Completely agree

No, that's not what I'm asking at all. I like all game types, but I'd like all 20-50s sorted together, all 40-100s sorted together and all 100-250s sorted together. I want all 3 gametypes, but want them separated in the lobby.

Ty for understanding.

Thanks, hopefully this gets worked on!

Precisely. You are getting it now.

I've played in a home game with a rule that if you are winning you have to give notice that you are leaving. It doesn't really matter why they have this rule, but the fact that it exists means some players don't like it when you win and leave. When the game isn't fun for bad players, it isn't profitable for good ones.

I play party poker but i've been keeping an eye on this situation as it evolves.At first i was excited and starting to think about putting my role back on stars,the place i used to love playing before it became infested,but i've just looked at the 1-2 fr tables running and its not far off a 50-50 split(45%20-50).Not only does make me want to stay at party(100% 35-100bb tables) ,but it worries me.If poker predominantly became 20-50 poker how would this impact the games future?To me it would be terrible because id have to go back to work or become a rake pro/ss,but to alot of poker players(losing/BE players) i sense they could begin to like this new easier to play form of poker.Do ps feel a responsability towards keeping poker a 100bb game?Does anybody think they should feel responsible?My view is definitely that of a winnig reg who wants thing his own way,but who am i,who are we to say how the game should be played?Its just a shame that the ssr's who for the last 2-3yrs have played with no moral or table etiquette have been looked after by stars by once again allowing them to play with weaker players.Once again this is my one-sided view of things so if you are a ssr's please don't post any response to this as i am totaly fed up with going over the same old **** with you.

ps.please lose these tables stars,i think its bad for poker

Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. Players are expected to keep their stacks on the table. You aren't allowed to remove chips from your stack after you have won a hand. That is against the spirit as well as the letter of the rules. Trying to circumvent this by switching to a different table for your preferred amount and then returning to the same table with an amount less than what you had before is VERY MUCH against the spirit of the game.

SNE2010 - Such a move wouldn't have to cripple anyone if they didn't want it to of course. There are also some players who shortstack who don't just sit there ratholing away and bouncing back to their same tables over and over again. For those that don't like to play with 40BB's then too bad for them....sorry you won a hand.

I'm not very comfortable playing with 300BB's or something either if there's some really good player who has position on me who has a similar stack. Now I'm at risk of losing ALL of it to him. But it's my choice whether I want to stay at that table or not. If there's some fish trying to give their money away then I'll choose to take that risk and stay around even though I'm not entirely comfortable.

Anyway, the ratholers who are returning to the same table sometimes within the same freaking session with less than they had when they left are certainly against the spirit of the rules. Suck it up and play with 40BB's I say. Everyone else is keeping their winnings right there on the table. The ratholers are intentionally attempting to circumvent this very basic rule of poker.

While nice (and I see the logic for home games), phatty has STILL provided no back up to the LIVE game argument.

However, as soon as Steve comes to this thread - everyone jumps right back in. These are great suggestions for the UPCOMING debate thread, which isn't here yet. Maybe before January 2011, maybe sooner. But as Jmillerdls, 1nsight, several others and I were active in the other thread, UNTIL that thread opens up - there will probably not be a lot of these changes.

As I noted earlier - someone posted screenshots of 100bb tables on Stars vs FullTilt. All the action is at Stars. Folks on waiting lists should just start new tables (heck - folks should just start new habits when changes arrive, I am). But they don't want to. The rathole timer will 99.9% NOT change to 12 hours. On the other thread - I suggested 90 m to 2 hours. I don't think they will implement that change.

PS, just cause Steve shows up - doesn't mean its time to reair all the suggestions that were on the other threads. I'm getting ready to up my grindage level on both sites, and I'm going to have to deal with the split player base in my own way (i.e. - have to improve enough to beat regs if I want to play 100bb poker). Why I don't care about short stacks - they have been removed. Heck, if need be, I'll play a couple 50bb tables. But not if there are more than 40% short stacks.

Where is this very basic rule? Did they leave it out of the T&C's? I don't see it (no insult intended).

Most casinos it's an hour or two at the most. If someone has a problem with two hours then they are just being ridiculous.

RROP says one hour. It's good enough for RROP and it's good enough for Pokerstars, and I have no major problem with it, even though I think the rule against ratholing should be abolished.

I am in the extreme minority and have a quite radical viewpoint on ratholing, which is, you should be able to go south at will at all times in live games and online without even having to get up. But I know that will never fly so I don't talk about that very much, and I will not engage anyone who wants to argue it with me. Now to my point: There have been many times where I am at a game and it goes like this (1/2 no limit 9-handed home game):
--buy-in for $100. LOSE.
--buy-in for $100. LOSE.
--buy-in for $200. LOSE.
--buy-in for $200. LOSE.
--buy-in for $200. Grind it to $350, get in a big pot toward the end of the night with someone who has me covered who got their stack from other players and I double up through him to $700 and then I say one more round and I'm out. So even though I am DOWN $100 for the night I STILL give notice...and guess what happens...the guy I just doubled through just feels the sting of $350 less dollars than he thought he was going to go home with and he invariably gives me a dirty look, if not a comment.

