petition idea is nice in theory, but in actuality will it work? I would like to believe it would, but highly doubt that gets through the skull of amaya execs. Would be interesting nonetheless

several guys have already visited amaya hq with similar questions and come back with DNA-closed mouths. and the message they received was something like "as far as at least one guy beats the game everything is good with rake structure and poker is still beatable and a game of skill

Petition seems a good idea, gonna sign as well and spread the word. With lot of signers there will be someone in amaya managament who takes this seriously. Who's gonna write it? No time to waste, gogo!

I moved from Stars only awhile ago even though RB doesn't effect HUSNG's (Turbos) as much as other formats, but when this is implement the new RB I'm going grind all the Micro stakes just to crush fish, would be sick if everyone else did it as well while playing their main games on other sites..

Amaya should raise rake as well!!


Gooooooo raise rake Amaya you know you want too!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4O8J6X03v8

Are you gone be transparent and release to the public the odds of each chest type?

aha, so stars values new money coming in more than regs playing on their site.

so are you telling me the argument "sites dont care weather you lose or win they get the rake" vs "sites are rigged" was actually invalid all those years and all those losing players have been made fun of for no reason?

we need to dig out the x files again

I don't think that argument is invalid, it's just that it's a conspiracy theory.

Their rng works fine and is regularly controlled. Amaya might be making some really dull decisions and **** the site long-term to gain some short-term bucks via increased prices (= decreased rewards), but they're not going to ruin their game completely by rigging anything.

The reason is they are getting tricked by variance and/or are bad at poker. Ppl happen to seek mistakes in areas not under their control first to defend their ego.

Go for it if u like, online poker is a shady business with lots of scams and fraud going on, so anything u can prove about things going wrong (and there is a lot of it, just not rng riggedy) will be highly welcomed by the honest part of players.
However everyone who tried to prove that the stars rng is rigged failed and it would be quite easy to figure it out if this was indeed the case.
Just take a large enough sample of net depositor and net withdrawer hands and prove that either
a) the hole card distribution is skewed significantly
b) the community card distrbituion is skewed significantly
This is really easy math, but no one could ever provide that proof.

to the stars rep/team (if they even bother to come here read)

Just because you have the best steak in town doesn't entitle you to charge triple; well its your business of course, you are free to do whatever but to think people are this stupid is going to be your huge failure.

Your business is going to die, mark my words.
Cash/zoom is gonna die, sng is gonna die, hu is gonna die, and all that you will be left with is gonna be the casino/gambling crowd and the mtt sharks contributing to the great recreational player experience that you so hard want to achieve.

You are going to fall bit by bit just like the Roman Empire, its already happening.

I was a bit less serious than you may have thought. However shouldnt have posted worst run of coolers and bad beats ever today. Stars was obviously not amused

So, on the danish .dk site, wasnt the new program set to launch in late may? Maybe any danish grinder could give a little insight, or any of you got some danish poker buddy who could give a little review?

It's 2017. You don't gradually rake rig. Whoever has control of altering specific hands or setting off when jackpots hit simply combine the two. Make a fake uk or russian account, log in and ping. Easy. Because we trust Pokerstars will uphold the integrity of that lucky account. Or run someone good in one tournament for a year or two salary. Easy. Variance** rigs* these days would be more liken to a fraud or scam where a programmer or integrity manager who has the ability to set up hands to prevent cheating would use it scam games IMO.

So lets work backwards and ask the question, does any employee of pokerstars have the ability through use of a third party or internally developed software to intercept the shuffle and redistribute it for "game integrity" purposes? OR, is there any way to shuffle and deal hands "privately" not real time and store those hands in a server to be distributed on a live table in future? If any of these things are done or possible thats where 2017 corruption would occur. Individuals profiting large sums off of game software exploits being ised in nefarious ways

People still post in this thread? Switch sites guys it's over ffs

You might like it here
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...dition-255990/

Yeah stuff like that belongs in that thread.

I had some doubts about the RNG lately myself as the RNG does appear to help fish both in EV and in setups.
I really don't believe it's rigged though, mostly because:
1) you need a competent IT team to do that. Seriously, Stars nowadays have so many bugs that will annoy regs and fish alike.
Every small thing that needs to be fixed takes forever.
So how could that IT team rig a RNG properly?

