Overview
Thanks for your patience in waiting for this writeup. It didn't take 3 weeks to write, of course, there are simply many other things to be done as well.

This post will communicate the current PokerStars position on the topics discussed at the meetings. Some or all of the attending players will disagree with some of the views presented here. I am not claiming to represent the views of the players who attended or anyone else.

I have similarly asked players to communicate their own views, not what they think our views are.

Special thanks to the players who took their time to participate. We will benefit greatly from the experience and hope they feel the same.


Purpose of the meetings
During this session we went around the table to give each person a chance to speak. Each person introduced themselves and shared a few bits about his history with poker.

The top goal for PokerStars was for players to get what they want out of the meetings. We also wanted to get input from players on a wide variety of topics in order to help improve our plans going forward. We also wanted to continue to grow the list of respected community leaders who have visited us and gained a better perspective of how we operate, including learning:
-Why we might not always do exactly what the majority on the forums want
-That we do read the forums and understand and consider the feedback given
-Why it might take longer than players would like to make changes
-That we do care about players and run our room with a customer focus
-How much effort and consideration is put into each change, including on the smallest details
-That poker room operations is actually quite a small part of the quite substantial effort required to build and maintain the world's largest poker room


Sit & Go
There are some software improvements that are often requested by regulars that haven't made it to the top of the overall development priority list yet, but we do hope to complete them eventually. These include an "I'm Ready" button for tournament start and breaks and the ability run synchronized breaks every 2 hours which we would trial for 18s and 27s.

Where has our development time gone instead? We've completed development on a new promotion for Sit & Go tournaments that we expect will be very appealing to recreational players. This promotion is very visually integrated into the client. We showed the promotion to the player representatives. Everyone will be seeing it next month as a part of the 100bn hands celebration.

We've also completed other development earlier this year that allows us to include tournaments in our happy hours during our promotions for specific game types, for example Omaha week.

The lobby for each individual tournament has been redesigned for PokerStars 7. We're really excited about this change; we've put a lot of time and effort into getting the details right for this improvement.

Finally, Easy Seat for Sit & Go has been on our test site for several months but isn't yet releaseable due to bugs. This feature will automatically register players for tournaments, similar to how Easy Seat for Ring Games automatically seats players at tables. We hope to see this feature complete soon.

Sit & Go players have been asking to be able to buy Sit & Go tickets in the VIP store with their FPPs.

Right now we have different situations for each of Ring, Sit & Go, Scheduled tournaments, and satellites. We don't have any available mechanism to sell ring game buy-ins for FPPs. We have the ability to offer cash Sit & Go tickets in the store for FPPs but we don't. We offer tickets in the store for scheduled tournaments, but only for our premier tournaments with largest prize pools. Satellites are the easiest way to use FPPs directly for play, as there's quite a wide selection.

Overall, the standard is to not allow FPPs to be redeemed directly for buy-ins. The exceptions for satellites and tickets to major tournaments are there to help build large prize pools for our tournaments. This reason doesn't exist for Sit & Go tournaments.

All players do have the option to redeem their FPPs for cash bonuses and then spend the money on buy-ins to the games of their choosing. The cash bonuses follow the VIP Club philosophy of providing better value for redemption for higher statuses.

One option going forward might be to develop the ability to allow FPPs to be used more widely to buy-in to tournaments as an alternative to cash without even needing to buy a ticket. We would want to be able to charge different FPP amounts for each status for the same tournament. We will consider this for future development though we haven't yet firmly concluded that this is something we would want to implement. A bit more thought is needed.

In the last player meetings we did agree to add more exit points to the step system and eliminate the step downs. We did so, and may in the future add more ways to use tickets won through the steps system. Steps tickets purchased in the VIP store may start to only work on the actual steps themsleves, though any tickets won in tournaments entered with VIP store tickets would be free to be used in other tournaments.


HUSNG
The experience of the recreational HUSNG player is nearly perfect. They come to the lobby and have a choice of a couple of opponents. They register and instantly have a game. After the game they are almost always offered a rematch. They can choose to accept, or alternatively can decline and go play one of the other people sitting in the lobby waiting to play them.

