LOL

I was coming to post how crappy golden sng's are this week, Every one I seen was the 2x reward and games are terrible.

When are hands per level coming anyway? I am starting to get on board with structures really need to change.

in over like 2 hours, $2k was giving out. My god, come the *** on.

Give away some money. start slamming the 20x.

Such cheap bastards

It's a great way to level regs into heavy reg-on-reg play with a 1% RB boost late in the year (when everyone is trying to hit SNE/milestones).

Are they stretching out the last 50k over the whole week? Hopefully the regs would catch on more quickly than the rec and games would be good. But who knows.

They gave 5k out in 2 hours.

It's really ridiculous

Promo should of ran to Saturday and possibly Sunday tops, yet it'll likely run into tomorrow evening

For some reason i was expecting some fishier games during golden sng week. Lol me though.

1 2x golden in like 600 sits. Solid troll.

course they hit me with a 5x just now, still haate you

The decisions by Stars lately have ranged from questionable to horrible, but the hands per blind level change is a godsend. Thanks for that.

Now they just need to expand the hands/level to cash SNGs (or hypers at least) as well so we don't start having script-v-script "stall-offs".

It can get paaaaainfulllly slow from start to finish (along with all the other arguments).

Hello all,

Time to address the issues in this thread , but I want to be upfront and say that anything that has to do with the rake changes (both implemented and announced) and the removal of Battle of the Planets is not within the scope of my posts here. I appreciate that it is a very hot topic these days, but communication on this is handled through other channels than myself.

Having said that, I have a couple of bits of news that I hope will be well received. First of all, we have now implemented blind levels based on number of hands for all 6 Max Hyper Satellites. Please let us know if you find this change to be positive.

As mentioned before, 6 Max Cash Hypers is the next place where we are considering making this change, and I would be really interested in hearing from the involved players about two areas in particular:

1. To what extent is stalling an issue in 6 Max Cash Hypers?
2. At which stakes do you play?
3. If we implement hands per blind level for these tournaments, do the numbers in the table in my last post give a good representation of how these tournaments normally run?

There was some feedback to my previous post, but more is always better in this case. We don’t really want to fix something that is not broken.

Secondly, at the time of you reading this post, we have implemented a new blind structure in the $1.50 NLHE Turbo tournaments (both 6- and 9-max). It is literally a copy of a previous proposal by Alex Wice and looks like this for the first seven levels:



The remaining levels will be the same as they have been for years.

I will look at these tournaments in a couple of weeks to get an opinion on how the new blind levels have affected volume, total running time and time to get to the money. Once that is done, we will make a decision on whether to roll this out to other Turbo STT tournaments. In the mean time, feel free to give us input on what you think about this change and particularly on what you think about the chosen structure.

And with that, back to the normal Q&A:

We do have such functionality in the pipeline, but unfortunately I can’t promise that it will be available very soon. It is a quite complex piece of functionality, so we must absolutely sure that it meets the players needs and that it runs without any serious bugs, before we can release it to the public.

We are definitely aware that some of the effects of Spin & Gos might not be felt until after New Year, and it is something that we try to account for when we think ahead to possible promotions and potential changes in the game offering. And I do agree with you that it is very important to encourage new players to check out games other than Spin & Gos. Being the place to come to for any form of poker has always been one of PokerStars’ goals and will continue to be so in the future.

The problem with running these satellites all week, is that it may take away from the satellites leading up to the majors on the weekend. Having said that, I have moved them up to 18.30ET on Sundays, so that you will be able to catch the tail-end of the Sunday traffic, at least.

As playing habits change, it is natural that we make changes to the offering as well. However, I don’t think we need to make any knee-jerk reaction at this point, but once New Year has passed, we should have more information to go on.

Not a suggestion that I have seen very often at all. Is this something that a lot of players see a need for? As the poster after you mentions, the Turbo 50/50s are actually a lot faster than regular Turbos, so a Hyper would not be that significantly different, I think.

I don’t think 3 max hypers is something we will run anytime soon. Besides already offering them in Spin & Gos, I don’t see think it is a great idea to further split the 6 Max/HU Hyper liquidity.

The PS7 client for Mac is just around the corner. When the next client release comes out, you will get a menu item in PS6 where you can try out the Beta version of PS7 if you want.

