https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ys-win-already

PokerStars says these gamblers -- semi-professional types who play hand after hand day and night -- became a problem after they grew too numerous and have taken advantage of the thousands of novice bettors who account for the lion’s share of all wagers made on the world’s largest poker website.

Sick of being dominated, the amateurs cut back on the hands they play. So for the owners of PokerStars -- Canadian company The Stars Group Inc., which ponied up $4.9 billion for the site in 2014 -- driving out the sharks is a crucial step in their effort to jumpstart growth in a business that has been sputtering.

OP: that makes things pretty clear to me.

Well, not all the sharks will go away that easily, but the most risk-averse of them will quit soon.

The VIP program change is only one of the measures. A lot of aspects of Spin & Go Max have been designed deliberately to deter as many risk-averse regs as possible.

tldr: We want more money instead of poker players making the money. Come give us money

Interesting choice by PokerStars to double down on the vilifying of pros. I became interested in poker in 2003 because I was inspired by the professionals I saw on TV. Daniel Negreanu was one of them. It's sad to see what he and the company he represents have become.

It seems awfully cynical to think that an effect strat is to jingle keys in the face of recs, give them slot machine games, and assure them that they have a shark-free safe space. Maybe I'm getting old and out of touch, but one of the biggest draws to this game was the dream of climbing the ladder and earning a seat next to DNegs or Tom Dwan, purely by using your intuition and outwitting the competition.

If you kill that dream, what's even the point of having sponsored pros? Nobody's going to look up to those people if this narrative succeeds in being pushed.

Pokerstars wont have any sponsored pro in 5 years

They are just waiting for the contracts expire

Maybe Dneg stays, but sponsoreds will be only rec-friendly people like that fat guy that streams on twitch and sports stars

srsly,

change "vilify of pros" to "vilify of online rakeback grinding pros" and the rest makes pretty good sense.

they dont seem to be doing anything to vilify live pros. in fact quite the opposite.

Yep they recently cut rake on live tournament above $10k. Stars deosn't have a problem with sharks, it has a problem with sharks that play with fish - ie. a winning $5k SNG pro playing a $200 buyin SNG.

Amaya Stars sucks....sounds like they were mad about giving away their rake back to SNE grinders and are blaming the downturn in the poker economy on said 24 tabling grinders, when rec.-pro ratios are only a sliver of the problem with modern online poker.

Lets not derail the thread. This has nothing to do with 'live pros'.

Your point that has nothing to do with the article or the points in this thread.

Stars/Amaya is going after the people who helped them become the industry leader. Hopefully we start to see their decline as they are terrible for the game of poker.

Also, great post srsly, I've stopped playing poker seriously for 7-8 years but once totally had the same type of dreams that stars is now ****ting on.

So... basically... they want poker without it actually being poker...

I haven't been an online pro since BlackFriday....
But as an observer it's quite sad to see the approach the new owners of PokerStars are taking.
Trying to compete with the Video Game world (I mean the most popular game is free for **** sake LoL) seems like a fools errand.

One of the greatest marketing and drawer of new depositors is the stories/allure of people being able to escape the working world and carve out their own path playing a game...and by killing these stories through increased rake at the low-stakes / micros you destroy a huge potential customer segment (one in which trying to lure video game nerds who can play far funner games for free won't make up for).

Obviously Degens will love these new game formats but they will play whatever you offer them anyways because well...they're degens.

I would love to see an argument where spending massive amounts towards marketing towards Gamers (I mean this segment doesn't even have $ for **** sake because they're spending their time grinding games and are much more likely to become the very thing the current owners despise i.e. analytical mass tabling grinders) and destroying the segment that has fueled the poker economy for years (the Dreamers) comes out ahead in the long run.

IMO, PStars is placing the blame on too many grinders when the most definite biggest driver of online poker decline is quite simply the abolishment/segragation of the countries with the most disposable incomes (USA, Italy, Spain, now AUS? ). If this isn't rectified, no marketing ploy can possibly revive the online poker economy to compete with the booming gaming economy.

This is actually quite incredible. Pokerstars openly saying they don't want winning players on their site. Also admitting the only reason why the rewards structure was changed last month is because grinders were making too much off rewards! Absolutely unbelievable. Now of course we all suspected this but here you have a CEO telling the world exactly that. Not very smart!
Furthermore, he says "The site is getting a good response from players to the new loyalty program" That is a flat out lie! Majority is complaining about it, even casual players hate it and are leaving the site.

Well, sad to see Pokerstars go in that direction but this is exactly what happens when businessmen, who don't know much about poker, take over a pokersite...

I got into the game because of the dream of being a professional player, online and live.

Great post Srsly.