The only problem is that above the lowest stakes, recreational players don't tend to end up playing other recreational players. Regulars, often professionals, tend to always be seated in the registering tournaments. It would be good for recreational players to play each other sometimes to have a better chance of winning in those matches.

One way to facilitate this would be to implement a random matchmaking system at stakes for which we have sufficient liquidity. We could wait for 4 players to register, then pair opponents randomly. Before considering this seriously we need to determine if recreational players would be turned off by not being able to select their opponent.

We discussed HUSNG issues more deeply than this, but as none of the attending players played HUSNG regularly, it didn't see appropriate to draw conclusions. Chadders0 has accepted our invitation to come to the Isle of Man once he is well enough to travel. He'll be visiting us on July 2nd and 3rd. I'll post an update on HUSNG issues affecting regulars after speaking with him.


PLO Rake
While players use bb/100 to measure impact of rake on their winnings, bb/100 is not the correct way to compare rake between games. I've discussed this previously at length, so I will not belabor the point.

Our Supernovas do at least as well after rewards at PLO as they do at other games. Plenty of players are winning, and Supernova+ VIPs on average are doing just fine However, due to rake adding up to more bb/100, rewards are a bigger component of winning PLO players' earnings in bb/100. This means that players with low VIP statuses are having a harder time in PLO because VIP status has a bigger impact on results.

We'd like to do something to help players with lower VIP statuses have a better shot at winning in PLO games. We aren't confident that a simple rake reduction would have the desired mid-term or long-term result. We have a different solution in mind, but it would be a bigger change for players. We want to invite several PLO representatives for a shorter PLO focused session of meetings to discuss further. If these additional PLO players agree, we can work together to come up with the specifics of how to move forward. We hope to have the PLO players join us in late June for this discussion.

This situation also exists at other games such as FLHE and hyper-turbo SNG. If we come up with a good agreed course of action for PLO, similar changes for those other game types could follow.



Player Communications
We do not want to completely change our player meetings format to have only dedicated meetings for each game type. However, we will try inviting players for a few such additional meetings this year to see how they go.

We will discuss with the mods in various forums how to better make players aware of the meetings and the voting process. We did pay to advertise the threads in the forum notices section this time, but it didn't draw as much attention to the voting process as we had hoped.

We'll also talk to mods in some of the ring game specific forums about having PokerStars specific feedback threads there like we have in a few of the SNG forums.

We're going to add presence on some forums where English is not the primary language. We will try both posting in English and letting players translate and also helping bilingual staff from other deparments post in the native language. We'll find out if it's worth adding the extra layer between players and poker room management to get the words in the right language.

We'll also work to better communicate to players about software updates. This is something we're trying to do in part through our Supernova monthly newsletters. We will do more and see if we can improve the rate of supernovas who are receiving those monthly newsletters.

*

Edit/MH:

Original Discussion Thread.

Shane Stewart's Trip Report.

Trip Report by Gags30

Trip Report by Mexican_Natis

To be continued with additional reports from meetings on days 2 and 3...

Frist ! Still waiting for ratholing solution.

Here was the agenda...

April 24th
9:30 Welcome and NDA signing
9:45 Office tour
10:15 Introductions
10:45 Purpose of Meetings: Discussion
11:15 Sit and Go Tournaments (not satellites or HU)
12:00 Lunch and informal discussion
12:30 HU SNG
1:30 PLO rake session 1
3:30 Break
3:45 Player Communications
5:00 Players present top suggestions; PokerStars responds
6:15 Players return to hotel
7:00 Dinner and informal discussions

April 25th
9:15 Ring Game Ratholing
10:45 Discussion/Review of PokerStars 7 Client
12:00 Lunch
12:45 Software: Upcoming planned improvements
2:00 Ring Game Seating Issues
3:30 Break
3:45 Ring Games Promotions: Discussions and Suggestions
5:00 Players present top suggestions; PokerStars responds
6:15 Players return to hotel
7:00 Dinner and informal discussions

