolerance policy for account sharing. Any player found to be sharing their account will be disqualified from the promotion and have their account permanently closed. All other players will be promoted ranks accordingly and compensated the relevant amount in prize money. Unfortunately, we’ve already had to disqualify some players from the leaderboards for breaking the terms and conditions.

The Game Integrity team has dedicated a lot of resources into reviewing all winners and all players with irregularities in their gameplay, sessions lengths and so on.

If a player is suspected of breaking the terms and conditions in any way, we will immediately start a closer investigation into the account and freeze any payments until the investigation is complete. In certain cases, we may even ask the player to stream, in order to verify their gameplay.

Leaderboard Strategies

Leaderboard points are based on rake. You receive one point for every dollar in rake that you have contributed. Only hands that reach the flop are raked and you only receive points if you contribute to the pot. Every player receives points based on their contribution to the pot. In other words, the more you contribute to the pot and the more flops you see, the more points you generate towards the leaderboards.

Below is a real-life example from a specific cash game leaderboard, three days into the week. The player, who is currently in second place, has played only 36% of the volume of hands compared to the leader. The leader’s points-to-hand ratio is 0.03 while for the 2nd place holder is 0.078. Your style of play has a huge impact on your success in leaderboard promotions.

| Hands | Points | Points/hand
Player 1 | 56903 | 1730 | 0.030
Player 2 | 20417 | 1586 | 0.078

Battling towards the top prizes of the leaderboards takes a lot of stamina and mental fortitude. We are seeing a lot of players put in a lot of volume from Monday to Wednesday. Mid-way through the week, the finishing positions begin to materialise and the top players often move towards defensive strategies, only playing enough to keep their current position. So it’s not only about putting in huge hours, but it’s also about strategy, beating the competition at the table and making them give up first.

Coming back to the huge value I mentioned earlier. If we consider the $0.05/0.10 leaderboard, it pays out $1000 for the winner. That is 100 buy-ins. In other words, if the winner is playing 12 hours per day on average (84 hours during the week), this is an added $11.90 to the player’s hourly. That’s more than a buy-in per hour just from the promotion

EV Reports

I wanted to touch upon another topic as well as we’ve had queries from players. Some users of Holdem Manager 2 (HM2) have raised concerns that they are running well below EV in all-in situations. We have investigated this and noticed that, when importing hands downloaded from MyGame into HM2, HM2 is counting the EV incorrectly.

EV reports will be available through MyGame soon but until then, my suggestion is to use alternative methods in order to find out your all-in EV.

Recent Bot Closure Numbers

Our tireless work will continue against bot users trying to decrease the quality of our poker games and ruin the enjoyment for the game we love.

In 2020, to March 23rd, we’ve closed 134 bot accounts and confiscated almost $180,000. partypoker redistributes 100% of the funds confiscated on bot user accounts back to players who have played with the accounts.

If you still have concerns you can reach the Game Integrity team directly by emailing us at gameintegrity@partypoker.com. All genuine reports will be investigated thoroughly and feedback provided where possible. Malicious reporting will not be tolerated.

Remember to frequently check our Safer Poker page for any updates.

Stay safe.

Juha

Head of Game Integrity – partypoker network