It is not my area of responsibility, but no one would be able to able to tell you what the changes for 2016 are going to be. The simple reason is that the decision has not been made yet, and is probably some time away from being made.

I tested at play money tables and am able to take notes during Spin & Gos. If you are still not able to, I suggest you send a bug report to support@pokerstars.com and include as much detail as possible.

I am not certain what you want to achieve by paying out the higher prize tiers in T$, but I think that most players prefer cold, hard cash.

We are re-visiting the HUSNG promo you mention from December 1st in order to give something to back to the players who engage in reg-wars. I have some problems seeing exactly how this can be done for 6 max tournaments, though. In HUSNGs, we can easily look at who plays the same opponent at least x number of times, but the same lineup occurs far less often in 6-max tournaments for obvious reasons.

Bind lobbies is something that we have discussed in the past, particularly in relation to HU SNGs where it received a mixed reaction. I do think it is likely that we will see Sit & Gos free of game selection sometime in the future.

Having said that, it is not currently something that we are discussing for the near future, but on the other hand, such changes are often made when something comes up that creates an urgent need.

One potential issue I see with blind lobbies for non-HU tournaments is that a program like Sharkystrator will come along and keep track of how many regulars are registered to the tournaments, and have other regs wait for the next lobby once a certain number of regs have registered for the first one. I am not sure such a situation would be better than the one we have today.

The Golden Sit & Go promotion is set up to run for a week on average, but since the variance in the rewards are so high, particularly in the Milestones, the running time of the promo will also vary. By the time you read this, it should all be over, though.

The parameters of the promotion was exactly the same this time around as it was the previous time. The rakeback % was actually a little higher this time around in order to account for the smaller total volume we are having as a result of the Spin & Gos.

Thanks,
Baard

The best news I've heard in years followed by the worst news I've heard in years. If you make sngs devoid of all selection you are going to kill off a number of regs, while this in turn might make the average SNG without selection decent it will crush liquidity and the number of games that run.

Well,

Just to make it very clear. We do not currently have any plans to make SNG lobbies blind. I was merely expressing an opinion for where SNGs (and not only on PokerStars) might be heading in the future.

Thanks,
Baard

Why only sattys and cash hypers getting structure change.

I want turbos and reg speeds getting structure change. I don't think hands per level is needed as stalling is rarely done to the extent of notice.

I really wish you'd get your head out of your azz about the adding antes for every structure across the board.

What's next if you give blind lobbies only for SNGs?

You going to start giving blind lobbies for Cash games and forcing players to play X hands or bust before able to leave the table?

Fu if you do blind lobbies. I already get sick of full reg games and you idiots will make it only worse. Not happy with making billions from a shady business so we need to further increase our profits?

Yes please structure change (18 mans too?).
No thanks blind lobbies, that's a disaster.

Baard, why don't you keep the ante in line with the hypers ante in the new turbo structure?

Cuz 10% ante looks too clean. Making it vary randomly from 12% to 15% level to level sounds more appropriate.

As much as I am on your side in your rants against stars I'm pretty sure you misread his post. The ante changes have been released at 9s and 6s turbos/nonturbos at the $1.50 level

Well I just noticed he did it in Turbo $1.5s I jsut checked the regular speeds as well. Nothing has changed at that speed.

I'd really appreciate fast forwarding this asap to every stake. Whatever you do, don't make it hand per level. There is virtually nobody stalling these.

Go ahead if you wanna kill all sngs above 60 bucks

You could do table assignment with some secret method (that is apparently NOT random) like that done for Spin&Gos.

Chat Box:

Said this many times now but previously you were able to "minimise" ie "orange button" the detached chat box in OS and send it to the dock.
Surely this would take a few mins to reinstate and it is necessary.

Changing Table Themes:

PLEASE allow customisable felt colour for each SNG rather than just either a SNG or tournament or cash etc ie 45 Man SNG is light blue etc and a 180 is dark blue.!!


I put this in Stars S/W improvement thread but putting it here as well to try and catch your eye Baard

You guys need to stop talking about blind lobby, the more you talk about it the more attention it gets, so stop asap its not going to happen

Point taken, but I think the chance of something not wanted not happening because we don't talk about it is probably about the same as something wanted happening because we do talk about it... if ya know what I mean.

ya but you know how amayastars is working, players dont want it = implement it