Why is the top quartile more important than the rest of profitable players or the overall player pool for that matter? Re: sustainability of the game, the most important variable is the rate of $ leaving the player pool. Pokerstars justified the higher rake in the Internet Poker thread by saying that winning PLO players win more, but that's a specious justification for higher rake IMO.

I would not be surprised if it was no longer the case. The games have gotten much tougher past 2 years. Rake was the same 2-4 years ago (basically) and nobody cried over the rake and the flow of the money. Money was still going up and you could still find a decent amount of regs winning a fair clip. It now seems that it's less and less the case, and if nothing is done, PLO might look more and more like LHE sooner or later.

Chinz, the problem in your reasoning is that you don't know whether the "top quarter of profitable players" are the best players, the players who run the best, or both? If you compare two games, of which one game has a variance of almost 3x the other, thats a huge problem.

It obviously all depends on PS' definition of winners. PLO has more than double the standard deviation of nlhe. If you look at relatively small sample (a couple of 100k hands), you will obviously see the tendency that there are a lot more big winners/big losers than at nlhe.

EDIT: I guess joeri was quicker than me :/

This should be done.

Because "realistically achievable winrates" was the argument Lorenzo used (and several others have in the past when trying to justify/compare rake structures and winrates). Of course you could also just do something like take all the players with 500k+ hands played, exclude top/bottom 20% and then compare the winrates to get better idea what's it like for "average reg". In that case I'd imagine NLHE comes even farther ahead in winrates, but I'm just guessing.

Or you could just take all the players, which would be equally easily justified way to look at things, and say that PLO players at all stakes lose more on average than NL players. Anyway my point is, there's no reasonable way to compare PLO and NL regs that would show PLO regs to have higher winrates. As long as sample sizes are good enough and drastically higher variance of PLO is taken into account, I don't see anything suggesting that PLO winrates for profitable players are higher than NL at least in micro, small or midstakes.

Lets say I get us 10 million plo10 hands of the last quarter (thanks for PM). Who can do the following analysis (possibly at a reasonable expense fee)?

1. Select the 100 biggest winners (in bb/100) with a minimum amount of 10k(*) hands in the first 5 million hands.
2. See how these players did in the 2nd 5 million hands.

(*) can be less if required by the amount of data.

Edit; If anything interesting comes out of this, we could do this for a couple of stakes and maybe also for some nlh stakes to compare.

Also the big losers in NLHE are losing at a much higher rate than the big losers in PLO:

http://www.pokertableratings.com/par...earch/scout315

I dont think there is a single PLO whale that loses at a rate that comes even remotely close.

I can def do this analysis, but won't have time in the next couple of weeks, maybe in Feb. PM me if you want help with it.

If you want something more "realistic", you'd need 1 stake lower and 1 higher to truly evaluate the "state" of PLO 10. Otherwise, you'll miss on a couple of people who went up or down.

Serious q--> And why is that bad?

I deliberately didn't include a minimum amounts of hands in sample 2. I think my setup is pretty unbiased.

are there enough Regs who played enough of the 10M hands to actually get a good sample? I always assume most non losing players get into PLO 25 then 50 pretty quickly. I'm not the guy to do the analysis but would love to see the results.

Jeah i fear that too. I can buy 10 million hands on a few other limits too if necessairy. Its not that expensive. (Is that even legal for me to buy?)

However i don't have a clue whether it will increase the analysis by a huge amount???

Shimmy, if there is nobody else on short notice, i will get back to you, you seem like the perfect guy with your math/comp background. But for me computer noob; would you import all the hands in a database (which will take a while), or do you write a sintax, which you can fairly quickly run over different datasets?

Strictly speaking I do think it's against the T&C to buy HHs.

Exactly, and we can learn from history (x-posting from RunItOnce):

Big losers will still lose, but more slowly. Some small losers will become small winners. Good for them and good for the games. Bad players getting cleaned out too fast is the reason NLHE was dead as a cash game until it the poker boom revived it. Live, deep-stacked NLHE simply wasn't a sustainable game.

Then NLHE cash was reborn as a 100 bb capped buy-in game online and grew fast. The 100 bb part of that equation was important. It protects the weak players, but the game still has lots of room for skilled play. Now we're asking Stars to take similar game-preserving actions for PLO. All players will benefit, and probably Stars as well in the long run.

