That's the point. The compliance costs are a much larger percentage of the budget of a small new site than a large established site. It's a lot easier to have revenue shortfalls with high taxes, startup delays, compliance legal costs, and licensing fees if you're new, and it's going to be a lot harder to compete on price by operating on a shoestring budget in the beginning.

Yes, you're right. I edited my post after I wrote it and added the "being able to dream" part, but I agree it's probably incorrect as written:

I agree the majority of active accounts don't have such ambitions as their main reason for playing poker. As in most discussions on this topic though, "player pool" can mean very different things depending on whether an actual count of individual accounts are being referred to, or whether we're talking about bums on seats. Negreanu, Jones and the rest of the PR machine like to talk about how "only 2%" of players will be affected when they, say, scam players out of millions of dollars, whereas we know that that 2% represents a very significant factor in having games run.

So, as explained in the previous post and in the past, I think it's very short-sighted to think you can simply switch 90 million(?) players from a skilled game of poker to something very different and expect the same (or greater) amount of profit because there are many contributing factors that prevent it from happening. These include the removal of "winning/break-even/losing but ambitious" players that contribute significantly to game traffic, and the fact that many of the recreational player probably already play casino-style games and, whereas poker offers them enough variety to gamble even more, they may have no desire to play what would essentially be more of the same. (E.g. If I play soccer regularly and also go to a gym, if that gym [ridiculously] transformed into another soccer club then I'm not going to play twice as much soccer- I'm going to join another gym.)

What's frustrating for people who rely on the game for a living is the dishonesty and greed Stars are showing. Poker has always been different from other forms of gambling in that the competition is not the house but other players and then the house takes a generous cut. This business has been and still is extremely lucrative for Stars but that's not enough.

They need to find ways to contort the game in such a way that they get a bigger and bigger piece of the pie until poker is indistinguishable from some random table game. Instead of being upfront with customers who have played on the site for years, they try to make out that it's in the players interests that more money is being taken out of the game. Hopefully a line in the sand has been drawn with cutting rb to effectively nothing because if they keep messing with the games there will be nothing left.

Anybody arguing that recreational players just want to gamble and don't care about skill and outplaying people -- have you ever been to a casino? Maybe 1 in 25 recreational players are gambling, the other 24 are entirely convinced that they're outplaying everyone and everyone else is making mistakes, and they're more than willing to be vocal and point out when they think someone else made a mistake. People play poker because they think they can outsmart the other people at the table and make money. If you take this away, poker dies.

^^

I guess I really dont even know what we are discussing anymore ITT, but nobody said recs dont want to win, or that dont think they can out smart anyone in any given hand.

at least I was discussing whether an expected long term win rate is requirement for the majority of players to play. I'd argue no, else poker would not exist live or online .

(or this is a group of extremely stubborn people as most players lose yet continue to play. I lost online for years and still played cuz it was a freakin blast and occasionally I would bink something or go on a cash game heater. Could I have loaded up all the tools and watched all the videos and studied more and maybe not been such a baddie? maybe . but it wasnt that important to me in relation to extra effort required)

Stars' mutation of the game of poker as many believe it should exist, along with their 2015 gang rape of SNE's, and ongoing disingenuous marketing communications aside...

.... believe that plenty of players will play whatever it is you call the game they now offer with no expectation or realistic hope of long term winrate.

All of your chips are belong to Stars.

this is one of those " is it everyone else or is it me"

see your basing your theory off of the fact that you donked around and couldnt beat a game but its ok because you were having a blast. id be willing to bet my roll if we had a magical time machine and went back to when you were donking around youd be telling us how your going to go pro soon.

im judging off of the people i play with , i literally hear them say the craziest **** of why theyre winning players and are unlucky. also i know complete degen problem gamblers who only play scratch tickets and guess what ....... they think they are long term winners who can sense winning tickets or god told them they will win or they had a dream about it ect.

your confusing morals with ability. yes stars has the ability to do whatever they want at any given time so does anyone. but there will be consequences to there actions . all it will take is the right site with the right people or technology to create something better, get popular and its game over for stars. they will have no base , no loyal customers all because the wanted that precious little bit more.

I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case with most of the live players who are attracted to these threads.

Call

Though my personal experiences are largely irrelevant , my demographic was a very common one in the boom boom days of yesteryear. Also likely very similar to the demographics Stars is targeting today.

I had a career, family and no reason nor desire to ever be a "pro", live or online.

Had I ever binked the proverbial Sunday Millions, a chunk of that would have been withdrawn and some of it would have been the fodder for one of those threads with hilarious HHs where dude binks a big MTT and then jumps into high stakes cash game much to the amusement of 2+2 and the financial windfall for which ever regs lucky enough to be on the table at the time.

You are looking at the world through only your perspective. I recognize that there were many players like yourself, you should recognize that for each of you there 10s or 100s of me.

