As some of you may know, Blopp/Skjervoy nominated me as a candidate for player rep in the upcoming Stars meeting, and I accepted. You can cast your vote for the reps in Internet Poker soon.

Regardless of whether I'm voted in or not, we need the reps to know the "hearts and minds" of the PLO-community, so I invite you all to use this thread for topic suggestions, ideas, concerns etc.

enjoy the well deserved vaca (hopefully)

Haha, i'll try not to book any flights just yet.

Nice! You obv have my vote.

The man that is willing to talk three days about how ridiculous this ratholing is and wont stop about it even when they ask him to leave the room has my vote.
Are you that man GGARJ?

FYP. "that's off the table for discussion" isn't an acceptable answer to me and as long as PLO is getting charged way more than NL I think I'll vote for someone who wants to complain about the rake. Hopefully GGARJ will do that :-)

I thought I read they implemented where you can only rathole like 8 times per 24 hours at small stakes with the intention of doing it across all cash games soon.

Other than that I would like to see:

deep ante games at all stakes go back to normal non-zoom

discussion of ways to stop seat scripting and table camping

PLO related promotions

make zoom tables remember your past sessions so you don't still lose buttons

lower rake at low stakes

since zoom plo was introduced i think pokerstars sucks. i dont care about who goes on this stupid metting. fu ps. after 2-3years of full grind at 1/2-10/20 on plo 6max on pokerstars, being supernovaelite in 3 years in a row, im htinking about move to ipoker, ongame etc and all this ******ed softwares, just because i want play real poker.. i dont want play zoom.

gogetrealjob, have fun at trip.

Any sidebets on whether Stars is going to show real numbers for plo vs nlhe rake or not?

Maybe 2+2 could vote for me!

Definitely mention the high plo rake (especially at the lowest stakes). Push for more plo promitions and plo tournaments with high guaranted prizes. If we're paying the highest price for playing we should at least have the best game promotion, but that hasn't been the case so far.

***** ban seating script

murder campers

lower rake

ante zoom at mid stakes

this thread needs a link to the voting thread

+1

GL GGarJ, awesome that you want to actually do this.

Skjervoy had a nice idea about boosting VPP earning rate for PLO. Would lower the effective rake and bring more people to try out the game. Wouldn't affect SNE-chasers negatively, which has been one of the arguments against lowering the rake.

I'm thinking about starting a new petition for this soon, good spot now right before the player rep meeting.

Thoughts on specifics for this suggestion? maybe 1.2x VPPs?

This would be nice to get to a point where PS charges PLO players and NL players the same amount of money for the same services but I think micro and SSPLO is a more winnable battle than trying to get PS to make all the right changes in one meeting. Once they see how much changes at micro's and SSPLO help their bottom line they will make the same changes at MSPLO a year or so later.

#1 priority should just be to educate PS about PLO and how their calculations about rake are completely wrong.

If PS realizes how much making rake reasonable for micro and SSPLO will help the overall PLO ecology I think they would just snap do it on their own.

PS is never going to make any changes out of "fairness" or because they are sympathetic towards a grinders needs (and I don't think they should, they are a business).

This will all be hard because PS seems pretty stubborn and unwilling to take input but maybe the golden tongue of GGARJ can do it. Which brings me to a 2nd rep. GGARJ should be the 1st PLO rep to talk at them an eloquent presentation and our 2nd rep should just be someone with or without any knowledge of PLO who is willing to mix drinks and give PS reps handjobs/blowjobs to keep them loose while they are listening to GGARJ.

@ hoopman; in my experience PS people had been very well aware of plo dynamics and i expected to do a lot of educating as well. But they where already very consious about just about all the plo specific things i wanted to educate about.

@ GGARJ; When we had the PLO specific meeting last time, we identified the main problem with PLO was that rewards (bonusses/rakeback) where a really big portion of the profits winning people made. In NLH this was much less the case (due to lower rake in bb/100). So pre rewards winrates proved lower for plo on average, but after reward winrates for plo where pretty decent. We (ps and reps) identified this as a problem for various reasons. I don't think there is any chance the rewards will be increased for PLO.

