The €50 and €100 HexaPro stakes can be a bit of a roller coaster ride. Not just for you as a player, but also for us a site. We’re still, relatively speaking, a small poker site, and the highest stakes HexaPro games are the most vulnerable to traffic changes – just one more regular player can make a huge difference to the overall health of the game.
As an example, the NL200/NL400 cash games generally have a monthly fluctuation in traffic of 5%-10%, while the €50-€100 HexaPro games often see 30% differences from one month to the next.
In recent months, it’s been a scary downhill ride aboard the HexaPro roller coaster with a traffic drop of more than 50%. While the games will certainly rebound from current low numbers – again, significant monthly swings are natural – time has come to revisit the games.
We can see we got the casual players to support greater traffic, but the games are suffering from not achieving the critical liquidity; having at least two regs ready, when a casual player wants to jump into a game. This is painful, as it’s a slippery slope and with more long-term impact as well. If you’ve once waited in queue for 5 minutes, without the game ever starting, you’re far less likely to try and jump into a game again.
In this post, I won’t comment on all the factors influencing the current performance, but I’m happy to discuss those on the community. Instead, this will focus on key aspects of the game which are about to be changed.
I must add the below details aren’t 100% final, and I also don’t have an exact date for them at this point. Stay tuned here, or on the community.
Multiplier Distribution
Our multiplier distribution is unique, when comparing to rest of the industry. While everyone else have got a 2x minimum prizepool, we’ve opted for 1.5x. If you aren’t familiar with the Jackpot SNG game type, it might sound like we’re just offering a terrible deal, but that isn’t the case. In the long run, you’re paying about the same in rake/fee, as our 10x games are for instance around 10 times more likely to hit than with other sites.
I personally prefer our distribution, as the grind with infinite 2x and very rare 10x+ multipliers can become boring. However, us not conforming to an industry standard, that could also be hurting the games. From player feedback and surveys we know that our active player base generally prefer our current distribution, but those numbers are also naturally skewed, due to the fact that the active players have chosen to play with us for a reason.
Ultimately, I think different buyin levels require different distributions. The average monthly disposable income of players at the €100 level is not 100x greater than for players at the €1 level, so why would the game design be identical?
At the highest stakes, the experience over a really small sample of games becomes extremely important, much more so than at the lowest levels. While our current distribution is relatively low variance for a large sample size, it’s high variance for small sample sizes. Again, 10x is approximately 10 times more likely to hit on Unibet than other sites. While this does seem like a good fit at the lower stakes, I never liked it for the highest ones.
Later this year, we will be changing the distribution for the €50 and €100 HexaPro games to the below.
| Multiplier | Distribution, 100k games | Multiplier hits 1 in x games | Mutliplier hit % |
| 1,000 | 1 | 100,000.0 | 0.00% |
| 100 | 2 | 50,000.0 | 0.00% |
| 10 | 4,000 | 25.0 | 4.00% |
| 5 | 2,500 | 40.0 | 2.50% |
| 4 | 6,000 | 16.7 | 6.00% |
| 3 | 29,306 | 3.4 | 29.31% |
| 2 | 58,191 | 1.7 | 58.19% |
| Total games | 100,000 |
The big change is obviously moving from 1.5x lowest multiplier to 2x, but we’re also removing 25x and adding a 4x multiplier. There were several roads we could go down here, but I wanted to stay somewhat true to the original distribution. I don’t believe in these huge 12,000x/€1,000,000 top prizes, which hit one in 10,000,000 games, as they’re just a marketing gimmick that’s bad for both casual and serious players. I also don’t believe in heavily favouring the 3x at the cost of all higher multipliers, as it simply makes for too dull of a distribution.
You’ll notice that 10x has still got a rather high probability, and this is partly due to an upcoming promo format.
“Permanent” Happy Hours
From the data it’s evident that we’re especially failing to meet the needs of the casual players, in the early night hours, with the lost buyins from casual players being especially high at this time. By converting these buyins to actual game launches, everyone – site, casuals and regs – stand to benefit.
We’ll be introducing new happy hours on the €50 and €100 stakes from 00:00UTC till 03:00. The happy hours will feature guaranteed 10x games within a certain number of games, like the Jackpot Mania promotion. For regs, it means much lower rake while for casuals the thrill of a €1000 game should drive more buyins. It’s also worth noting this will be running in all markets, albeit with different visualization depending on jurisdiction.
Rake Adjustment
If you aren’t a numbers wizard, it probably wasn’t obvious from the previous multiplier distribution table: we’re lowing the rake by 12.4%, with the new distribution.
The other stakes will remain at 6.853% for the time being, while €50-€100 will have exactly 6% rake. This makes us much more competitive, as the industry standard is around the 7% mark today, for these stakes.
I dare say it won’t be the only rake change you’ll see for HexaPro in the next 12 months.
Design Changes
As we’ll keep the €50 and €100 stakes under the regular HexaPro tab, we had to find a way, to make it obvious that these games are different. We’ve opted with a small rebrand to “HexaPro Highroller”, and it’s mentioned in both lobby and on buyin dialog that the minimum multiplier is now 2x.