April 26th
9:15 Sit and Go Promotions: Discussion and Suggestions
10:45 PLO Rake session 2
11:45 Lunch and players’ group time
2:00 New Jersey discussions
3:00 Break
3:15 Scheduled MTT and Satellites: Discussion and Suggestions
4:45 Players present top suggestions; PokerStars responds
6:15 Players return to hotel

Why do the reps at Pokerstars always make ridiculous statements like this? You don't think reducing the rake would solve the problem of too much rake being taken for normal players to be able to win? Anyone with half a brain can see what utter nonsense this is you're spewing. I understand you're paid to sugarcoat these things and put the best spin on them possible but really now... this is twoplustwo and we are generally not idiots, this is just getting insulting! Just say "we are not willing to lower the PLO rake because we want as much of your money as we can get" FFS. At least you'd be honest finally.

great!

haha, im pretty sure it will.


Less rake = more profit for players.
















oh wait pokerstars only wants profit for it self

Any timeline we can expect to see more of pokerstars 7? (except couple of pictures that can be found googing).

PROFIT = bb/100(winnings) + bb/100 (rake back) - bb/100(rake paid).

You have never made a post that disagrees with this mathematically correct equation.

Further explained: At micro stakes and small stakes the bb/100 in rake paid gets so large that even the players with the highest bb/100 in win rate and supernova+ status can acquire the bb/100 in revenue to make up for the bb/100 in rake. This occurs because rake caps are not consistently adjusted stake by stake.

Any time multiple levels of stakes have the same rake cap, the lower stakes within that group are being charged more.

Also, please qualify this statement to MSPLO+ and clarify that Supernova players at micro and SSPLO DO NOT have the same PROFITS (winnings + rake back - rake paid) as NLHE players at the same stakes.

Please qualify this to MSPLO+ and verify this is not true for Micro and Small stakes PLO. Also please recognize there are far fewer Supernova+ players at these levels compared to MSPLO+.

Again, please qualify this to MSPLO+ and verify this is not true for Micro and Small stakes PLO.

Now that you have read this and been provided the correct equation to calculate player profits do you have more confidence and understand that there is no question having properly adjusted rake caps stake by stake would solve this issue? My goal I hope PS and other players share with me isn't to try and get PS to be more generous and hand more of their profits back to players, it is to help develop a sustainable and growing PLO/poker economy that will make BOTH PS and the players far more money.

PLEASE +1 if you would like PS Steve to know you also would like his response to this

Do the supernovas do as well in LHE as all the other games too?

120 pages of notes, 2 weeks of delays and the best you can come up with is: "We don't think lowering the rake would result in more money going to players..."

Perhaps the sites are turning over a new stone. Instead of being anti-winner, they've decided to become anti-reality!

So the rake is fine because bb/100 is not the correct way to compare rake and supernovas are doing fine? Am I reading this right?

And don't even get me started on the statement "plenty of players are winning".

I truly hope this post is not what you are referring to when you say you have "discussed this previously at length".

Surely the fact that "players with low VIP statuses are having a harder time in PLO because VIP status has a bigger impact on results (compared to NLHE)" implies that there is indeed a problem.

Higher rake = higher rakeback required. That's basically what this means.

I do note that you were careful to avoid saying the rake is actually comparable to NLHE, merely that bb/100 is not the correct way to determine whether or not this is the case.

So I will give you an older quote from that thread:

I have to ask, when you say that "We aren't confident that a simple rake reduction would have the desired mid-term or long-term result", are you referring to your company's balance sheets or the best thing for poker in general? If the latter, please elaborate.

It is obvious to all and sundry that the rake is too high and unsustainable. It needs to be reduced before we are lamenting the loss of PLO, regarded by many as one of the more enjoyable poker variants.

Finally I would like to address your proposed solution. While it hasn't been properly fleshed out yet, it would appear from your post that rather than lower the rake or change the structure to something more appropriate to PLO, you are considering providing ChromeStar-PlatinumStar players some form of extra bonuses when they play PLO. Presumably this would be to bring them closer in line with the Supernova+ players that are (the only ones capable of) doing "just fine".

Notwithstanding the fact that if Supernova+ is the level of VIP status that enables players to be competitive/marginally profitable then there is something very wrong with the level of rake, I can see some problems coming up when it comes to deciding on the implementation of this.