More background info can be found in my trip report of last time:
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...playu-1347678/

My preferred line of going into the meeting would be;

PLO rake is still the most important topic to discuss imo. The amount of rake PS takes out ot the games in bb/100 are much larger compared to nlh. PS knows this but is offcourse a commercial company. Some of the arguments mentioned where;

-There is still a decent number of winning players for PLO. (see trip report i linked in the post above).
- PS is a commercial company. The rake has been set years ago at a certain level. It's debatable if the current rake is at (or close to) "an optimal" level, profit wise. Lowering rake might increase traffic and revenues from plo might actually increase. But it is very hard to determine what the effects will be.
-plo100 might also be a way bigger game compared to nlh100, because of way larger variance. So can you just look at bb/100 figures?

So with that in mind i would think of these topics:

- The data that i was shown in the PLO meeting showed that people were making solid profits, even with the high rake. In my trip report i wrote:
"I don’t think I can go to deep into the actual figures, but the general picture was that in most low and midstake PLO levels the pre-reward winrates had been around 0 or slightly positive for the group of players with high VIP levels."

I think it would be a good idea if the next PLO reps follows up on this and checks if this is still the case. People argue all the time that games are getting tougher. If the pre reward winrates dropped (below zero), i think you have a very strong case that the rake is too high for PLO.

- The amount of zoom action compared to normal action has been steadily increasing over all limits. With the actions PS took lately, i think everyone agrees that this will likely continue to do so. In zoom there are a lot more hands dealt with only regs on the table and I think it's fair to say that the fish/reg ratio is far worse in zoom. In a game with a very high rake in terms of bb/100 that can be really bad. I think that this can be a major argument for lowering the rake across the board, because i think otherwise I think volumes will be steadily decreasing over the next years (or at least the beautiful game of PLO will never reach it's true potential).

- One of the metrics we discussed last time was that a good way of looking at the bigger picture of a game is by checking the ratio of "how much of the money inflow in a game is going to PS and how much is taken out of the system by winning players". And offcourse comparing this accross different games. Last time we just discussed this metric but seen no data on this. Maybe PS has more data / ideas on this nowadays?

- In the june PLO meeting the rake scheme has already been split between nlh and plo, because PLO micro's received rake discounts. Maybe that's a precedent that can be expanded to more limits/bigger differences?

If you get elected I think it would be smart if we talk a bit on skype, so i can give you more specific updates.

joeri has my vote to go.

gogetrealjob seems just want talk about deep ante games

Awesome, was def hoping to talk to former reps beforehand, so thanks for the offer

I agree that checking out status quo for the winrates is important. I'm def not planning on "educating" PS on rake, but rather telling them how difficult many regs feel it is to beat SSPLO right now. If their data confirms this in any way, there should be room for discussing rake relief.

If we can make PS agree that rake relief will improve their bottom line, they will do so. That's the only way, as far I can tell.

@ urubu; i won't go.

@ggrj; sounds like a plan to me

They can argue that at SSPLO people are doing just great with the bonus scheme at the expense of a reduced winrate compared to NL all they want and that's fine, I for one couldn't care less where my income comes from.

The main problem is IMO that such a model does absolutely nothing for the acquisition and holding on to of new players starting with zero VIP status, how on earth do you market a game where noone is winning?

GGaRJ, make sure to tell us when and where to vote and linky in this thread when the time comes please. GLGL !

edit: thought this was the SSPLO thread but obv applies to both.

Jeah thats right. That's why we discussed at length that the big problem was to much dependense on rewards. But it is really hard for stars to lower both rake and rewards. See that trip report for more discussion on that. Can also dig up Pokerstars Steves' report if your interested.

Why not? You both should go imo.

Unfinished business imo.

Because I play a lot of deep ante? I think it's fair to say I take part in virtually all Stars-discussions that take place here

As Joeri pointed out, Stars agrees that PLO-winnings are too heavily weighted towards rewards, and are prob also aware that it's a problem with new players. I'm gonna bombard them with suggestions on how to bring new players to PLO, beginner bonuses and the big sunday MTT are def among them.

I'll post the link to the voting fosho