Hi all -
It's the holiday edition of the Roundtable.
Q: Wait - Zoom tournaments?!?!?
A: Yes, indeed. They're in the new software release, so it's just a question of putting a final polish on. We hope they'll be out in the next week or so. Of course, these things occasionally slip, and job #1 is making sure they work properly, but we're getting
very close on these.
Q: Are you going to announce changes to the VIP club any time soon?
A: Already announced at the
Amsterdam VIP Club Live event. You can watch the awesome PokerStars Steve Day announce them on
this video. If you prefer your information in nice dry text form, you can get it
here.
Q: How are things in SNG land?
A:
- We've got $3.50 NLHE 9-max Hyper-Turbos now, if that's your bag.
- We just deployed $15 and $30 6-Max NLO-8 Hyper-Turbos
- And, we've started to roll out the auto-unregister functionality from HU SNGs. The first ones to get it are the NLO8 HU Turbos. If a player disconnects for more than 60 seconds while he's registered for one of these, he'll be unregistered as long as the tournament hasn't started yet. We'll deploy this feature across the whole HU SNG space in the near future.
Q: What's new in the cash game world?
A: Well, let's see...
- We've changed the stud game structures to make them a bit more consistent in terms of the size of the antes and bring-ins relative to the stakes. For the most part this involved making them larger where they were particularly small for a particular stake.
- Run It Twice is now on all NLHE and PLO at $.25/$.50 and above. We're also about to deploy it to all flop-based NL and PL games at $.25/$.50 and north.
- Run It Twice is in $.25/$.50 NLHE Zoom, and should in all pools by the end of this week or early next week (with the usual disclaimer that if Something Goes Wrong, there will be a short delay).
Q: And what about MTTs?
A: Biggest news is the Saturday Super-Knockout($154 + $154 + $20) is doing real well after just two weeks. It's on Saturdays (!) at 18:00 Western European Time (19:00 CET). They got 889 runners last week so there's a bunch of money in the pool and the cash structure means that if you knock out one player, you're freerolling after that.
And keep your eyes open for
TCOOP announcements soon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lee Jones
Correction: the fee for the Super Knockout is $12, not $20. Mea culpa.
Q: What's this about Open-Face Chinese Poker?
A: All the cool kids are playing it. There's a pretty good description of the rules in
this blog post. It's sufficiently popular that we're going to have a seminar about it and a tournament ($2K+$150 buy-in) at the
PCA.
Q: So will PokerStars be offering Open-Face Chinese Poker?
A: That's pretty unlikely, to tell the truth. But then again, I never thought we'd offer badugi.
Q: Say more about the PCA...
A: It's the tenth one (ninth at the Atlantis) and this should be the most epic of the bunch. If you've never been to the PCA, you owe it to yourself to come down and participate. The
tournament line-up is amazing, there are cash games of every sort, and it's just a glorious gathering of the poker community in a tropical paradise. What's not to love?
Q: I'm sold; how do I qualify?
A: There's a full satellite schedule
here. And even if you don't manage to qualify, I encourage you to come on down anyway. You can just walk in and play the cash games and tournaments (there are plenty of side events) and hang out with all your favorite poker players.
And finally, PokerStars Steve and I will be at the PCA, along with a number of folks from the poker management team. If you're there, please look us up and say hi. Meeting players face-to-face is the high point of the event for all of us.
Regards, Lee
Last edited by Mike Haven; 12-13-2012 at 10:03 AM.