Hi there, am ovb a 2+2 noob, so am hoping this topic is in the right section.

just wanted to open up a topic to opinions from a much wider audience than i am used to at PKR.

PKR are looking to run team games, i love the idea of Team games which would bring about some really interesting dynamics.

however i read how they plan to implerment it. this is the OP from a PKR staff member detailing the rules

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Team Tuesdays have arrived on PKR offering an extra addition to your tournament schedule! As this is a new addition and still in its infancy there will no doubt be changes as we mould this into something we feel can be successful.

How it works:
Each week there will be a “sign up” tournament in the tournament lobby for PKR Team Tuesdays. This will have a real money buyin. At 17:15 GMT every Tuesday, the sign up tournament will disappear from the lobby and everyone who was registered in that tournament will now have been entered into the team tournament. (We advise you to enter in advance, as places are capped!)

At 17:25 GMT a thread will be created in the Lounge on the PKR forum with the following information depending on the number of entrants:

The tournaments that count for Team Tournaments will be normal tournaments that already exist in the PKR schedule. These tournaments won’t be restricted to just Team entrants, so there may be other people playing the tournaments that aren’t involved in the Team side-action. Not to worry though, as when working out the scoring, all players who aren’t involved in the team tournament will be disregarded when points are being worked out.

Scoring

Reverse scoring will be used to assign points to a player. If there are 500 players in the Mini PKR Open and 346 of those are part of the Team Tournament, the highest finisher of those 346 players will be awarded 346 points. The second highest finisher out of the 346 will be awarded 345 points, and so on.

Points

The top 3 scores from each tournament will go towards the final team scores. If you are in a team of 3, then all your scores count. Example:

Team 1
Player 122 scores 100 points in Mini PKR Open, 150 points in Mini Primetime
Player 220 scores 120 points in Mini PKR Open, 130 points in Mini Primetime
Player 290 scores 5 points in Mini PKR Open, 300 points in Mini Primetime

Top 3 highest scores in Mini PKR Open = (100+120+5) = 225
Top 3 highest scores in Mini Primetime = (150+130+300) = 580

Total team 1 score = (225+580) = 805 points

Team 4

Player 161 scores 60 points in Mini PKR Open, 100 points in Mini Primetime
Player 380 scores 120 points in Mini PKR open, 105 points in Mini Primetime
Player 197 scores 0 points in Mini PKR Open, 295 points in Mini Primetime
Player 105 scores 55 points in Mini PKR Open, 150 points in Mini Primetime

Top 3 highest scores in Mini PKR Open = (60+120+55) = 235
Top 3 highest scores in Mini Primetime = (105+150+295) = 550

Total team 4 score = (235+550) = 785 points

The results from all teams will be pasted in the forum in a similar format to below:

Payouts

For a player to be valid for any sort of payout, they must have played at least 1 of the tournaments assigned to “Team Tuesdays”. Any player who signs up to the “Team Tournament” list, and then does not play any of the two events will a) not be eligible for any payout and b) not be entitled to a refund. Please make sure you can play the tournaments before entering the sign up tournament.

All of the workings in the examples I have pasted above will be hidden from view going forward as not to confuse you – only the important information will be shown.

- If either or both of the Team Tournaments suffers unexpected technical difficulties forcing it to end early, the Team Tournament entry fees will be refunded and there will be no leaderboard or payouts.

- In a case of an exact tie for Team Points, prize money will be split equally between the tied teams.

- Payouts for teams use the same PKR MTT 10-Seater Payout structure % wise.

We have plans in the future to evolve this if it is deemed a success, with possibly allowing players to create their own teams, and having nights where teams are created with players all from the same country. Open to suggestions if you can think of any other ways we can create teams.

Team Tournaments are a community building promotion and hopefully it will allow players to meet and interact with some players they’ve not had contact with before, and will give players an extra little sweat for some prize money. It isn’t perfect as it is right now, but we’ll listen to feedback as much as we can and then let it grow for bigger buyins/different tournaments and so on.