You will either bring everyone to, or close to, the level of Supernova in terms of equivalent rakeback, thus diminishing the point of attempting this VIP status as a PLO regular in the first place and alienating those who already have. Or you will increase everyone's bonuses without bringing them to, or close to, the level of Supernova in terms of equivalent rakeback, not really providing a solution to the problem.

Neither of these scenarios are very appealing to me. If you recognise that there is an issue here, as it seems you have without explicitly stating it, surely the reduction of rake/rake caps/changes to PLO rake structure should be the first solutions to look into. Perhaps you have something a little more revolutionary in mind. Fingers crossed.

Regarding PLO rake, what I dont understand is why winning players ratio is even considered in this issue. Look at this from different angle. NLHE player plays the same game like PLO player, only card number is different. Costs from Pokerstars perspective are the same. So why PLO players pay twice as much as NLHE players for the same! This just does not make any sense, and is unfair.

No I will try to add arguments with the assumption that we should take players winrates into account after all.
1)Do you understand that even if winrates can be the same as in NLHE, PLO player wont be able to play near as many tables as NLHE player? This affects winrates per hour
2)Did you consider that variance in PLO is much bigger, and with addition to much bigger rake, many even good players trying PLO just have to give up due to bad luck on the beginning of their PLO career?
3)What is more, knowledge on PLO is growing on websites, situation will be even worse, only the best players will be able to win at small/micro stakes, then you will try to do some changes, but it will be to late, PLO will die.

But Pokerstars, you already know everything I have just written, dont you?

Now, can you, our player representatives write your own day 1 TR?

+1

cliffs: Suppose stars opens a new VIP system for PLO only, where VPP requirements are only 1/5 of what they are in the normal VIP system. So you could be a PLO supernova by accumulating only 20K VPP's per year, and the rakeback you get from the PLO VIP system only applied when you play PLO. I don't think this solution is perfect, but I would be very content with it. IMO this is the kind of system Steve is suggesting, and anyone who'd be happy with this system should be content with Steve's report on PLO rake. Do joeri or any of the other PLO players who understand rake and poker money flow have opinions about this solution?



Ok, now for my actual reply:

First of all, I think the hostile style ITT is reflecting poorly on the 2p2 community. There's a thin line between debating aggressively, and between being downright inflammatory. I think some people ITT have crossed that line, and that perhaps the community should moderate itself more tightly to keep a civil standard for discussion. And I hate that I spend half my time in this kind of threads thinking about how to deal with the poor standards of discussion rather than dealing with the important issue at hand. I suspect other members of the community feel the same.

Ok, now for Steve's report. I'll stick to talking about the PLO rake situation.

I don't think this is an outlandish point of view. bb/100 is in my opinion the best metric today, but it's not perfect, and I'd be perfectly happy talking about other reasonable metrics. Here are two of them:
1. post-rakeback hourly winrate (for a specific stake) for a "standardized reg" who is, say, 10-tabling NLH vs 6-tabling PLO.
2. post-rakeback mounthly winrate of the reg population.
These metrics have their own significant problems, but at the current state of discussion, I think they are reasonable as well.

In the next paragraph Steve seems to implicitly be using metric #2 above. Which is fine by me, at least for now. (Its main downside of this metric that it doesn't allow to easily extrapolate what would happen to winrates when the nature of the game changes, when either more players become regs, or regs become better, or more recs join, etc etc, but let's ignore these issues for now)

I haven't seen data about this, but I'm willing to believe it. The PLO rake thread indicates that at PLO100, almost no one is an actual winner pre-rakeback. But seeing as rake is so high, with a global 35%-40% rakeback there might be a good number of post-rakeback winners. I'll need access to gui166's data and doing some data crunching (or he can just do it for us) but for now let's assume that this statement is true. This is what the PLO community was claiming among itself anyway: that due to rake, players shouldn't play PLO unless they are SN+.

Fine. There is a moral point to be made about unbeatable games that are only beatable with rakeback. Poker players tend to think there's something immoral about this kind of games, and it could be argued that any poker game should be kept at a level which is winnable pre-rakeback, or otherwise abolished. But let's suppose for now that we're happy with thinking of post-rakeback winrate as the only relevant winrate.

