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In my opinion.
They don't share the news and others for the game is already being deploy, testing the game first with freeroll + to avoid people overload access the game. That's why, they want to make sure the server or dashboard poker can handle a huge visitor/player. But still even they not announcement the game, total people who already joined the freeroll over 2,000 user.
Plus they are probably not even sure if it is working as well as they hope it would, so they want to first consider this stage as open beta, that way they would still have some people playing there, they would get to watch and see if people are having trouble of not. That way it would be quite good and would result with something much better.
Obviously it is not going to be easy, and a lot of people will not see the benefit of this, but the truth be told I think it is quite obvious that we are going to see this open beta be fine. That way they can fix whatever issues that they have, and it will get a lot better on the long run, they will move along while fixing all the issues and will not face with any trouble on the long run.
You can't really call it a beta anymore.
They tested it for at least 6 months on their .us site, and it still looks like a college kid made this software in 1 evening in his dorm.
There are so many flaws, it amazes me a big site like stake would publish this as a finished product. Reminds me of the Cyberpunk 2077 release, hahaha.
I thought I would use stake again when they finally publish poker but it seems like this ship has sailed, totally not worth it!
I am not a poker player, and neither do I even know how to play, but one thing we need to also consider here is that, the US version of that site is not the same as the global site, for one sure thing first is that, number users of the US site and number of users of the global site can't be compared, and we know that tech products always have issues when hit with the type of traffic it wasn't designed for.
And Secondly, you don't expect stake to just take the software from their US site and implement into the global site without tweaking some line of codes, adding and removing some stuffs, and as long as this is done, the software automatically considered new and in beta test mode since those code thats been updated may not have gone through a normal rigorous test phase or process to guarantee not just usability, but durability, reliability as well.
Anyways, I am not here to defend stake for releasing a poorly crafted piece of tech to their users, i am just stating some possible reasons that could have lead to the low rating and dissatisfaction of users on the newly launched poker game on the site.