First and foremost, the rake needs to be lowered. The nature of PLO makes it a good game for the recreational player, but the rake is killing it at the low limits.

I'm not sure about the most efficient way tbh, would have to do some research and testing. Ideally, as you said, would be easiest to use PT/HEM cos they have the import scripts written already, but I don't know well/efficiently they deal with huge datasets - my own dbs get to about 1m hands before I scrap them then start fresh cos they're too slow - but I use a crap PC and never investigated properly about optimising.

Alternative would be to write a custom script to process the hand history files into our own db - shouldn't be too difficult to do that if we just needed a few specific stats (for example amount won/ win rate / rake by player name & stake etc.)

Great post. i had no idea. I am playing micros cashgames plo. I wanted to move up to lowstakes/ midstakes.. I hope Pokerstars will change the rake or I must quit and only play on 888 and other sites.

1) Rake
We have posted on PLO rake here.

2) Time to act at the table
We did specifically ask for feedback from PLO players and took it into consideration when making these decisions. The feedback we received regarding PLO players needing extra time at the tables did initially make sense to us until we looked at the actual playing habits of players in both our NLHE and PLO games.

As it turned out, there is only a very small difference in the amount of time PLO players take to act on average compared to NLHE players. Some of the remaining difference can be attributed to the fact that a higher percentage of actions in PLO games take place postflop, which in the new system will also result in additional average time to act.

PLO grinders play substantially fewer concurrent tables on average than NLHE grinders. As a result, PLO players are losing less action time at one table due to being focused on decisions at other tables. This naturally balances out the needed time to act between NLHE and PLO.

For those who are unconvinced, I suggest spending a few hours single-tabling at normal speed tables. Perhaps you will use your time bank for more difficult decisions, but the vast majority of players would not have problems with overall time to act while single tabling. Instead, the game flow is frustratingly slow.

We will keep monitoring the situation at high stakes PLO after the changes are implemented. If complaints continue here, we’ll survey a random (not self-selected) sample of HSPLO players to see if additional changes are needed.

It’s certainly possible to have longer times to act at HSPLO than at all other tables and it wouldn’t require development so such an adjustment could be made fairly quickly, if determined to be appropriate. First, we want to give this plan a try. The difference at HSPLO is just 5 seconds per action. It may have less impact than some players fear.


3) Ratholing

As we develop our response to the ratholing issue and other issues, we will be careful to ensure we evaluate whether PLO needs a different solution than NLHE and what the differences may need to be. In the meantime, the way you can ensure the best arguments are heard by us is to post them in either the “Open Discussion: Ratholing, Table/Seat Selecting, and More!” thread or this thread. We will be monitoring both threads, and are more than happy to incorporate well thought out ideas into our plans.

In the meantime, we are going to be increasing the minimum buyin to PLO and PLO/8 standard buyin games to 40bb shortly. If we make further changes to this in the future, they will likely be part of a wider response to these issues.


I understand it looks like we solicited feedback just to ignore it, but I assure you we were sincere in our request, and were actually very convinced through those threads that PLO needed more time per action than NLHE, and we had even initially planned to give PLO more time to act. However, when we looked at the actual in-game playing speed of PLO players versus NLHE players, the data did not bear out the difference we expected as described above.

Note that the 30-100bb buy-in structure that has been in place for some time is different than any than has ever been deployed for NLHE. This structure was implemented with input and endorsement of the 2+2 community. This clearly demonstrates that, when appropriate, we are happy to consider PLO differently than NLHE.

While there are differences between the two games, there are also a number of similarities that cannot be ignored. As a result, not uncommonly both games will be subject to same/similar rules.

In case there is any confusion, there is no situation where a player is only given 8 seconds to act in any type of ring game. The 8 second warning timer is to alert you that your time is close to running out at a table, and your table should have already come to the front when action initially fell on you. Changing the warning timer would *not* change the total amount of time to act, only the point at which the warning timer sounds.

We are looking into the possibility of future (months away) development of a feature that would allow each player to customize when exactly they receive this alert/reminder.


If you would like provide feedback on our PLO MTT offerings, BryanS-PS is quite active in the MTT Community forum. I will make Brian aware of this post, and I’m certain he will be happy to listen to your feedback.

