So after reading this weekend about what Party and now Revolution are doing with their player pools I'm a bit concerned. Basically if you are a winning player/player with good stats on these networks you will be separated from the fishy players on the network and will only be able to play with players their software deems is of equal skill.

I know that some US Casinos have agreements to use the Party/Bwin software. Please tell me this **** won't fly here in the US once regulated. Anything in the NV/NJ legislation that would deal with crap like this?

Nothing in any US legislation or regulations addresses this issue, and I doubt we will see anything that does. It will probably be left as an internal control procedure for individual sites that is either approved or disapproved by the regulators through normal regulatory procedures. For the time being, I don't think that any US-regulated site will implement any segregation of their player pools, as they compete in the newly opened US regulated market for market share. It may become an issue a few years down the road, as the market leaders get established and as player pools reach a size where segregation could be considered.

If this happens in the states, we'll be able to piss of the regulators until the end of time.

I am going to go all contrarian again.

First it is still not clear precisely what Party are doing and "segregation by win rate" is just an assumption to date. Indeed the only statement Party have made is that new players are free to choose any table.

Second the usual refrain is that regulation should be minimal and that a market system offering choice is the preferred way to keep sites in line. Banning player pools or leagues would be a step beyond regulation to protect the vulnerable, the underage, game operation, protecting consumer balances or any reasonable area where regulation is justified. this is a business decision, a marketing decision with a site wanting to appeal to a specific niche market. Controlling that is way beyond a regulatory remit.

Finally. We face a situation where one site has a near monopoly. Restricting smaller competitors from following their business plan to compete with that monopoly would not be in the interests of players, competition or freedom.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but that assumes we'll have a free enough market to punish any site that would do it. If Caesars would do this, with the WSOP brand that will always be a top tier site for amateurs, then there isn't much we as players could do other than go to the regulator.

I don't know why I am complaining, though. This is good policy for me.

i highly doubt that caesars will be the number one top site.

sure, plenty of amateurs will flock there because of the wsop brand. but just based on how caesars runs things (i mean, look at the exact same boring schedule that the wsopc is every stop)....sites like stars and borgata will have creativity and give hte players what they want, making them top contenders

Lets start the derail of this thread. Stars is banned from Nevada and still has an uphill battle in NJ. Borgata is owned by Boyd/MGM though a subsidiary and both of them have a partnership with Bwin, the company that started this discussion in the first place.

Caesars has 25k rooms in Vegas alone, WSOP, one of(if not the) largest rewards memberships in the world, and is easily the most prepared US gaming interest for the future IPoker market. Saying they will be anything other than the top provider in the US market is probably wrong. Saying that any other company will be able to be more creative is wishful thinking. The only thing that is going to hold Caesars back is their future bankruptcy, but even then creditors stand to gain a whole lot more by allowing Caesars to continue their expansion online.

My previous post was simply an example of what could happen wrt this issue in a highly segregated market like we will have in the near future. I highly doubt Caesars will ever do anything this stupid. They stand to make several times more off the IPoker market by funneling players to their casinos.

Hopefully Party can't segregate players in nj like they are doing now.

I can't imagine a PS run site ever segregating by skill level.

This Fair Play crap is absolutely awful, but the "beginners tables" Party has/had isnt a terrible idea.

They had those like 8+ years ago IIRC. Nothing over 50nl, and you had to have an account <30 days old.

I don't think many would object to something like that. New Fish get a chance to get their feet wet at micros without sharks gobbling them up instantly. (They don't have to play the tables of course, its just an option)

I also doubt there would be many people making new accounts every 30 days just to play in fishy microstakes games.

I'm not sure this will be an option. One very good aspect of regulation and ID required to open accounts.

Please contain any further discussion of PS entry to NJ to this thread:
AGA Attempts to Block PS Entry to NJ

This highlights a pretty important point. There is already a filter that keeps the best players from the worst. It's called "stakes", or "table limit".

i've thought of several scenarios under which us poker could be regulated yet still unbeatable.

this is definitely one of them.

Can't really see this being a good thing except for new players, often which get bored and quit - I'd say the people that get addicted and love playing are in the minority so eventually those players just leave anyway...

Does anyone know if your tier is determined by your BB/100 or total net winnings? Like, could just grind away loses at 2nl over thousands of hands to stay in the fish tier?

lock reps have stated that they have no intention of telling us how the system calculates what we are, or telling us what level we are in.

afaik party is taking the same line.

the system seems to be designed to keep money on the site so it can be raked rather than withdrawn, so i would imagine that net winner/loser is the most important factor.

also note that your question demonstrates that even before this "fair play" is implemented, it's already encouraging people to start figuring ways to game the system. multi-accounting is another way.

How can players contact the NJ, Nevada and other gaming commissions about their concerns about player segregation? No site should get a US license that practices segregation.

well those groups probably don't overlap, so this effects 2 different types of players, as opposed to only one type, 'experienced players', whom we can easily discount using various mathematical algorithms (2>1, et al).

Exactly. It sounds so very, very scummy.

Making people of the same skill / win-rates play against each other is incredibly insidious - it promotes more break-even play and maximizes rake. They don't want good players stacking bad players. They want the money on the site to go back and forth among players as many times as possible to generate rake.

we already have segregation of the players. the stakes you play puts you in the same skill set to a certain extent.

this reminds me of bovada.

The U.S. poker market has several problems that stem from the limited market created by the intrastate system. Companies want to invest in a product that will last and have been trying to come up with ways of doing that. If they can increase the amount of rake collected by limiting or making it harder for regs to take that money out of play they will try to do that.

There has been talk about segregating player pools within a site for a while. The talks are usually limited to optional segregation like others are saying. They don't want to force the new/bad guys to play with each other because part of the appeal of poker is being able to sit and play with the best. At the same time they want to prevent really good players from sitting with terrible ones and cleaning them out which is contrary to what most of us think is a key part of this game.

One of the problems with discussing regulation on this site is that a lot of us are obviously poker players and only think about how things will effect us individually as poker players. People tend to forget that good sharky regs that don't lose are bad for poker economies. This is a particular problem in small markets because of how quickly a large reg populations will dry up the economy. The U.S. poker market is going to be fragmented among states with varying populations and pieced together over time. We need to try to keep a more open mind to some of the things you are going to hear about and remember that the goal should be to get as many state operating legal poker rooms as possible. The more open the market the better for players.

Are the following the correct links to make sure that sites that use player segregation do not get licensed in the US?
- New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement
- Nevada Gaming Commission

These are your best contacts to make comments/suggestions about the regulations:

info@njdge.org
liaison@gcb.nv.gov

However, your statement above won't make much sense to them. Sites are not getting licensed in the US. US casinos are getting the licenses. The poker platform providers like bwin.party, 888, etc. are getting approved to be service providers to the casinos.

What you want to ask for is a regulation that forbids the licensed operators from implementation of segregated tables among the players within one state based on level of skill. Word it carefully so that they don't mix it up with the idea of segregation of players from different jurisdictions.