A lot of people ITT had big problems with this statement, and I think this points to their lack of economic understanding. This is a perfectly reasonable statement. It could be false of course, but it's not patently false as people seem to imply.

Let's suppose for a minute that recs don't care about rake at all (this is not far-fetched, since their losses usually significantly outweigh the rake they're paying). Let's assume that stars is willing to dedicate a certain chunk of money from its bottom line and distribute it back to the player pool. A rake reduction would distribute this money to both recs and regs, while a rakeback improvement would distribute it mostly to regs who care about these things. Viewing things like this, it's obvious the rakeback improvement route could be the better solution for both stars and the community, assuming that recs indeed don't care about rake, and that the amount of money stars will give back to the community is limited. This is simple market segmentation, and it makes plenty of economic sense.

So, I would be entirely fine with improving the rakeback situation rather than decreasing rake per-se. Essentially, it means taking the high rake stars gets from the PLO tables, and giving more of it back to PLO regs than stars is doing now. Some people might think that's unfair (just as some people think that any market segmentation is unfair), but I'm pretty much fine with it.

For example, suppose that stars opens a new VIP system for PLO only, where VPP requiremens are only 1/5 of what they are in the normal VIP system. So you could be a PLO supernova by accumulating only 20K VPP's per year, and the rakeback you get from the PLO VIP system only applied when you play PLO. I don't think this solution is perfect, but I would be very content with it.

Personally, I think things will never change at least in a substantial way. PS will never give up a part of their profit so the players can win more.
And I believe these meeting are purely a show they put once in a while to calm us down and we feel that something is being done and eventually something will chance in our favour.

It's time players unite and we actively change ours and poker games future. Time to build our own site and world organization (or federation, whatever you like) and do things on our own. Currently this beautiful game is being shamelessly disfigured because of the rake. It's completely obscene that players pay hundreds, thousand and even hundreds of thousand dollars per year to play a card game on the internet. But, we the players, are to be fault because we do nothing. Poker players are lazy.

Is there interest to start something going on? We need smart people like software programmers, layers and marketing people. We also need support from well known professionals.

YES WE CAN or NO WE CAN'T...

we can chose our destiny.

let's keep in mind amidst all this negative that they do want to meet the plo players again...we can send well-informed reps over to discuss these matters, get our points across face to face, research some data and what not. as an eternal optimist, i see this as a good thing.

i would be really happy if eldodo and hoopman20 would attend the plo meeting with stars, alongside some midstakes+ regs (blopp, joeri, antchev to name a few).

rome wasn't built in one day, so patience is required in these matters. but let's not have the same destiny with plo as rome did.

+1

I didn't expect much of this meeting but what we got regarding PLO is even less than that.

At the previous meetings it was like "There are enough players winning at PLO after rakeback, no reason to lower the rake." Now it became "There are enough players with Supernova+ statuses winning after rakeback.". Next step is "There are enough SNEs playing PLO winning after rakeback." and then we'll get the final "OK, we got nothing left, we just don't care about PLO and prefer it dies.", which we all can see judging by your actions or the lack of it.

Of course Supernova+ players will do well, you have to play hundreds of thousands of hands to get to that status and if you're not a big winner in the games (not decent, you have to be HUGE to overcome the rake and the volatility) you'll be long broke before that. Steve, here's a question for you. What percentage of the people who play PLO have Supernova+ status? And I think you directly admit that after looking at the data people at micro and small stakes have small to zero chance to be winners. That's a nice line to advertise to the, I guess, 90%+ of the people playing PLO who are not Supernova+.

I'll be travelling the whole summer and I won't be available in late June. But either way, I reached to the point where I don't want any part in this charade. I mean, Steve is playing a decent amount of PLO, he has got the opinions of the most prolific PLO players in the world today from this forum, there were already several discussions at several meetings about it, how much more insight can they get from another meeting? Games are dying at a significant pace and we need actions, not another meeting to show that "they care".