When I could still play on PartyPoker, I used to change my screen name every 6 months to try and foil the multi-tabling pros who could use poker software and heads up displays to gain a significant advantage. PokerStars never allowed you to change your screen name and the only reason I can think of for this is that they were afraid of alienating all the regs.

ever walk in a casino?

This. The company as is severely deserves to die now. Good game AmayaGambleStars. Pls go and die. Either that or Unibet, PartyPoker and other more customer-friendly operators will hopefully make you come back to your senses. But I doubt you want to come back to sense.

The only thing on AmayaGambolStars which is still half-way profitable is tourneys but they've started to attack them as well more and more during the past years and months: Introducing antes from the get go, fees, hiding the fees, blind level changes, stack size changes, more hypers and turbos, list goes on and on...

Exactly this and this must be one of the best posts on here summing up the situation quite fun and neat.

One not all too bad suggestion would be instead to simply restrict 24-CG-tablers from existing. Max. 2 or 4 tables or so.

But all these things have been said and suggested a mirrion times already anyways...

Agree, however, it is not at all unbelievable as all of us have repeatedly said that for years and years for at least wan mirrion times... We can only dream on of Isai buying AmayaSpingoMaxCasinoStars back

Now that they flat-out openly communicate poker pros being bad they have sealed their own fate and basically Dnegs and all the other more credible pros like Selbst (hello Doug!), Igor Kurganov and so on in their roster need to get called out hard for the hypocrites they are if they won't leave.
Funny also how this POS company calls online Poker pros "semi-professional gamblers" to up-keep and convey the image that Poker is essentially gambling.
Shame on your CEO Rafi Ashkenazi as well as on you as a whole as market leader.

Whenever one thought that there's some reason left in the company, like generously helping out the Full Tilt or very recently the PKR players when they don't have to they keep f---ing that image up and even worse the next instance.

2-time EPT winner Vicky Coren was not even a real full-time pro but still had the balls to kick AmayaGambolCasinoStars in their balls and leave their roster when they introduced spingos. I loved her parting statement, too. She's not a big wig name but still did a decent job to raise public awareness and expose them for the fake frauds that they are. Anybody with a love for the game needs to love her for that.

Same gos for Isaac Haxton that left their roster complaining about their deeds. Much love.

And the same gos for example for Doug Polk who keeps criticizing all things that are unethical and wrong in the industry. Due to his financial and personal independence he can address all of these issues.

These are some of the people in the game that I definitely look up to.

It seems like smaller, more unsafe sites, live and MTT is the direction playing Poker for a living is taking.

Exactly this.

No, that's wrong and not what is happening. GambolStars also introduced and massively advertises unbeatable or near-unbeatable gamble variants of poker like PowerUp, Spingo, SpingoMax.

+1

If Stars were to carry on down this path so that the skill element was all but removed from all of their games, would there be an argument for not letting them into the US market (should the opportunity arise) due to the fact that they no longer offered skill-based poker?

Here's the thing... what pokerstars is doing is just plain good business... The value of their business model is their player base. And the most valuable part of that player base are the fun players with disposable income they're willing to lose, period end of story. It's not in anyway the pro player who bases his livelihood on avoiding gambling as much as possible and attempting to extract money from the site... In the article and interview with their CEO they talk about potential mergers with sports betting and casino websites i.e. looking for market leadership in the degen online gambling sphere. How the hell do you think what's his name got blackstone to put up billions of dollars to finance the pokerstars purchase? It's because he had a ten or twenty year business plan where they could maximize profit from pokerstars enormous player base of casual gamblers; which unfortunately had very little to do with the game of poker but more so the profile of said players.

This ship has sailed. The only online hope for the game of poker we all love is for a competitor to come along that caters to poker purists, and those that wish to "climb the ladder" so to speak. Where rake is low and people are allowed to compete against one another. This will not be nearly as profitable an enterprise as what pokerstars is aiming for, but it would be profitable none the less. Unfortunately, poker is within a decade or two of being completely solved by AI bots, and true safeguards against computerized play may be impossible to enforce. It's a tough nut to crack but I'd love to see someone pull it off.

interesting question and this would have some poetic justice for those arguing against Stars mutation of game of poker. Remember though that in the US online gaming is approved and regulated at the state level.

New Jersey, for example, authorized full online casino gaming, including slots. Stars is licensed and operating there. Here they could get a game comprising of a coin flip approved.

Nevada on the other hand authorized only poker (and sports book I think) and did not authrorize other casino games/slots. Stars has yet to get licensed in NV (bad actor clause type issues). It would be pretty funny if and when Stars got over bad actor clause stuff in Nevada, NGCB rules that some elements of their game was no longer poker but more akin to online slot and approved them as a company but did not approve their game (s)

What other states do is anyone's guess.

that is well written and all spot on.