Pokeit has its own live streaming feature allowing you to share a session of poker in real-time. This service includes two major components: a live homepage where you can publish visualizations to the web and a chatbot for Twitch called Pokeitbot. In this article we go over the basics of how to start a live stream. If you’re streaming on Twitch, and are trying to figure out how to set up your Pokeitbot, check out our guide on Setting up your Pokeitbot.
Starting a stream
You can start a live stream by clicking the Start Broadcast button in the bottom right-hand corner of the dashboard. Clicking this button opens a dialog with a lot of different options for your stream. Live streaming in Pokeit is built around sharing visualizations and you’re allowed to share up to 5 at a time.
You can add a visualization to your stream by selecting it from the first dropdown. The dropdown includes visualizations you currently have loaded in Pokeit, as well as your favorites. A timeframe can be added once you select a visualization. A timeframe is just a filter we add to your visualization for the duration of the livestream. By default, we set the timeframe to “Current session”, but you can change it to current week, current month, all time, or any tournament or table name you’ve played at during the session.
Once you go live, a web-link is generated for your visualization. That link can be customized if you want, otherwise it will look like the title of the visualization. Clicking the share button will take you to the live version of the visualization.
The link to your live streaming homepage with all of your shared visualizations can be found at:
https://pokeit.co/<username>/live/
Where <username> is your Pokeit username.
Configuring your stream
There are five additional options worth mentioning:
- Hide Holecards: Your holecards will be visible on all of your hands by default after the hand is finished. If you choose to hide holecards, only those hands which went to showdown will be revealed
- Hide Player Names: Player names can also be disguised. If this option is selected, players will be identified by number if they're in a visualization, or by position when viewing a hand history
- Hide Histories: If you’d like to share a table or graph of hands, but would prefer to disable access to each individual hand history, select this option
- Stream Delay: If you’re streaming a session of poker on a delay, you’ll also need to set a delay here to make sure they’re synchronized. This value should match the delay set in your broadcast software (e.g. OBS)
- Twitch Lag: When streaming on Twitch, there is often an upload lag of between 10-30 seconds on top of any delay you’ve set. This value is set to 20 seconds by default, but you can adjust it in the account page or from your stream using the !lag {+/- seconds} chat command. Keep in mind, viewers with slower connections experience longer lag times. Because of this, it's better to err on the side of setting this value too high so you don't spoil the action
Managing your stream
After you’ve set everything up the way you’d like, hit the Start Stream button and your stream will now be live. Live visualizations will be highlighted red in the header. Live stream settings can be changed mid-stream so you don’t have to start and stop if you want to make a change.
When you’re ready to stop the stream, just click the Stop Stream button from the dialog. Streams will also automatically stop 30 minutes after the last hand was played.