This is a dumb post. It's not "rakeback grinding pros", like you derogatorily say, it's all online players/pros.
Also, before this new PCA announcement, PokerStars/Amaya had also ****ed up lots of its other live events in many ways. Killing the EPT, getting overlays and poorer attendance etc.
And obv any live pros outside of Stars events are obviously unaffected by this so that doesn't matter in this thread.
Yep.

In 2003 that was correct but in 2017 its purely about who has the best software.

Stars is making a business decision that keeping "Rec" players around the site longer is better for their bottom line. In the eyes of Stars, "Pro" players are siphoning off the "Rec" money too fast, money that would otherwise slosh back and forth between "Recs" and therefore generate more rake. It's probably a legitimate business strategy to "de-shark" the waters, so to speak, at least a little bit if possible. If some of the "Pro" players are butthurt over this, then its kind of LOL, because Stars isn't obligated nor are "Pros" entitled to be catered to over and above any other class of player.

Bottom Line: If you're trying to expand the herd of gazelles, you first must get rid of the lions waiting down at the watering hole.

Eh, not really.

Nature didn't "get rid" of the lions...they have their place...without them the gazelles would over-graze the grasslands to the point where the herd begins to die off in heaps due to starvation / disease. The Lions have their place.

To relate to poker economy, if you "get rid" of the pros...life (games / rake profit for Stars) is good for a little while but that allure of becoming a pro fades fast and you self-kill your own economy (incoming dreamers who are crucial to your economy as they are re-depositing slow bleeders).

I don't know why they don't just cut the max tables down to 3 or 4 and ban any kind of 3rd party software. That would solve the problem way better then all the measures to date. I doubt Pokerstars minds great players not matter how good they are. The real problem is that great player is able to play 10+ tables of 200nl and grind away profit like a machine against players of a much lower skill level with lower variance then playing 1 or 2 tables at their true skill level. They play like a machine because they can use software and also avoid boredom by playing so many tables versus just one.

Live games are so much softer then online because each great player can play just one table. If each 5/10+ nl player could play five 1/2nl games simultaneously live poker would suck pretty bad too.

Sure, most players and even fish dream about being winners, but those who pay attention to changes in the effective rake and rakeback schedule are on the whole pretty undesirable customer. It's only on smaller sites that they need people to fill the seats to satisfy the demands of the customers who are actually depositing money regularly, so they give out prop accounts or generous bonuses.

It's the same as it's always been.

Nature may not "get rid" of lions, but Park Rangers and Game Wardens do. PokerStars isn't an experiment in anarchy, it's a business run by executives charged with delivering a return to their investors, whether equity or debt holders. Think of the Stars executives as the Game Wardens and Park Rangers in your example. If they think culling the predators is good for overall business, then so be it.

Also, I think you vastly overestimate "that allure of becoming a pro" to the average Rec player. I would say most Rec players have no intention of "turning pro" especially the basement dwelling solitary life of an online pro.

Exactly.

The rec players these sites want to target, none of them want to be like the online pro's. Sure they may have been drawn into poker from the pro's on TV. But they were mostly live pro's . Durr would be the closest to a crossover star whom even fish were fascinated with.

If you go into a live casino and ask around, 80% probably couldn't tell you who the heck Haxton, Coleman, Jungleman, Polk are. They could care less. Not until you get to the grinders and pros and wannabee pro's would anyone even know who they were.

When people on here say I wouldn't have gotten into poker if it wasn't for the pro's, then you are proving Pokerstars views correct. Since they don't want you as a customer, preventing future players like you is their desired outcome. I know it puts pro's in a no win situation but it's true.

They should have disallowed tracking software and huds first because the SNE types rely on them heavily. The effect would have been similar, fewer pro's/table but they may not have earned as much hatred nor been accused of a cash grab. They could have claimed that it was a matter of game integrity. Then the SNE types would've have screamed about the RB system saying it's impossible to achieve, so after 6 months Amaya could have responded responsibly to customer concerns by initiating the chests system as a replacement, lol.

They may not aspire to be pros, but they absolutely like to think they can get reads, or be tricky, or use their wits somehow to win. That's what makes the game fun. That's why we had a poker boom, not a craps boom.

To believe that you could take the skill out of the game and still attract players, you would have to either be extremely cynical (assuming the customers are profoundly stupid), or simply not understand the game at all (like short-sighted Amaya execs).

Of course, why else would they even play if they didn't believe they could use all their "skills", limited or not, to win against other players?

Not sure I get your point, since game selection is supposed to be one of the crucial elements of a player's success, or win rate. You don't select a game full of sharks to play in, you look for a soft game full of fish, right? Recs will be attracted to rec-full games where they can win some money, or at least not lose as fast.

And to be sure, the sharks will attracted to those rec-full games, but Stars is now making the decision not to cater, pamper, or otherwise compensate them to stick around any longer, that's all.