Before we launch on Tuesday we want to test this all out. There is a test Team Tournament on 19th July which costs 1,000 PP to enter. The two team tournaments will be small ones to test this all out. There is another thread for this, so please discuss that specific tournament in the other thread.

Use this thread to ask any questions and give feedback where necessary happy
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my response was:

love the idea of team games but, hmmmm surely this has a massive potential impact on soft play and collusion issues?

ok senario, PKR open FT, 2 members from same team both reach FT. now ovb its in their own interests to go soft on each other and i know for sure if im on the FT and i see 2players collluding, ima not gunna be happy.

cant we just have an MTT solely for this purpose, which is only made up of teams?

thoughts??

Its all or nothing, why allow individuals to enter a tournament that has multiple teams working together, of course there will be collusion, please do not encourage team play in poker tournaments.

Site is rigged anyway.

I have never in my life seen so many badbeats over, and over again.

And yes i know its a bit tarrdish to claim its rigged. But when you see every single time hands where there is a favorite ranging from 65-35 % to 92-8 %and the worst hand wins like 75 % of the time while playing 5 hours a day for like 3 month you start to belive its true.

Confirmation bias. Either change your attitude towards luck or stop playing poker.

^^ this

pkr is the softest site in the universe. if u cant beat the game at PKR, u cant beat the game.(btw there are also some sik v.good players, but vast majority are recreational gamers /sweet)

neways, appologisem looked at my OP earlier, realised much too long and likely to cause twitchy eye snydrome to anyone who can ba to read it all, and didnt manage to work out how to edit, /doh!

Nutshell Version

PKR want to introduce Team games, but want to have teams palying in open MTTs, so 10% of the field may be playing as part of a team, where as the other 90% would be playing as individuals, but more importantly they wont know who is playing as part of the same team.

ovb think this opens up issues of soft play/collusion & other team tactics which im not happy about and feel doing this will compromise PKR's integrity.

by all means PKR have a dedicated Team game, then collusions, chip dumping and any other sneeky tactic u can think of FTW

pkr very proffesional site/team and would definetely be the last site to be rigged imho and the top echelon of players are far fewer than any of the other sites and i would class them around the mid tourney level on stars so if youre an advanced level thinker you could earn a nice crust grinding pkr.

just want to clarify, i am in no way suggesting pkr is rigged, and also want to state for the record.............

I am not a Rigtard.

ty.

lol athough once, i lost a last longer prop bet in a plo8 game and for 24 hours i had to convince pkr players on thier forum that i was. starting with this post......

i try to be positive, i have alwasys tried to believe this site is fair and reputable, but enough is enough. everytime i withdraw money i get **** on from a gr8 hight, every river is now against me, every donk gets lucky and gets rewarded. i just cant beat these donks anymore.

the only way forward is to switch sites where they will try to encorage me to stay by giving me some decent cards.

i then had to spend the next 24 hours defending my OP.

/oh the shame and humilitation

Compromising their integrity is a bit harsh. I would say its more of a case that they really didn't think this through.

Why would they not have thought this through? It is an additional incentive to boost the social aspect of the game and well, you can barely avoid potential collusion either way with instant messengers available. You can only punish players that soft play on purpose, because those patterns can be detected and punish them accordingly to demonstrate that they indeed take it serious.

One of the most popular and ridiculous poker conspiracy theories that you’ll find on message boards and poker forums is the cash-out curse. This conspiracy theory presumes that a player who cashes out some of his money from an online poker room will experience a horrible losing streak when he returns to play. The theory figures that a “curse flag” will be placed on the poker player’s account, singling them out to be dealt bad beats.

