Mobile poker: an alternative perspective

Ever since the first iPhone was unveiled to the world in 2007, the form factor of smartphones meant it always felt far more natural and comfortable to clasp them in an upright position. That’s how dumb phones were always used, right? In fact, research suggests the overwhelming majority of smartphone users hold their devices vertically, whether it be web browsing, scrolling through social media feeds or communicating via messaging apps. Even mobile video content is primarily consumed in this orientation nowadays, borne out by data produced this year by Ooyala that revealed 82.5% of smartphone users watch video in portrait mode when on video sites.

Now it seems the world of online poker has cottoned onto this trend with certain apps having recently either been completely redesigned in portrait mode, or the option introduced for players to rotate their devices 90 degrees from the traditional landscape view. One of the latest companies to take the plunge is partypoker with the roll-out of an overhaul to Spins (its version of the popular three-player, lottery-style Sit & Go format) for its iOS and Android apps. One of its most striking features is the new vertical layout to the Spins tables.

partypoker

Built to be played one-handed, these games have been completely re-designed so that the controls are all within easy reach of a user’s thumb. There is also a vertical bet slider in the middle of the screen to select precise bet sizes. In addition to the hand re-player also being in portrait mode, the Spins lobby was given a makeover while the animated jackpot multiplier that reveals the prize before the table loads now mimics the appearance of a one-armed bandit slot machine. “There are other apps out there that have portrait gameplay capability and the feedback from that was good,” Ross McQuater, the operator’s head of poker product, tells EGR Technology.

“We spoke to our ambassadors and players at live events and there was nothing telling us that we shouldn’t do this. People were not opposed to playing poker in portrait mode.” McQuater says work on the overhaul to Spins began six months ago and, he acknowledges, partypoker’s overall mobile offering “hadn’t seen much love” due to the focus on overhauls to the PC and Mac desktop clients. Now that the revamp to Spins on mobile is complete, the GVC-owned brand’s product roadmap includes the release of portrait view for partypoker’s fast-fold variant, Fast Forward, closely followed by cash games. Single- and multi-table tournaments will receive the same treatment some time in Q1 2020.

Crowded house

The product team has a confirmed visual mock-up of how the redesigned tables for tournaments will look, although this popular poker format is arguably the most difficult to repurpose for portrait view. They’ll need to figure out a way to position the avatars without it feeling cramped or messy, as well as clearly show which player has pushed chips onto the table. Then there is the need to have information displayed like average stacks and how far off, or in, the money the user is at any given point.

McQuater says: “Tournaments is going to be the interesting one as that introduces some additional complexity around the information you want to be able to display to players and the fact that you are running nine-handed and not three-handed. Things can get quite congested. Plus, you have your tournament lobby information that you want to make accessible to players, your deal-making and final-table functionality. So, we said tournaments would be last on the list in which we roll out the updates to the variants.”

However, Playtech recently introduced portrait view for its poker network, iPoker, including for multi-table tournaments. Players can choose to flip their phones or tablets to play vertically or stick with the traditional landscape mode. The egaming supplier’s head of poker operations, Marat Koss, says the portrait-view table was developed in response to the evolution in the way users want to play games. He adds: “We used an external usability tests lab to validate our concepts and discovered there is an even split in preference among users between portrait and landscape. As a result, we invested in building a table which is fully responsive and adaptable to the player.”

Playtech

The software uses dynamic avatar placement and sizes to better utilise the space available. And since smooth rotation and displacements of the elements is a fairly heavy operation on mobile, the developers faced technical challenges ensuring a smooth transition, especially on older devices. “Another challenge was the impact of device rotation on pending user actions, or if the player was in dialogue,” says Koss. “We successfully navigated these complexities, but there were a number to address through the design process.” Playtech’s developers also had to strike a balance between the type of game information to display and at what size. “This is particularly acute when you consider the number of different mobile sizes and resolutions now available,” Koss states.

A tried and tested UX

For years, mobile poker’s UI was basically a stripped-down replica of the antecedent desktop versions with their top-down view of the table recreated in landscape mode. The now-defunct PKR was the only operator to truly break the mould with its proprietary 3D software recreating lifelike players and playing environments for both desktop and its native app. Despite a handful of social poker apps pushing the boundaries with the UI, on the whole mobile poker to date has been designed to be played horizontally and with two hands. That feels more natural on a tablet as opposed to a five-and-a-half-inch smartphone.

It is worth noting that this isn’t the first time partypoker has supported portrait mode. Back in 2016, the operator released a standalone app for Windows-powered devices that came with portrait mode set as standard. This was an HTML5-wrapped version of its Fast Forward games and came equipped with gesture-based controls, allowing players to push chips into the pot and physically flick their cards into the muck. There was also a horizontal bet slider. Yet, much like the Windows OS itself, the app struggled to gain traction and was later shelved. “It was competing directly with the native product that had all of the game variants and so it didn’t take off in that regard,” McQuater concedes.

