Recently Decentral Games launched a mobile version for their ICE Poker game, ICE Poker Flex, so I went in to try it out and see what it’s about, how the experience is like and of course, if you can make money with it.
This was my first contact with Decentraland Games / ICE Poker, so here’s my first impressions.
The Barrier to Entry in this Free to Play Game
I go over to decentral games, I go to Play Now and woops, I can’t play because I don’t have a ‘wearable’. Apparently you need a NFT to play the game, so I go to their marketplace.
I’m like ok, whatever let’s try and get one, how much can it be? I go to the floor price and find this:
$360 to be able to test out a poker app. I could probably buy multiple nice real party shirts with that money. Wouldn’t be my first stupid crypto acquisition, but I’m trying to be more rational these days.
So I look for alternatives, apparently you can also get tournament wearables, which is basically the game mode I will try. So I got myself this nice $10 jacket
This also has 9 ‘Shine’, which I will need to enter the Sit & Go apparently. I pay 3 shine and we’re in.
Playing my first Sit & Go
To my pleasant surprise, the 6 man tournament table filled up within few minutes. First feel of the interface, looks clean and simple.
The first few minutes I had some trouble distinguishing between players stacks and chips being bet, but eventually got used to it.
As expected, chips started flying around pretty soon, as if people were playing for… some fictional thing called shine. However I am a poker pro so I have to go full try hard mode and win this thing.
Soon I am headsup versus Bengay, the most solid player at the table.
Shortly after, we go all-in preflop with AJ vs mr Gay’s AQ and we somehow spike a Jack. Now I believe I am destined to win this, only to have my dreams crushed by another all-in preflop
I notice I still won something, 1 trophy badge for about 20 min of play (pretty long!). At least I won my second game:
Can you make money playing ICE Poker Flex?
For first place you get 2 trophies and shine refund, for 2nd 1 trophy. So let’s see what can we do with this.
Ok let’s first go for getting that cash money 🤑💰. In this case, ICE. You can directly trade the ICE token (which is their ingame token), on the marketplace. For 5 trophies, you get 1500 ICE which at this point in time, is worth $9. Not bad, not great.
Especially when you factor in you need Shine to buy-in to these tournaments. For 4 trophies, you can replenish 20 Shine ✨. Otherwise, you can also buy ICE to replenish shine. If you are getting confused by all this shine, ice and trophies, I don’t blame you.
Lastly, for 115 trophies you can get 1 piece (of 5 total) of this exclusive ICE Pharaoh garment.
Which would equate to $264 dollars if you just redeemed ICE for that same amount of trophies. However, you could sell this garment, for which the floor price now is 0.34eth ($446) on OpenSea. This seems to be the most profitable option. That said, those 115 trophies would require around 55 wins (excluding replenishing Shine to play).
Let’s do some quick math, you are going for the Pharaoh pieces (max value). Say you win 2/6 games because you are skilled. 20 minutes/game. You need to win ~200 trophies (to cover the shine entry fees also), that’s 66hrs to win $500. Putting it all together, you are making around $7-10/hr at this point in time. Before you ask, you are allowed to play 1 table per account.
In conclusion, the earning potential of ICE Poker Flex is decent but not too great. We are in a bear market, after all. I imagine you could have made 3-5x more in the bullmarket.
With an all access wearable NFT you can also play in the Decentraland metaverse ICE Poker, which offers other opportunities, but that’s for another time.
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Good Luck!
