Last week, PokerStars finally relaunched a beta version of BOOM, its social media utility for sharing and replaying hands, in the international and Spanish clients.
The feature has been live for some time in some of its regulated countries—including Italy and France—and for Team PokerStars members. It was first announced to be going live back in May, but technical issues with the launch prompted PokerStars to temporarily take down the client.
The utility aims to bridge the gap between social games and real-money online poker through social sharing of hand histories. BOOM can be accessed from the hand history in the chat box of the poker client via a small red star, or via the replayer which sports its own BOOM button. Options allow players to share hands on Twitter or publish them to their own BOOM website, accessible at boomplayer.com/.
The feature is much like hand history tools like pokerhand.org and weaktight.com, but with a focus on social sharing. Once shared, PokerStars opens your web browser, where you can review the action, replay it in the hand replayer, share it on other social networks or embed the replayer on one’s own blog. One notable omission, however, is Facebook support, possibly due to restrictions of real money gambling on the platform.
The website also has a search box which players can use to search for interesting hands. The search results page has filters for selecting hands most viewed, most discussed, top liked and most recent. A cloud picture of most active hand posters leads to a thumbnail list of all the hands posted by that player. The page includes a table of the most recent hands posted by Team PokerStars Pros.
Due to the additional resources required by your computer and the time to launch a browser, users with older machines have reported disruptions ranging from lags in gameplay to a brief freezing of the client when attempting to share hands.