What would be the motive for such an absurd policy? Poker conspiracy theorists say that a poker room’s motivation for the cash-out curse is twofold: First, they’re trying to punish you for cashing out and discouraging you from cashing out in the future. Second, the card room hates it when players cash out, and they’re redistributing the money to other players in order to allow the house to eventually receive the money through the rake. Although it may be possible to see the twisted logic in this sort of reasoning, the simple fact is that the online poker cash-out curse is not real.

Poker is a game of constant, volatile fluctuations, and this applies to your bankroll as well. Typically, a player will cash out after experiencing a nice winning streak. The average casual player will have a few wins, look at their bankroll, and think “Hey! That’s enough cash for that new set of golf clubs I had my eye on.” When he returns to the online card room he’ll have an inflated sense of his poker skills. He doesn’t feel like he can lose, and when he inevitably does, he cries about the cash-out curse
The random number generator (RNG) is the backbone of any online poker room, and an understanding of how they work will help dispel any of the conspiracy theories you’ve read so far in this article. The purpose of a random number generator is to ensure that there are no biases and that cards are distributed in an unpredictable fashion.

You might be surprised to know, but it’s impossible for a computer to produce a truly random shuffle all on its own. An unpredictable external stimulus is required for a pseudo-random shuffle. Online poker sites have various ways of creating a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG), which rely on real world physical processes that are unpredictable. Examples include:

Combined mouse movements from players connected to the online poker room.
Thermal movements around the computer’s thermal entropy chip.
In many respects the online poker rooms go beyond what is actually necessary to create an unpredictable and random shuffle – so you can rest assured that any site you play on is providing a fair and unbiased playing environment. Using such methods also ensures a potential hacker cannot break or crack the random number generator.

Many of the conspiracy theories suggest that online poker rooms somehow fix their random number generators to produce certain results. The fact is that any attempt to create some kind of set of rules or decision engine into a random system would immediately invalidate the randomness – and a dysfunctional random number generator would be extremely easy to spot.

Also, let’s not forget that there are online poker players with hundreds of thousands of hand histories, saved in programs like Hold’em Manager. Online poker hands are regularly scrutinized by the poker playing community, and if there ever was some kind of “fix” by an online poker room, (that produced results that deviated beyond expected variance), it would be pounced upon at once

No, it would not. The whole trick is to keep all 'rigged-ness' within acceptable boundaries. If a 3rd party auditor gets a large sample of hands, they will find nothing odd.

Take the typical fish flush draw for example: Has 9 outs. Say the site has a 'cursed' flag.
normal draws vs cursed: add a few outs in the deck.
cursed draws vs normal: remove a few outs in the deck.

All the site has to do to pass it's randomness audit is to adjust the ratio of these 2 rigged decks so that overall the statistics add up: In a large sample about 18% of the turn cards hit, 18% of the river cards hit. All looks fine, auditor signs off.

Nobody has enough hands in their database to catch this. Especially if the 'cursed' flag in only on say 5% of the hands played.
The only way to catch this is a site like PTR, where you eventually have enough hands to create a decent sample of 'good' players vs 'bad' players. Then you might spot that something is wrong with the draws. It will be bloody hard work.

"Probably not rigged, definitely able to rig with a low chance of getting caught."

Also while i agre its somewhat dumb to claim its rigged. Its very hard to spot on sites like PKR because there are very few regs, and not enough people with a significant sample size to conclude anything. Because its not posibel to multitable with a HUD.

All i can comclude is that on this site there are whales like there is on no other site. Its like online poker was in 2002.

But also it is unbeliable how many bad beats, and other hilarious stuff that happens here every other hand. Maybe im just running worse than the worst person on the planet. But i have never seen anything like this on any other site i have played on.

Rig discussion doesn't really seem to have a place in this thread IMO. Anyway, When I started reading I made the assumption the team play would be in special team play tournaments...but they are putting team play in regular tournaments? Sounds stupid to me.

I would consider using 2 accounts this seems the way forward

neways

They are destryoing the game. Team events in real-money poker are idiotic anyways. Expanding team play to open tournaments is just plain stupid.