2) assuming 1) is possible, with the likely recent cuts in salary for their support and IT team, how could you "buy" the silence of every guy in the IT that has access to the RNG coding?

I don't think "the RNG is verified by a 3rd party" to be a good reason, 3rd parties have never stopped FTP, absolute or whoever before, they are just a formality.
I also don't consider "they won't do it bc they don't want to risk their biz/image" a plausible reason, they don't give a fk about that and it wouldn't stop them at all, it's just hard to do bc of 1) and 2) above at least.

Also belongs in that thread

Would love deal to be replaced with some form of bad beat/ 2to7 tables and try to avoid making a royal flush and spinning a wheel.

The only rigged concern should be superuser. Chances of that happening/will happen has to be above 10%.

Lets be honest here this is BS.
There is no clear cut between regs and recs. Every Reg has once been a rec working towards getting better because they were motivated by the fact that they may one day become winning players because the game was beatable. I dont believe there is lot players in 2017 who are playing just and only for fun. Most people are trying to improve and have an edge over the other players and ultimately yield a profit even if they are not playing as often as a reg does. Pokerstars argues that with those changes rec will be favored but this is just total nonsense and BS. Think about it rec players will gain a few extra $ here and there but this is not going to do ****. Here is what will happen. Lets say a winning 2.5/5 player cant beat the game anymore cause he will get 0% Rakeback has a few options.
1: quite poker. But considering the time he has put in to become a solid winning player and the players that are addicted this will not be the case often
2: Change the platform. ROI Poker lets hope u dont **** it up
or
3: move down in stakes. I think most will choose option 3.
And this is going to have a very negative impact on every poker player not just grinders and here is why. a 2.5/5 player who is not able to beat the game anymore is going to play 1/2 games making the game harder at that stake forcing those player to face the same 3 options the pros at 2.5/5 had. This is going to lead to a huge butterfly effect and the already tough games of today will become even harder to beat in if not impossible to beat since the effective rake will be higher and the games will be harder itself. In oder words there wont be any 16 table grinders anymore which sounds like a good thing but think about the impact this has onto rec players. They are going to have to play versus people who normally played 1 or 2 stakes higher and played at multiple tables so maybe didint exploit the rec player to the maximum of his ability but now this is going to happen and in exchange for this the rec player will get a few extra bucks which wont change anything. So tell me pls how are the rec player going to gain anything of of those changes??? How are their deposits going to last longer??? I honestly dont get it. Those changes are neither going to help the rec players nor the game balance. Its going to do the exact opposite. PS just tries to sell this BS this way so stupid bricks dont quite the side. The only one who benefits from those changes is PS and they know that. Every time they make those negative changes they sell it under the same Rec/reg BS. If pokerstars was honest about their goal to stop the mass grinders they would ban seating scrips, bots and put a maximum of lets say 6 tables you can play at once. Maybe reduce if not remove the HUD completely but they are not doing that instead they increase rake year for year since amaya. My theory is that they know online poker is a inevitable sinking ship so they wont to milk us players in the last years before it totally collapses.

What is Rec and Reg definition?
I mean,if people who play online/live poker for a living is a definition of Reg,then I guess there are many Rec out there,ME included..

actually even recs not getting any extra penny from that. at best they would get bronze lvl rakeback.

Reg is a player who plays on a regular basis and wins. Rec is a player no matter how much he plays he loses.

Not sure if this is the correct thread to post this in, but Amaya/PokerStars has been in the news this past week following its annual shareholders meeting. Here's a summary of what has made the news cycle.

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* Amaya shareholders have approved a name change to "The Stars Group" along with a corporate HQ move from the greater Montreal, Quebec area (the province where former CEO David Baazov's insider trading trial is scheduled to begin in November) to Toronto, Ontario.

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* The official move is expected to take place in August. Only one article (by Steven Stradbrooke of CalvinAyre) out of the roughly 20 I've read suggest the move is linked to Brian Kyle (newly-named CFO of Amaya/The Stars Group) and his "apparent unwillingness" to relocate. The article by Stradbrooke also reports that Amaya already has around 300 individuals working near Toronto.

https://calvinayre.com/2017/06/21/bu...orate-rebrand/

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* Amaya/The Stars Group has announced it is working with a partner in India (unnamed, but one that it says already has a license to operate online gambling in all but two states in that country) to possibly enter that market by year's end -- citing 1.2 billion mobile users that could make up for loss in revenue from Australia and other markets where legislation has not been favorable. This is not a done deal, just an announcement that negotiations are underway.