It's so whatever. You just can't win. You give a 3-orbit or an hour notice, and you sure enough will win a big pot right before and then you will catch grief on the way out the door, and then nobody ever sticks up for you and says "he gave notice an hour ago." Sigh. That's why I'm a radical on ratholing. Plus no one has ever given me a good reason why there should be a rule against it, unless you count "don't piss off the donkeys" as a good rule, which it very well might be!

Shortstacking and ratholing is like if I was a heads-up player, and as part of my overall strategy I'm going to quit on the button immediately every time someone sits down, and just play the button twice for every one big blind for my entire career.

It's not against the rules. You'd totally be making the best decision in terms of your per-hand winrate. But it's completely unfair and it's unsportsmanlike and it's bad for the game and it's abusive. You're abusing a flaw in the game, that's all there is to it. The flaw is the positional disparity coupled with the fact that people are allowed to quit whenever they want.

Ethically, I don't see any distinction between that and shortstacking/ratholing. You're taking a flaw in the system completely outside of the card game itself and using that flaw as the entire basis of your career.

I think the comparison to button thieving heads-up is an original argument, maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah, I get that. I was just saying, regardless how you feel about it, it would be huge in terms of impacting some pro SS'ers. Makes sense, of course, that's why people want the change. I'm not sure Stars would want to have that impact on those players...

I guarantee you haven't thought this through the whole way.

There would have to be a sequential order to when people decided on their stack size, otherwise nobody would ever agree on what the stack sizes were going to be at the start of a hand (as an example, I want x as long as player a has x+y, but if I'm going to have x, then player a wants x+z, which of course would mean I want x+w and it goes on and on and can involve multiple parties and it'd just be a mess)

Without a sequential order (clockwise from button, whatever) you'd never get a hand dealt live because there would be arguments and stalemates all over the place. So you can forget about going south "at will at all times"

And I hope you're not thinking of trying to dictate an exact moment in time at the start of a hand where changing stack size is no longer allowed, because that'd obviously be impossible to enforce at a live table. And online it'd be basically mandatory to short your stack to the minimum every single time you're in the blinds so if you're going to keep up with that like all the best players would it'd add a ton to your workload so you can forget about ever playing more than 8 tables

And I hope you don't mean to say people can go south in the middle of a hand, because going south after someone goes all-in so I can call them off with 1 big blind would obviously eliminate all bluffing and ruin the game

So already I've established that it can't possibly be an "at will at all times" affair.

There would have to be a sequential order, and since it's sequential it gives an advantage to whoever picks last. Since whoever picks last gets an advantage, all people would have to be given equal opportunity to be the person who picked last, which means it has to happen at the start of every hand.

So, what's the correct decision for stack size for everyone who's choosing their stack size after the worst player at the table announced 87 big blinds? Far too often it's going to be 87 big blinds. Do you think that'd make that player feel good or bad?

That player might be a bad poker player, but I think he'd at best know that everyone thinks he's the player to win money from, and at worst he might think everyone was colluding against him.

Since it has to be a sequential decision at the start of every hand, and it's never a simple raise or fold and always involves picking a number in relation to other numbers, right there you've added a 5th round of action, and this 5th round of action would take about as much thought as a complicated river decision and would occur on every single hand. So you've increased the amount of time every hand takes by who knows how much.

Heads-up tables, huge advantage on the button, huge disadvantage in the big blind. Every single player reduces their stack size to the minimum on every big blind. Every player raises their stack size to the maximum on the button, but that doesn't matter because there's only 2 players in the game so the effective stack size is the minimum buy-in 100% of the time.

I hope your goal was to ruin poker, because then your idea was a great success.

That's one way to avoid looking like an idiot.

Party poker was for 2 years, every table without a any ratholing (rejoin) time, and in practice it was never a problem. You say it is a big problem, but in the game nobody ever complain about this.

The 24 hr timer suggestion is really the most extreme form of special pleading.

It's effectively saying to Stars - 'use the rathole timer for a purpose for which it was never intended - ban the decent shorties from playing more than once a day(as all decent shorties rathole) and let just the bad ones keep playing.'

It isn't the same table in anything other than name once the players rotate off it.
Even if some regs here pretend not to understand that I'm sure Stars do.

There is no reason whatsoever why a player shouldn't leave a table and be able to come back to it several hours later, when all the other players with whom he played at it have also left, and buy-in for whatever amount he wants.

The other players he took money from (if he did leave the table up on them of course) have all themselves left - why have any of the new players any right to complain?

And the suggestion would cost Stars money too if the high volume shorties played less

Lengthening the rathole timer may also have unintended consequences for the 50-100BB tables as the pro shorties will then be desperate to increase the overall number and/or turnover of 20-50BB tables and there are several ways for them to achieve this (all of which would tend to funnel yet more fish away from the 50-100BB ones).

In live Poker the player switch the table and can choose the stack every time new.
And in 2 hours live poker are less hands, and the player don´t switch so quickly like in online poker. Even if you find one casino with 2h, translated to online time is less the 1h.
So you have never leaved a table with a bigger stack then you joined in before,now I get why you are whining around.