Wartune Texas Hold'em minigame

Whenever a new game event is added to Wartune, you have to consider, does it worth the time? Does it worth the money? I will try to help you there.

First of all, you can read my opinion about the pokergame here. I'm especially angry about this feature, because I know making a working poker client requires a LOT OF work. If they devote this amount of work somewhere else, it could have been enough to undo all the nerfs, listen to the players suggestions and implement them, get rid of the lag and the bugs. Still, "we have to cook with what we have."

We have 2 very important questions here:
How much points can you get for your balens?
What can you buy for your points?

How much points you get for your balens
I made a table for you about 2 players, Joe and Jim playing poker. They don't make it too complicated, each turn they bet 100 chips, then pass the whole river and reveal their cards. Joe is more luckier though, so at the end, Jim loses all his money.

As you see, both of them had 500 chips (worth 500 balens). At the end, Jim lost all, so he effectively transformed his 500 balen into 262 points. On the other hand, Joe retained his original funds, even increased it a bit, and have won 262 points as well. If he is good, he can play even 3-4 similar rounds before losing his chips. So how much point you can get for your balens will vary greatly: it can be as low as 25%, and as high as 300-500%, depending on your luck and poker skill.

Please note something about poker. If you win in a particular match, it's only like 10% skill, and 90% luck. But if you play a lot of matches, on the long term, this 10% skill adds up, so after 1000 match, a better player will always beat the weaker one. And for this reason, unless you are an experienced poker player, I do not recommend playing this game. Because you will get 25-50% points for your balens, and not 100-300%.

I played on pokerstars for about 9 months. My goal was not as much as winning money, but achieving glory. I wanted to win a big tournament. One time I was playing a multi-round series of events. Each round, 2/3 of the players were eliminated, and the rest got to the next round. The first round cost only 10 cents. But if you made all rounds (like 10), you won an entry to a tournament where the registration fee was 10000 USD, and the total prize was several millions of dollars. The event lasted for almost a day. With incredible luck (and of course, focused play), I made it to the very final round... and I lost my last chips 10 seconds before the tournament ended and the winners were announced. So I was 10 seconds away from playing in a million-dollar mega-tournament. After that, I lost my interest in the game and stopped. When I cashed out, I got 400 USD more than what I spent. But my actual winning were like 3400, just pokerstars took 3000 as rake in the many many thousand games I played. And I think I was good, I read poker books, and I win many smaller tournaments. So be prepared, unless you are a real poker shark, convering your balens 1:1 to points will remain a dream.

What to buy for your points
Let's see the reward shop! This is always the best part of every Wartune event :)

As a rule of thumb, don't spend balen on items which you can either get for free in large number, or you will max it out in the foreseeable future.
Eudaemon warpatch crystal, resist and resist reduce: fall in both category (I don't even understand why the event chest are also filled with this crap).
Moon dust, moon rock, divinity stone: during events, you can buy 100 for 10 chests (which you can get for free). So I wouldn't spend time and money to get these either.
Green, blue, purple, gold flame, book of wisdom: you can buy these in the shop for about the same price. So why waste time on playing poker to achieve the same (or worse).

The blood of zeus is a free item, like most other items on this page. Even the red copper, you can get enough eventually from bounty targets. Golden sand, you need 25 to give +1 to your eudaemons item. So for 30 each, it's ridiculously expensive for a few fake BR. I think not even whales buy this :)

Well-refined stone, you can get it for free only from chaos war shop. So this is a patience factor, I keep buying it since 3 chaos wars, I think I need 2 more and equipment of my main eudaemon is refined enough. Dragon blood stone, this is a cash only item, but it's not more expensive via direct sales. Of the rest, tenacity mark seems a good item, but it's ridiculously overpriced as well, the rest is junk.

Gift of god and Compliment of god are still hard-to-get items. You can get 100 gift of god for 100, and compliment for 200 chests in events. Even if you have to buy these chests (27 balen with discount coupon), one gift will cost you 27 balens, and one compliment 54 balens. So you can get a slight discount here only if you are a true poker star and get 200% points for your chips. 
The rest, moonlight, glint, golden holy water, gold is plain junk.

Conclusion
So it seems even the cash-only items, you better just buy them from the balen shop directly, rather than play here in poker shop and get them for points. Since the poker shop has nothing worthwhile, playing this game is not useful either. Even if you have the balens.

If I have made this shop, I would have given much better prices on items, to draw players in. Also, I would have added some really unique stuff, like dark&light emblem, loki seal, empire truncheons, mounts (where is the unique poker mount??). Filling up the slots with fate stones, sack of gold and rough stones was really unnecessary.

If you liked my analysis, please consider visiting my Odin kickstarter project :)