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Hello all,

As usual, there are some more questions to deal with since my last post:

You are probably right in that the ‘Add Table’ feature would increase the number of players who play more than one table at a time. However, I simply tried to illustrate how we affect more players by prioritizing other development tasks.

Hopefully, our Support department was able to help you with this, but if you have not yet received a response please PM me your userid and I will look into this for you.

If you by ‘sitting in the lobby’ mean that you are register for a tournament and get disconnected before you get an opponent, this will in many cases be taken care of by the Auto Unregister feature that is in place. However, if there is a very short time between when you disconnect and when your opponent arrives, the situation you describe will take place. I am unsure what can be done about this, but I will ask around to see if I can get an answer for you.

In the meantime, if any of you can PM me some tournament ID’s where you encountered this problem, I will have a closer look myself.

Thanks,
Baard

thats what happens when somebody screws you with ddos.
so solving this issue will give us time to fire up our backup connections and making it impossible for those ddosing basterds to blind us down in a matter of seconds.

Would still like to see a SCOOP/WCOOP/TCOOP etc hyper HU tournament. Something along the lines of a first to 5 advances to the next round. Think it would be a cool idea

But then again if we can't get an add another table button I have low expectations ^

how long do you need to be disconnected for PS to unreg you from your tournaments?

Because recently I got ddos while sitting in 3 lobby and after reviewing the tournament history I saw that there was more than one minute between the start of two of them.

1+ min seems way too long of a time at 60-100s imo, it would be much more useful to be unreged after 15s or so.

Hello all,

Before you all are off to your favourite holiday destination, here is some food for thought that you can take with you to the beach:

As I mentioned in my previous post, a PM with a few Tournament ID’s where this happened to you would be helpful in order to look into the issue

I agree this would be fun. Unfortunately, this would take some development to implement, and since this would not be a widely used feature, I don’t think it will be prioritized anytime soon.

For HU tournaments, it should only be 10 seconds. If you think that this did not happen, please send me some Tournament ID’s by PM, and I will ask our QA team to have a look at it.

Thanks,
Baard

what was the reason for the 2x lobbies at the 30-60 turbo games?

It's just temporary, due to some maintenance work we are doing.

Thanks,
Baard

Add a table feature please. You cant keep postponing it for god knows what, 4 years i found a post about pokerstars agreeing to develop it at some point but low on the priority list. Thats just ****ting in your customers face

*** Cross-posted *** from proposed software rule changes thread

When players register for a Spin&Go or a HUSNG I would like to see a Zoom-like lobby alternative to the existing lobbys:

* Click register and you join the list of other players playing Spin&Go/HUSNG at that stake for the number of entries/games you want at once.

* As in Zoom Pokerstars randomnly selects from the pool who goes into which Spin&Go/HUSNG

* As in Zoom Pokerstars has the player pool visible to non-entrants so you can choose to play if you think the pool is profitable or not just as in Zoom.

* When a player busts a game they auto-start in a new game with the same characteristics.

* in-game, a dialog box equivalent to Zoom's "sitout next BB" allows the player to select something like "sitout HUSNG/Spin&Go pool when Zero chips". This would leave the player in the pool of players and when all games are finished they could "stand up" to leave the pool.

Retain the current lobbys for players who prefer that style and introduce the Zoom-style lobby for players like me who prefer Zoom's entry registration.

A trial for zoom lobbies would be a great idea, so long as potential winrates (success) and popularity were the key focus.

The last thing most players want (winning or losing ones) is to ruin the potential profit in this game. Winning players earn a living and many losing players aspire to be winning players (and some turn into winners).

The nice thing about zoom cash is that it provides faster action, thus allowing the potential for equal to or greater profits. In SNGs, zoom style registration would not do that, it would simply match you up with someone random for an entire match, rather than changing you out every hand.

So the same primary benefits for zoom cash may not necessarily be realized for sngs.

I think there's a good chance zoom lobbies for husng would increase interest in 30s+ for a lot of recs or regs who want to try the format. Having to use sharky and battle exclusively the cartel isn't attractive for most players.