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the report. I really appreciate that you guys make time to speak about PLO specifically, especially because you seem rather busy (working saturdays already ). I also really appreciate that you kind of agree that the current PLO situation has to be looked at and this:
We'd like to do something to help players with lower VIP statuses have a better shot at winning in PLO games. We aren't confident that a simple rake reduction would have the desired mid-term or long-term result.
Shows that you are dedicated to take actions where it it needed most.
I also really like that you want to set the time for the meeting in "the end of june" already, because it shows you recognise that there is a bit of a hurry with the current situation. I hope the future actions on this topic will be equally swiftly.

People offcourse hoped for immediate actions and react hostile and dissapointed here. I too disagree for large parts of your post. Especially the part Hoopman highlighted. bb/100 is not a perfect measurement, but its the best "easy one" we have right now. You can offcourse prefer a different measure, but i think that the least you should do, is qualify the measure Pokerstars uses. Now you kind of burn the bb/100 without proposing a better one.

So in general i think your post opens the door a little. I think the least we can do is to look forward to the possible changes is the near future.

Ratholing
The reasons we have committed to addressing ratholing are already posted in great detail in public. Our focus is on determining what exactly to do, then executing.

We want to find a preventative solution rather than a punative solution. Punishing players creates a negative experience for customers who may not know the rules. It also takes substantial resources. Cases of rules violations are rarely so clear as to be handled quickly. Players violating rules may not feel that they are doing so even if data shows that they are. Players may also feel that other specific players are violating rules based on a small number of incidents when the data shows no such long-term trend, resulting in player frustration that rules are seemingly not being enforced.

We are OK with some limited amount of ratholing type behavior and specifically want to protect it. Sometimes players find themselves in uncomfortable positions where a tough aggressive player has position with deep effective stacks. This happens both for 100bb and 40bb players. Additionally, players with small account balances may win a pot and want to split their funds up across multiple tables.

We also want to protect the ability of players to play sessions across many tables, buying in for the minimum on each. As long as they are not ratholing, this is not a problem.

This leaves us with the challenge of defining very precisely the behavior we want to end in such a way that the behavior we want to allow is not included. We need to create both a verbal definition that is easily understood by poker players and a corresponding technical definition that can be coded into our software.

We would want to do so in a sufficiently simple way, as with all of our improvements. Simplicity benefits not only development time and communication, but also simpler solutions tend to be more robust in the long run. Complexity opens up additional possibility that unanticipated behavior patterns might help players get around the spirit of the intended change.

We have not succeeded in finding such a definition that both met our normal standards of simplicity and would properly isolate the problematic behavior. At some point earlier this year, we resigned ourselves to considering more complex solutions.

Thanks to a post by 2+2er 'mme', we worked out a very precise definition. We provided an 18-page document to all player representatives that outlined the solution. This business requirements document (BRD) is what we provide to the development team when we request a new feature. We had been through many rounds of review and edit on the BRD already.

The basic premise of the solution is that we track players' stack sizes when they leave tables and then enforce appropriate minimum buy-ins when they re-join other tables. Joining a table creates a 'stack identity' for that table type. For example, if I were to sit at a 40-100bb table with 40bb, then leave the table with 67bb, I would now have 40-100bb stack #1 set at 67bb.

Each player would have a maximum number of stacks at each table type, with table type defined by buy-in range. The maximum number of stacks would be equal to a player's table cap (for regular tables) and table cap divided by 3 (Zoom). This way a player could start a full maximum tables session with minimum buy-ins, but if they left any table with more than minimum buy-in, they would then need to re-use the same stack identity when buying into another table of the same type.

For example, if I buy in to 24 40-100bb tables with 40bb each, double up on one to 80bb and leave, I would then have to buy in for at least 80bb if I then tried to join another 40-100bb table. Let's say I do this. Then if I lose 20bb and leave with 60bb, the next table I would join I could buy in for 60bb. This all assumes that I have stayed on the other 23 tables the whole time; if I had left those tables, I would be given the option to buy in for the smallest number of bb available on one of my stack identities.

Zoom would be considered a separate table type as it is 50-100bb, but PLO and NLHE 40-100bb tables would use the same stack identities.

