Shane, I made the point privately to JTS about his comment and how it was absurd and he agreed that the comment was incorrect. There's no need to insult me over it, but clearly being a good player is much more important than being good in the lobby. If you're not good you can't even think about sitting at the levels that you're talking about. If you don't know anything about the lobby but you are good, you will still profit fairly well. If you mean lobby registering is a skill that has increased in value in the last 6 months, I doubt you would find anybody disagreeing with you.
Also, ucnat, points about hypers and regs are good, but I don't believe you included the 40%+ VIP many players at those levels are receiving as well. So the line is probably a bit lower than that (unless you included it and I missed it, if so sorry about that).
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-As far as the Stars/FTP comparisons: What I meant was that Stars basically offers the same setup for HU stngos as FTP did (stake levels, turbos, hypers, reg speeds ect) with the only big difference I know of being the lobby system. You would think that since Stars has more players and presumably more money on the site then FTP ever did that it would translate to more total HU stngos running regardless of any points you made. They ratio of total site players and HU sitngos running has always leaned heavily towards FTP even before Black Friday. More regs migrating over shouldn't have a negative impact on the actual games that run on Stars currently.
I don't think you understand. Full Tilt was operating a company 100s millions of dollars in the red. It's pretty easy to give many, many more people the opportunity to gamble it up in heads up sngs (or any game) when they literally deposit, get funds on FTP, but don't get charged, lose, then repeat the process for months. This is money that should have NEVER entered into the player pool. If Stars decided to float players hundreds of millions of dollars and decided not to cover their responsibility to player funds after 100s of millions government seizures as well... well I can envision a much fishier poker room for awhile (until it imploded and everybody with funds on the site basically gets nothing). Full Tilt basically wasn't real. If the ownership had to keep funds segregated and cover all deposits that went into the site, promos would've been cut back, rake would've increased to cover margins and seizures and many new depositors in 2010 would have never deposited funds they didn't have (or didn't intend to lose) onto the site.
(Edit: Also, FTP had super turbos, Stars did not. When you add a very fast game to the site, a game that takes 2-3 min per, versus one that takes 10 minutes per, when you compare the overall HUSNGs running to the overall amount of players on the site, the site with the 2-3 minute avg time games will have an advantage in that metric).
I'm done talking about the unlimited vs increased lobbies. I'm not against more lobbies, I'm against unlimited lobbies. Stars is happy to see the lively debate I'm sure, it gives them more information to make decisions. We're not wasting anybody's time here, we're all here for a purpose, as players that want the games improved, as a poker room that wants to increase the distance between them and the next best place for heads up sngs, and to us USA players (or in my case, somebody whose livelihood depends on heads up sngs being around and profitable), who have a direct interest in PokerStars improving heads up sngs over time (it sets the worldwide bar higher, which does impact what will eventually be regulated US online poker rooms). When a US facing poker site says "what should we do about HUSNGs?" one of the first things they will look at is how PokerStars does things.