As well as partypoker and Playtech, leading network GGPoker already allows vertical play. Meanwhile, online poker stalwart 888 is working on portrait mode for its app and Unibet has just launched a separate version of its lottery-style HexaPro poker variant for a few of parent company Kindred’s casino sites that can be played vertically. With the major brands seemingly now embracing this orientation (or at least giving players the option), it could be only a matter of time before the world’s largest poker operator, PokerStars, adds portrait view to its apps.

Malta-licensed Pokio is a real-money social poker app with private clubs – similar to home games – that has managed to attract the likes of high-stakes Scandinavian pros Viktor ‘Isildur1’ Blom and Ilari ‘Ziigmund’ Sahamies to its tables. However, when the mobile games developer behind Pokio, Qufan Internet Technology Ltd, was building the native iOS and Android apps, landscape view didn’t enter the equation. Portrait mode was instead chosen as the default option from the outset. “We’d seen some solutions for portrait mode with social poker apps in the app stores and on Facebook, so we felt it really was the way to go,” says CEO Manuel Lopes. “For a user experience, it is so much superior because you can play with one hand.”

Pokio

Pokio can accommodate up to nine players on the screen at a time, aided by the fact the edge of the ‘table’ has been removed, leaving an aerial view of just the playing surface and players. “The edge takes up a lot of real estate, so we eliminated it,” Lopes explains. “This leaves a lot more space for the chips and the avatars.” The app also uses pre-determined betting buttons and a bet slider designed to be controlled by a thumb. Before Pokio launched in December 2018, seasoned poker players were enlisted as beta testers for two months to provide feedback on the UI and overall UX. “Once players get used to using the buttons and the bet slider, it is a really fast learning curve,” Lopes says. “Most of them tell us they don’t play on desktop anymore.”

Four play

One particularly interesting aspect of partypoker’s Spins overhaul is that it supports up to four tables at once with a new tiling feature. Unlike the previous version where players had to tap on tabs to switch between tables, multi-tabling is achieved using this tiled view. However, this layout and UI does make it quite tricky to play more than one table one-handed as the top right tile is hard to reach for most people’s thumbs. And each tile is also quite small on a smartphone, so multi-tabling seems better suited to tablet play. “Tablet penetration isn’t where we would like it to be but we think with this update and that tiling function, when we enable it for tablet it, will give us a good opportunity to improve the percentage of players using tablets,” says McQuater.

With portrait mode being quite a radical departure from what most mobile poker players will have been used to for more than a decade, it will feel peculiar or awkward to some. Indeed, there have been players urging partypoker to reinstate the previous version of Spins. “You are always going to get negative feedback and we are never going to please everyone,” says McQuater. “There have been players who love it and players who have been getting to grips with a centralised bet slider that runs vertical as opposed to horizontal.” So as not to alienate those opposed to the new layouts, partypoker plans to allow players to switch to landscape mode once all the game variants are available in portrait view.

As to why this portrait-mode trend has taken all these years to emerge in the real-money poker sphere, Pokio’s Lopes puts it down to a general decline in investment in desktop and mobile poker. While online poker, Lopes says, is the “cool game” and a good acquisition tool, it has become the “bastard child of gaming in terms of revenue” while some landscape-orientated products these days “feel like 1999”. “Players weren’t demanding portrait, but the experience is as soon as they try it, they never go back to landscape,” he says.

Game of phones

You could argue that poker has taken a leaf out of casino’s book to some extent with RNG-powered casino, live casino and slots offering vertical play for some time now. Slots was the first gaming product to offer a portrait option (certain titles today remain landscape-only), and in a recent op-ed published on EGR Intel Karolina Pelc, who runs her own consultancy business BasicStrategy.co.uk and is group CPO for Games Marketing and Felt, suggested that 84% of mobile slots sessions are played in portrait mode.

Meanwhile, NetEnt first rolled out portrait mode for its live casino content in 2016 and it is now the “orientation of choice” among its client’s mobile users, says Andres Rengrifo, director of NetEnt Live. “Offering portrait orientation provides a level of convenience that players have grown accustomed to from general smartphone use, supporting quickfire gaming sessions on the move.” But portrait mode doesn’t come without its challenges, particularly for live card games. “Blackjack traditionally has a layout featuring seven boxes and optimising the design for that is a difficult task,” Rengrifo explains. “Another task is to find the perfect placement for the game presenter and to design and implement the right camera angles.”

Like casino gaming, online poker has reached a stage where it needs to offer portrait mode if it wants to stay relevant and fresh, as well as appeal to mobile gamers, particularly those who want short bursts of play. While playing poker in this orientation won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, particularly dyed-in-the-wool poker traditionalists, it is a trend that seems set to stay rather than ending up as some ephemeral gimmick. That’s unless foldable smartphones finally take hold and online poker operators and suppliers are forced to go back to the drawing board and design new table layouts.