Hello all,

Rounding off the week by looking at the incoming posts since my last post:

I was talking about a situation where clicking the register button would be enough of a +EV proposition for you to decide it is worth your time to play. Presuming that is the case, any solution that incentivizes the recreational players to stick around for longer should be in your interest.

However, at the highest stakes, I doubt there would be enough liquidity to implement such a system we are considering here. It would delay matches too long while waiting for 4 players to register instead of 2.

First of all, I don't agree that this style of lobby is appropriate for HU cash. The reason is that in that game, you could quit every time you didn't like the opponent you ended up with. In a SnG that is obviously not the case.

Banning Sharky is something that is very difficult to enforce, and as long as that is the case, we feel it is better to look for alternative solutions.

As for why we haven't banned Sharky, it has partly to do with the difficulties in enforcing such a ban (as mentioned above), and partly because it doesn't seem to prevent anyone from getting into the games.

Thanks,
Baard

I just don't get how banning sharky would help recreation players to play more vs each other. They will be able to opensit more? Dont think so, there are enough regs so lobby will be snap taken anyway. Even if they opensit, suddenly they wont get sat because there is no sharky? 15 regs will try register manually and will be just watching lobby and waiting till fish get sat by fish and try take next free lobby lol?

Only good thing about banning sharky is that it will reduce number of regs, weak regs will be forced to play other regs so some % wont be able to beat games anymore and will be forced to move down.

thats exacly my point
isnt that a part of poker?
table selecting, choosing who you r gonna play(to some extent)?

btw
how do the high stake regs feel about this
if they had to play each other all day because of a battlenetstyle lobby and cant share lobbies anymore

that
and the fact that they have to watch the lobby instead of just waiting for a lobby/fish

even if a reg is weak he stil beating the fish
if most of the weak regs are moving down or quitting that means more fish/recs for the other players

+2

ok the only reason you dont do anything against sharky is, because:

thats a good reason

how this is good? I better focus on games than on lobby.

use an auto reg script or tableninja or something like that and you are good to go

First you say this and now this? You are just changing programms.

using sharky to avoid players and getting in a waiting list with all the other regs waiting for a lobby/fish
and using a free script/program that registers you vs every1 is not really the same is it?

How about a Hu hyper event in Scoop? First to 3 against same player and winner proceeds to next round?

that sounds like the best event ever

+1 awesome idea

+2 That sounds amazing! I think recreational players would also love that!

+3

+4

+5
Would def play that event

Hello all,

This is the Q&A for this week.

Game selection has been a part of poker for as long as the game has been around, but that doesn't mean that it always will be. The choosing of opponents seems to be causing quite a lot of problems at the moment. If we can't solve the problems in other ways, we may need to remove the choosing.

Sounds like fun! The SCOOP program was set quite a long time before this suggestion, so we would have to look at it for future events. We would also need to develop the technical side of it, but I will forward the suggestion to the team responsible for scheduled tournaments.

Rematch Window

Finally, without making any promises of when the work will be done, I would like to present a list of the current issues with the rematch window. If you could be so kind as to confirm that this is the correct understanding of the situation I would certainly appreciate it. If I’ve left issues out, please point them out!

• Players are prompted for a rematch and allowed to both accept, even if one player doesn’t have enough funds for the match.
• Not all players want to see their balance in the rematch window
• Players can’t take notes while the rematch window is open
• The countdown timer until the rematch option expires could be more visually appealing
• When at least one player times out on the rematch option, the window remains open indefinitely until closed by the player
• There’s a 5 second delay after an opponent times out before the rematch window can be closed
• The rematch window prevents other tables from taking focus when it is your turn to act. Particularly troublesome for players who are stacking.

Once the list of issues is finalized, we can discuss possible solutions.

Thanks
Baard

Emailed this idea to stars a few weeks ago I suggest everyone interested do so as well, best of 7 SCOOP/TCOOP/WCOOP HU Hyper events would be sick

I dont see the problem are you sure this isnt a vocal minority. You can have continuous action againts regs or casual players I think the people complaining are overreacting because there are a lot more regs in the ecosystem.

Adding an option to hide the balance would be much appreciated.

Yes, very annoying when you're attempting to write notes on the last hand of a match.

I thought that was lag. If it's actually a "feature" it's an annoying one.

Yes.

I've bolded the two most important ones (at least for me). About the delay - what happens if opponent just click X on the rematch button? If it's not the same functionality like clicking decline - these two should be one and the same, not waiting for him to timeout after he's actually closed everything.

I'd like
- rematch for ipad, iphone (not because I use it but it's annoying when your opponent wants to play you for a session and can't do it
- euro hypers

Lower the rake and make it zoom style up to 60s. Every player ends up in a pool and gets a random opponent. At 100s+ i have no solution. Maybe have 4 lobbies instead of 2.

I like the idea of players ending up in a pool and get random opponent at the lower stakes.

I also think lowering the rake with x amount per rematch would be awesome (esp in the higher stakes) in so many ways. It would really encourage reg battles and if its done in a cool way so the rec players easily sees it in the rematch window they might like the idea of playing one more time for a little bit cheaper.

Other than that all good sugestions for the rematch window. After that gets fixed I would like to see improvements regarding speed/delay; Im ready button, no time delay after first hand, shorter delays between levels etc.

EDIT: Also, isnt 30 seconds i little bit to much thinking time for a rematch? In 95%+ of the times someone rematches it happens in the first 15 seconds.