The zoom like pairings in spin and gos are part of the appeal.

would love to see zoomlobbies, still i dont think they would do the trick. just more money for guys that program registration-tools.

Zoom lobbies could kill registration tools, IF they sufficiently made it difficult to predict.

However, doing that would likely require 6+ players to register a single HUSNG before it launched. That's not really ideal from a "get a game instantly" standpoint, which appeals to all types of players currently (can get an instant game in any HUSNG currently, probably about the same for Spins).

The aim and purpose of Zoom lobbies would be to definitely kill third party registration tools, making playing conditions fairer for all players in the pool to have an equal chance of being matched with all other players in the pool for the number of games they want to play over and over and over without dialogs, without ever leaving the pool.

In a Zoom lobby, it should not be like the current Spin&Go registration which is open to manipulation by third party group-collusive tools.

1. Players would enter a Zoom-like pool from which they repeatedly automatically re-enter HUSNGs and Spin&Go's without any need for user dialog that third party tools could manipulate until the user chooses to sit out and leave the Zoom-registry pool.

2. Even if the first batch of tournaments started immediately the player first enters the pool any third party tool could only influence this first batch of tournaments as subsequent ones happen automatically until a player chooses to leave the pool without any possibility of third party tool manipulation.

3. In order to stop a third party tool from having a parasitical queue of, say regulars, sitting on top of the Pokerstars Zoom queue of recreationals Pokerstars could enforce a ratholing-type rule/anti-bumhunting rule: once you leave the Zoom pool you cannot re-enter for, say 2 hours. Or a more flexible rule allowing recreationals to leave and re-enter whenever they want but locking out for 2 hours any "abuser" of the queue trying to manipulate it for bumhunting. So any and every user of a SpinWiz-like tool would quickly find themselves locked out for 2 hours as their permanent status. I'm not sure how you would codify that but I can see many differenet ways that would work. The important thing is for Pokerstars to recognise the issue and pre-emptively act to prevent queue manipulation.

Higher stakes small pools are a problem but I predict lower stakes pools would improve greatly over what we see today. Recs would come flooding back to lower stakes if they believed they had an equal chance of being sat with anyone in the whole pool instead of a snowball's chance of being sat with anyone other than a strong reg about to eat them alive.

That's not necessarily more fair, it's just an opinion on what is more fair.

We've had players in this forum say that refusing the action of a player is fair. I disagree with that, but there are points to that too. I don't believe randomness is necessarily the fairest either in HUSNGs or Spins.

Assuming the same rake on competitive selection (the current format) versus random games, you'll 1) Have to wait longer for a game and 2) Risk your winrate being reduced (in simple terms, the #1 player having to play the #2 player any amount of time versus never).

The biggest advantage of the current system (in both HUSNGs and Spins I believe), is that there is competition AND high rewards amongst the professionals. That is due to being able to fight off weaker professionals, and enjoy softer games after putting in that work. This is never a guarantee, which is also nice, because it means a professional has to continually work hard to keep other professionals from picking them off (this describes the current HUSNG situation accurately).

If you're a bad player, randomness is just going to mean waiting longer to get a game in which you're a losing player. Changing the registration process is not going to change a losing player into a winner.

But if you're a good player, it might be risking some of your livelihood here.

The suggestion to trial some truly random options for players, while keeping the old, and then looking at the results before making any permanent decisions seems far wiser to me.

If randomness hurts winrates of professionals and "instant action" can't be guaranteed, then it seems like a huge failure to me.

I don't think recs went anywhere. The only real thing that caused low stakes HUSNGs to have less recs was that spins were introduced. If you combine Spins recs and HUSNG recs at lower stakes, I would wager that you end up with a better situation than HUSNGs alone in the last year or two.

Also, $3.50-7s, maybe even $15s, 3rd party registration tools aren't really being used.

In HUSNGs (Spins haven't been around too long), the only reason $30s and $60s groups formed was because there were too many professionals sitting around refusing to play each other and just bumhunting losing players. Now they have to fight each other to get into a more select group for that ability to play losing players. No free rides.

It may not be perfect, but it's far superior to what was going on before. Randomness could improve low stakes, I'm not going to say I can predict it perfectly, but the downside risk is huge, so it should be approached carefully and experimentally until we see positive results.