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* Q1 2017 results (actually released in May 2017) show continued growth in casino/sports-betting for Amaya/The Stars Group. Online poker accounted for 69% of all revenue in Q1 (down from 75% YOY). However, overall revenue for Amaya increased 10% YOY from Q1 2016 to Q1 2017 due to growth in casino/sports wagering, beating analysts' expectations.

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* Amaya/The Stars Group's strategy appears to be to continue to use the PokerStars brand and its global recognition to entice endusers onto its platform in an attempt to introduce them to its non-poker products and further diversify its revenue. Although the quote below comes off as disingenuous to many of us who have been contributing to/lurking NVG, PokerStars (imo) does in fact benefit from its global brand recognition, established by years of mass marketing.

"As we undergo this transformation, we look to embrace the future of our business while also recognizing the incredible consumer goodwill and loyalty associated with our primary brand." - Rafi Ashkenazi, Amaya/The Stars Group CEO (May 2017 - Q1 Earnings conference call)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/amay...ange-1.4112095

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* Amaya's stock price is up around 20% since January, with some articles referencing "paying down debt" as a reason for this. If you look at the "PokerStars Chests" thread here in NVG, you'll find that "restructuring debt" may be a more appropriate term, as the company agreed to pay "three months of late fees" to former owners Isai & Mark Scheinberg in order to defer a $200 million (approx.) payment that was due Feb 1, 2017.

https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news...erstars-owners

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I'm no expert in this field, but judging from publicly-available information I'd say that Amaya/PokerStars (as it has purported all along) is not overly concerned with an exodus of professional, high volume players to its online poker competitors. It will continue to shift its focus to casino/sports-betting, and use its big-budget marketing to drown out/dismiss concerns it believes are only being pushed by a "small yet vocal minority" of disgruntled, mostly high-volume poker players.

The move towards quickly ensuring short-term profit is a logical one in a vacuum, yet doesn't settle the issue of what happens in the medium-term when online casino punters lose interest (my term for "going busto") and are not contributing to Amaya/PokerStars' revenue in relative perpetuity like thousands of online poker players have over the past decade.

The business model relies of consistently bringing in "new blood" and ushering them towards casino/sports-betting. In this sense, perhaps the move away from Neymar Jr & Ronaldo simply means that their respective fan bases were considered to have been sufficiently crawled, and it was time to move on to other big mainstream names with different bases such as Kevin Hart, Usain Bolt and Tito Ortiz. Rinse & repeat in a couple of years if that's the case, as celebs can easily maneuver in and out of such deals with ease in today's marketing environment.

The big question in my mind is whether online casino gambling as we know it stands a chance against online eSports betting which some believe could already take over the real money wagering world if it were regulated in certain markets.

Amaya's focus on "Time on Machine Entertainment" will get laughed out of the market once/if eSports real money wagering takes hold, and poker in my opinion is much better suited to co-exist with that market (even with card games such as Hearthstone included) compared to your run-of-the-mill online casino. In my opinion this is why some of the voices in our industry have made such a big deal about how video games will eventually be poker's main competitor (see Alex Dreyfus quote in this October 2015 article http://www.pokermind.in/alex-dreyfus...-online-poker/ ).

So Amaya/The Stars Group will need to continue to rely on a number of maxrolls to get their product in front of new audiences, which of course means upfront "make it legal" costs while warding off opposition in a number of key jurisdictions in which it currently operates, paying down its debt, finding out a solution or coming out on top in its "Kentucky Clawback" battle, ignoring negative press related to its former CEO and treatment of professional players through its "broken SNE promise," etc.

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Hope this helps. Again, I'm not anywhere close to one of the most informed individuals on this, but wanted to share my insight nonetheless. Please feel free to comment & to move this into the appropriate thread if this isn't the place for it.

-David

Interesting post, thank you.

ya good post dhubermex