As a guy who 4 tables high stakes (max, often less) I have trouble with the time limits already.

I think it's ridiculous that they're reducing them. The main problem with time is that at midstakes there's a bunch of guys who play 500 tables slowing down the action tremendously, particularly in spots that take more or less one second, such as folding preflop. This is an actual problem, and this problem is not that relevant at 25/50+.

Also, the fact that we're playing for more money should definitely be thought about, and it seems ridiculous to reduce it when it's my guess that most HS players are content with things the way they are. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

The majority of the voice here from what I understand (I haven't read this thread in full) are players from midstakes, so it would be nice if separate consideration was taken out for HS. This is similar to the ratholing discussion. Decisions on behalf of midstakes players were made for highstakes, which I find very frustrating. 25/50+ is a completely different ballgame to the limits below it, and should be treated as such, in terms of time, and in terms of ratholing and actually just in terms of anything. It'd be great if stars were to at least reconsider their changes for limits 25/50 and over, because I don't think the changes are necessary or relevant across the board.

#1 and #2 agree 100%. #3 isnt a problem. Most ratholers are terribad and if we lose them we lose a lot of profit.

It's sad to see that PS is not open to discussion about this. So many things in that post make 0 sense!

Next step you're going to rake RIT double as well, because it takes longer and is twice as much fun?

Unfortunately I think going on this way plo won't be around for a long time :/

So after many thoughtful and logical posts in rebuttal as to why much of Steve's points on rake don't make sense in his post you just direct us back to his post... did you really spend even 5 minutes reading the posts in this thread? Have you listened to/do you understand why much of that post you directed us to doesn't make sense? Only someone who has no clue about PLO would really look at the post you are directing us to and say, "Oh that makes sense, that's fair."

And as to my point about focusing ONLY on rake... 8 pages of posts and we finally got a reply from a PS rep. It was almost a full page long and it did not address rake except to say, "We already addressed rake." I would just like to restate the importance of not giving PS reps anything to respond to other than RAKE...

Im gonna be offensive since thats your statement.

That its just a 5 second per action difference is a disgusting lie. And that we don't understand the impact (after playing combined millions of hands on fast tables) also don't give us credit for understanding the changes + Pokerstars doesn't care about our opinion on the subject. Obvs its Pokerstars shop and you can do what you want even if its alienating lots of your customers on the way (hopefully upper management understand this bether), but no point in asking the most educated crowd in the world about the subject (HSPLO) and then not listen..

This are all the differences for HSPLO that I'm aware off:

- 5 sec less postflop (35 goes to 30) this is the change Nick acknowledge

- 25 sec less preflop first to act (35 goes to 20)

- 7 sec shorter warning timer, from 15 --> 8 (hugh cut and same as fast tables)

its not just a simple 5 second per action change. If Im wrong, and Pokerstars actually dont make any other changes and differences, for example the other two I pointed out, I apologize in advance and withdraw my opinon on table speed. I wholeheartedly hope I'm wrong.

I might have small details wrong about these three, but its def 3 changes that I see, not one, 5second change, like you claim. The three differences as Ive said already is the 5sec postflop, less time pre first to act, and almost cutting the warning timer in half last 100% similar to a fast table and works booth pre and postflop!.

If you are waiting for tech to make a adjustable timer we can adjust ourselves, why not meet in the middle and make it 12 seconds while waiting for tech? Even bether do the ubiased survey (by question bias) and check if HSPLO wants only fast tables preflop with fast tablestyle warning timer postflop as well.

And why not acknowledge that you have cut preflop time more then 5 seconds first to act? Im shocked if you dont know or actually think the difference is JUST the 5second cut.

Why does stars want warning timer cutted down so badly too 8secs, that they don't listen to our status quo (15 second) wish for HSPLO?

Later on you think we (me/I) are confused about the warning timer. I obvs grasp it, Ive 1.5-2m hands at your site mostly in PLO, how many HSPLO and cashgame poker hands have you played Nick?

Who is the one that is confused at best? I fear its the guy that runs the thread about table speeds (superimportant subject that impacts the whole community) in internet poker for Pokerstars and voicing opinions on their behalf. Please give us Baard (that asked us about the subject) or Lee Jones (use to post in plo from time to time) back.