It is a recreational player's view of what is fair: an equal chance of sitting all players in the pool. It is also arguably a legal definition of what is fair as a seller of services (Pokerstars) to a consumer.

Properly coded a Zoom pool makes getting games faster not slower. You are talking about delay with start of first game but repeat games occur automatically while a player chooses to stay in the pool so a player can select when entering the pool I want to play for the next half hour or I want to play 100 games at 5 at a time or, by default, I want to play repeat games until I click on any table "sit out of pool at game end on all my Zoom entries."

That is what was done for Zoom introduction for cash games. That is what I suggest for HUSNG and Spin&Go's. All players get to choose the format of their choice: zoom or non-zoom.

With Zoom cash some professionals hate it, others love it, others are indifferent and play both.

I'd be surprised if Zoom-style registration and repeat games for HUSNGs and Spin&Go's didn't also result in current player pools having diverse views.

If the sum of the whole is greater Pokerstars win but some individual players may be worse off while others are better off.

I contend that greater choice should mean more total recreational players.


I think coded correctly "instant" action will be quicker than today, not slower but let's see.

Supporting my point that extra choice grows (or slows the decline anyway) of the rec pool.

However, recs believe that the Spin&Go's registration is random and Pokerstars emails to clients support that but that is not true because third party software is able to parasitically separate regs from recs, manipulating the queue.

I fear recs will go on strike if they find out and discuss the non-random nature of today's effective Spin&Go registration.

Pokerstars should act to introduce Zoom-style registration and repeat games before recreationals find out en mass that Spin&Go's are not random seats, contrary to impressions and Pokerstars emails on the subject.

This is what was said before Zoom cash was introduced. There was immense fear amongst cash game players (Ironic that people who make a living from risk resist change like arch-conservatives but anyway).

But the sky didn't fall on cash games. Some regs prospered, others ceased to play. Different types of recreational players emerged, others disappeared.

Poker is always changing. I'd prefer to embrace change and be the agent of change for that matter. Getting ahead of trends produces a degree of control (if illusory) that resisting change can't.

- Good point about the pool RE speed improvements. A modest delay of 30 min would likely be plenty to discourage leaving and rejoining randomly. This is actually a major point you made that makes me more optimistic than ever that actual randomness could be a positive thing.

- Spins have never been random. Software just automates what players would do without it, take turns registering. It's blind registration. And software is being used by 100s of non professionals currently (at least in Spins, not so much in HUSNGs). That doesn't make it good or bad, but it's just clarifying your point about what software does to recs vs regs. It allows two players that want to avoid each other to avoid each other, while opening themselves up to someone else sitting them if they want to sit them. Anyone that feels they are being sat too much can stop using it. It doesn't make anything non blind except when two people choose to use software. Games are blind between a software user and a non user or two non users. It's not really random though if you just tell your friend when you have registered. It's not like Zoom in that sense.

- The software does benefit the professionals though. But that's kind of the point. Make registration more efficient, rewards the best at the game. That's the point of (some) of the divisions too. In some of these games (HUSNGs for example), a rec isn't even impacted. It's more about which professionals end up facing the weak players, the professionals fight it out rather than all sharing. Maybe being forced to fight it out randomly is more fair and/or more profitable, or maybe it's inefficient and will cause a dip in profits for all.

- More choice may mean more or less. It works both ways on service offerings, in and out of poker.

- I think we're mostly in agreement though, that a trial of some zoom style games could be a nice way to see if the grass is greener on the other side.

Thanks.

Are you aware that Pokerstars support responds to player query that Spin&Go seating is random? (There was a direct quote in the proposed changes to 3rd party software thread)

So there is a direct contradiction between the impression recreational players are given by the Spin&Go lobby and by Pokerstars support if they ask and reality.

Yes, we're mostly in agreement I think.

Clearly, random seating would mean recs have a much higher chance of being sat with someone who they are on a comparable skill level with (another rec) which probably happens close to 0% of the time at any reasonable stakes right now, right?

The % of being sat by 2 regs and crushed will be higher also