In 2017 the room will make a small cut to rakeback returns and use the money to give free cash bonuses to losing players.
As we have previously reported, Unibet Poker's new software Unibet 2.0 will be fully released this year. The web client has already been made available and the Android and iPoker tablet applications will follow on November 1. The PC and Mac softwares and the Android and iOS smartphone applications will follow on on December 1, the first day of the Unibet Open Bucharest poker festival. Until the all-around introduction of the clients, Unibet is running Sunday Countdown tournaments with added prizes every week.
UnibetAndrew, the room's representative on the 2+2 forums has announced various changes coming in 2017. After the introduction of Unibet 2.0, the room plans to introduce a new tournament schedule in the first quarter of the year, but this project is still in an early stage. The room also plans to introduce new, higher stakes games in December, namely NL800 and PL800 cash games.
Apart from these plans, an important change has already been confirmed, in January the room will introduce a Bonus Shop. Players will receive "bonus money" for activity on the site which they can spend in the Bonus Shop on tournament tickets and cash bonuses.
UnibetAndrew has also stated that the money paid out in Challenges will be reduced, but this money will be used to give the biggest losing players free cash.
There are players who are skeptical of this idea and who fear that the room will just take this cash to increase their own profits (like PokerStars did sneakily in 2015), but Unibet's business model has always been based on the idea of offering recreational players an incentive to return to the site.
Focusing on recreational players instead of low/midstakes "rakeback pros" has worked tremendously well for them, their traffic and revenue is constantly increasing in an otherwise declining business, so we expect this decision to contribute to the long-term health of the site's economy which will also be profitable for professional players on the site.
UnibetAndrew has also shared two VIP level/rakeback graphs with the community. This shows that at the lowest stakes, players get exceptionally high returns and after a sharp drop the returns start to rise once again.
Rakeback percentage/Amount of player points gathered
This system provides great returns to micro/low stakes players aswell as high stakes/high volume players, with only players in the lower midstakes/midstakes levels receiving relatively less.
Players registered to Unibet through Rakerace.com can get even more value for their play by participating in our €5,000 (2 x €2,500) exclusive cash races. The exclusive races will also return in November and Rakerace.com players can also take advantage of the €200 first deposit bonus to increase their total returns.
Unibet Poker - €2,500 - exclusive race - 15 - 31 October 2016
Unibet Poker - €2,500 - exclusive race - 1 - 16 November 2016
Unibet Poker - €2,500 - exclusive race - 15 - 30 November 2016
Unibet Poker room review and registration
Good luck and have fun at the tables!