We have accounted for angleshooting as best as we can predict. For example, if you buy into a table with significantly lower stakes than the one at which you created your stack identity, you are still bound by the minimum number of big blinds at buy-in but you cannot reduce, only increase, the size of the stack identity when leaving the tables. This prevents players from doubling up at high stakes and then reducing their minimum buy-in back to 40bb by losing money at much lower stakes.

The identities expire after a set period of time that is configurable. Configuring this period of time is challenging. The longer it is the more effective we are at preventing undesired behavior, but the more likely we are to be prohibiting behavior that we want to allow.

Our current thought is that the identities would need to set to expire after 18 to 20 hours. In this way a player could buy in at 24 tables for 40bb, play a full session and build big stacks on them, and then return the next day to do the same. 18 to 20 hours seems more reasonable than 24 as players can't be expected to start their session at the same exact time each day.

The downside of this configuration is that it does allow more ratholing than we might like from those who choose to take full advantage within the system. A player with a 24 table cap who likes to play only 6 tables at a time and is willing to play both Zoom and regular tables could get quite a few ratholes in per day before hitting their identity cap for both table types.

There are different opinions as to whether a 6 tabler ratholing 3 times is doing anything functionally different than a 24-tabler who joins all tables simultaneously and then leaves each table after doubling up. The net impact on the rest of the playing pool is the same, but the timing of each action seems more like ratholing. In any case, this behavior would be allowed under the system.

There is also a concern with players who have increased table caps being able to execute ratholes quite effectively. We can't a smaller number of stack identities than the player's number of max tables. If a player had 16 identities and a table cap of 24, what would their buy-in options be when sitting down at the 17th table?

Players have suggested that proactively lowering table caps for players who are not making use of their maximum number of tables concurrently would be one option. Some would suggest we should do this not just for players with caps above 24, but also for those with caps of 24 who are only playing 12. I am skeptical that this could be implemented without creating more problems than it solves. Players change behavior from time to time; a player who has been 8 tabling for years without causing any trouble may not be pleased to find that they are not able to try to jump up to 16 tables if the decide they'd like to. We have a lot of customers; reviewing such cases manually is not a desirable solution.

We don't think that multi-accounting to get around the restrictions is likely to be a big problem as VIP rewards are an important income source for mass multitabling ratholers.

It's hard to describe an 18 page solution in a forum post, but the above should give you a good idea of how it works and its identified weak spots.

We are currently doing significant technical investigation to identify what % of ratholing occurrences this would prevent if implemented today, based on a loose definition of ratholing. As long as the % is meaningful and no better solution presents itself, we will move forward.

We had hoped to implement this solution in the first half of the year as I have stated multiple times and we have been planning to do so, but it is clear at this point that we are not going to hit the deadline. We are doing everything we can to get the solution ready to go over the summer. It's extremely disappointing to me that we are missing our goal here, as I know it is disappointing to many of you.

Rather than go through another elections process, we decided to take suggestions from the player representatives in attendance as to who would be best to attend the PLO specific meeting. At least in this way the community is indirectly selecting who will come.

Your name was one of the first mentioned. I hope you will join us.

Huge +1

I think exactly the same in so many ways.

I used to be a big grinder on PS, done SNE 4 times in a row and gave up at the start of the year. I simply went for better rakeback deal for lower time invested and it's working wonderful to say the least.

On PS to have the equivalent of some other networks at lower stakes, you have to play 18 tables 3 hours per day EVERYDAY of the year. If you have some kind of a life, you will often have to 18 tables 6-7 hours per day the days you play. This is a good way to be burnt out by it.

I'd give an arm, figuratively speaking, to have the numbers about "How many players dedicated to PLO before busting their roll or quitting because unprofitable before reaching the level of VIP required to be able to win some at PLO". I'd bet it's way higher than in NL.

Anyway, I too am tired of this charade. PLO is becoming more and more like LHE a few years ago, now look where it is. Try to find a 10/20LHE game anywhere. 3 years ago you could still 6 table 30/60+. It's a shame.

Epic..just epic... Want to say many bad words sdpkfq0-93jf01ie00vinv10-fn