Ill also like to point out that the tabular Baard gave us baardtabular, is modified to hide the warning time change you say doesnt affect HSPLO (then dont change it if it doesnt matter..)nicktabular.

I 100% know what the warning timer is and what it does. I was the first one calling out in the stars reg thread on HSPLO (when Baard proposed changes to make all tables into fasttables vs 2) that there was a change from 15 --> 8 sec that was really bad. Consensus is keeping it where it was.

8 second warning timer pre = fast tables = plague. Also lot of tablestarters says they cant start tables with that warning, would be 'good' for everyone if people stop starting as many tables .

Stars reps threat that change as its not a big deal so why change it at all for HSPLO when we want it as it is?


So you don't think we know this game and the situation at cash games on stars? And just make uneducated opinions without first hand knowledge? That is ignorant at best. We got asked for advice that we clearly gave, then you just found your own arguments to make it as you wanted all along.

Reminds me of discussing with my xgf, she asks what I want and if its the right answer (what she wants from the beginning as well) I get my 'wish' and if its the wrong answer its her time to decide fueled by some non logical arguments I'm not supposed to challenge .

Whats the main reason to change it then, when we want it like it is (backed by opinions in HSPLO and the facts in what actually table type( = normal), running most on highstakes PLO the last years)?

As Ive heard (and witnessed) people don't complain at highstakes about slow games so why change it there because a selected few is to slow at midstakes?

And rec's are used to live environment, isn't online much faster anyway for them? Some aren't stressed if its fast tables and will have a worse gaming experience by timing out more often (quite a few regs play 2-4 tables) ?

Lastly for those complaining, why not simply tell them 'you can play many more tables if you think single-/two- tabling is too slow, most of our users play more then 1 table and online pokers is constructed to play multiple tables at once. Onetabling is what you are used to in landbased casinos but we have software that support this awesome multitabling technology. Did you know some of our pros play over 20 tables at once online? Are you ready to challenge yourself to more tables at once?'

You also say you restrict tables as I suggest for those playing to slow, Karls_Hungus (slowest ever?) say he was never restricted, just called a few times about the issue. If he was not restricted, who is restricted? How many plo grinders have been restricted totally (and what stakes)?

Wouldnt it be bether taking out the worst offenders (by capping the slowest players amount of tables) instead of changing the whole system if its the reasoning behind the change is what you say? Obvs if there is another agenda like raking faster, pls be honest about it.

Can we please prove that PLO is different then NLHE too Stars just like FLHE are different then NLHE (even they at least have same amount of cards) so they can demonstrate its appropriate to have a separate rake structure for PLO?

A raw comparition to FLHE playing styles vs NLHE and vs PLO could also be very interesting over big datasamples.

Can you please answer why FLHE have a different rake structure then NLHE/PLO?

Can you then please explain why the same arguments for different rake structures isn't valid for PLO then?

Why specific is PLO and NLHE grouped together besides its just always been like that?

Why shouldn't such a separate game with totally different fold to 3-4 bets, different betting structure, more players to flops and higher amounts of hands played have different rake structure just like flhe?

And please not link to Steve's post about rake without at least answering bolded.



///


Lastly Im one tabling 25-50 right now (table Tergeste) and its not painfully slow at all, and I still believe slow its a midstakes problem (that also can be tried solved by other means = capping offenders tables).

How many complaints from different users about HSPLO tablespeed have it been and on what stakes?

And why do you think waste majority of HSPLO tables started are normal ones and not fast ones?

I can't speak for the changes in timebank, since that doesnt effect me that much at my stakes / number of tables.

I would like to point out that what Skjervøy says regarding rake is 100% legit, and it's easy to get pissed when PS-reps link to the other rakethread, and proceeds to say this:

2) The average amount of rake taken per hand in PLO is higher than in similar stakes NLHE games because there is more action in PLO.

When at the same time acknowleding that FLHE should be raked differently. This is so ******ed it's like watching kids argue.

Nick,

Can you also comment on why no distinction between 100bb tables and deep ante tables with regard to time to act please? I think you'd agree that there are more complex decisions both pre and postflop when playing 250bb or more deep? When you looked at the PLO data you refer to above did you break it by different table types?