Who cares? HU lobbies have been pure AIDS for many years. There are just too many bumhunters.

This may or may not be bad for the fun players, but it is for sure bad for bumhunters, and that's a good thing.

I think this is a good change for people like me.

If your a decent heads up player, I don't understand why the zoom pool is a bad thing. You'll get to play a variety of players and improve your game.

Or your just not that good and will get your ass handed to you by someone better.

Meh, I can see why they would want to stop regs bumhunting these tables but the only thing I used them for was playing mates HU for the banter. Lame

It has been KOTH with capped table limits for months. The pure bumhunters were already gone.

Seat scripting and having TAG regs 24 tabling 6/9max is also bad for the games. The next steps will probably make all formats zoom. Then increase rake enough that the best players have no edge. Then voilà Gg online poker as a product people could profit from. Just becomes another casinoesque product.

just sign a petition, cashout 10% and say that russian boycotters are idiots. it works (nope)

I think the players themselves have forced this issue, as a rec its sad to see a lobby with 25 guys waiting for action and 2 active tables both with 4-5 guys waitlisting. Which is what the bum hunters do now. The guys not good enough to hold a table with the KOTH system just waitlist the fish and hope the reg tilts or has to leave. I have often wondered why they cant have a limit of say 1 table with 1 player sitting and another only opens if the table fills. Obv guys will find a way to abuse the system, much like the hu regs do now. As a rec I mark all the bum hunters and don't give them action, all the guys that are douchey and don't play them. honestly only leaves me 3-4 guys in the 200nl pool to play against who happen to be the best players at the stake, and 200nl is the lowest they are sitting. Anything below 200nl is so full of guys ready to tool out if you don't follow their "rules" ie cant leave on your SB, must play at least 200 hands, can never leave when up etc.

I play not because im good but because I like hu. Too bad I never get to play anyone close to my own skill level

have u tried playmoney?

sadly I lose there too

why do u want to play with similar level player on real money?

I'm exaggerating a bit here are my hu stats at 200nl I have in my data base. so with RB (I have 75,000 stars coins) I'm only a slight loser.



I end up having to play people better then me as I said I wont give the douchy guys action, (in my experience these are the weaker players) I work a lot and have kids so cant play mtts.

Now you won't have a choice of who you play and don't play GJ.

It seems that after rake the regs overall you are playing aren't winning against you except for a tiny bit of RB. What douche bags all the other guys are for trying to actually make a living at the game.

true, except for 100nl, where the rake is 7,5-8,5bb/100 (depends on the opponents), and 6max is (i think) around 3,5bb/100, correct me if im wrong

Pokerstars doesn't owe anyone a living, nor do they have an obligation to give people '30 days notice' so they can adapt to a different game. Do you actually have any clue how the real world works?

If you don't like it, there are always other sites to play on with heads up tables.

Absolutely, can't wait for all the haters and stupid shortsighted people come into this forum, after Stars took their beloved 6max cashgames and turned all regular MTT's into 3x Turbo Spin & Go Hybrids.

lets pretend that u got an equal opponent on nl50 hu table. are u okay with losing > 15bb/100 (in rake to pokerstars)?

correct I simply wont play now as I played because I liked the game and competition. I have a few guys I battle for days, and enjoyed it.

Naw im talking about how they berate players in general there was a ton of that at 100nl its not as bad at 200nl, the waitlisting is exactly the predatory thing stars is talking about, although a better way to deal with that would be simply to eliminate waitlists.

Knowing that no. As a rec I prob don't notice, but I don't feel like im getting run over, not sure if you have played hu with an end boss of sorts, and they exist at all levels not just 10k.

I paid 7.2bb/100 at 100NL 6max over a big sample.

who the hell is berating recreational players? havent seen any reg doing it years...

Anyway, if you're b/e post rb playing top nl200 players, you are not only not a rec, but you might be easily top 300-400 hu players on the planet

wow, srsly? that seems insanely high, I always thought 6max rake is way lower (havent played 6max since 2010, though)

Rake is signifixantly higher. Even an ubernit will never managed to come <4 at 100nl. I'm pretty tight and have around 4.5, avg will definitely be over 5

6bb/100 rake, z100 SH here.

+1 to all of this

The way I see this working is that for all stakes 400+, most of the time there will be no action with one of the top regs sitting (note, if a top 5k reg finds 400 worth playing then they could be controlling that lobby). Maybe for the first few months there will be some action between medium to top regs, where people will think they have an edge on each other. After all, there is a common cognitive bias of thinking you are relatively better at performing than you actually are. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect. Eventually this action will die out and mostly nobody will play unless there is one or more recreational player(s) in the pool.

Then, when a recreational player starts playing, there will be value added to the pool and people other than the single best reg will join. "Zoom bumhunting" will probably prove to not be sustainable for most tier-2 regs. There will just be too many hands you have to play against people that are better than you for every hand you play against someone who is significantly worse than you.

Then the pools will basically be left with the best 3-5 regs playing with 1 or more recreational players. Assuming that the win rates of these best regulars are close to 0 when playing against each other, there will only be incentive for them to play when a rec player joins. The thing is, I just don't think this system benefits any professionals... not even the very best players.

Say you had 3 players, A, B, and C are regs, D is a rec player, and the table cap is 1 for simplicity

Player A beats all regs for $1/hand and the rec player for $5/hand
Player B breaks even vs all regs ($0/hand) and beats the rec player for $4/hand
Player C loses to all regs for -$1/hand and beats the rec player for $3/hand
Player D loses to all players for an average of -$4/hand

Player A is doing the best in this situation. During hand 1 he makes $1 in expectation, hand 2 he makes $3, and hand 3 he makes $1 for a total of $5 in profit.

Player C still has an incentive to play, because for hand 1 and 2 he loses $1, but for hand 3 he makes $3 off the recreational player, for a total of $1 in profit.

Even though Player A is doing the best out of the 3 players, as more players join the pool, the number of hands he plays with a maximized win rate decreases until most of the hands he's playing are against other good regs, who by the way are incentivized more than ever to get better.

It seems like it will be a sort of race to the bottom where professionals are forced to battle over small edges until they decide its not worth it any more and quit. Because you're not a robot, you can't get by paying for your personal finances if edges get too small. However, there is a huge incentive to make the other players quit first, so that you're the only player left, to the point that you could actually chose to keep playing even if the edges are too small just because you think the other person will have to quit first (maybe because of their personal finances or because they think there will be a better career option).

Altogether, this, along with the eventual removal of HU tables on Stars is where I see things going. It doesn't seem to be good for anyone except maybe rec players who strongly prefer to play HU in a zoom setting.

For a table that is 36bb/100.
For a table that is 0.36bb per hand.

For a pool of 200 players/entries, that's about 50k hands per hour. (250h per hour per entry)
For a 24-hour period that is 1.2 million hands.
For a 24 hour period that is $432,000 in rake.

As with all services, greed is the first step towards evolution.

Yeah but the gotta give like 30% of that back in RB so actually it's very little money that they're making.