I can say from personal experience this is absolutely not the case.

chadders you would sell your soul for a free pint of beer and slice of pizza. 101% authentic weasel who in real life would not last a day in my world. I am sure one day you will be remembered eternally in a dictionary with some derogatory word created soley for yourself. even david price could knock you out

That's such a great insult I can only laugh

Yeah that's a very valid argument, and I think it's definitely true to an extent. Otoh though, I still think for lower limits, 60-200s, if we polled a lot of the regulars who are not sitting new regs/unknowns moving up, their response would simply be that playing good players doesnt maximize their utility. Any system that allows games selection between regs ultimately regresses to the current lobby state more or less, because we maximize our utility by playing fish. If we think of the lobby system as a game, it would be very easy to prove that the equilibrium solution is to play fish. Think of this, there is a 10man player pool , and 5 fish, so, each player has 1/2 a fish, everyone is committed to stopping new players from moving up, now one day a new player attempts to move up. Now, if this new player is allowed to move up, everyone has 11/5 fish, if everyone sits this new player and he is not allowed to get fish, everyone still has 1/2 a fish but take a lower overall utility from having to substitute games vs fish, for games vs this new reg, now if one player deviates from this co-operation, they suddenly capture more games vs fish, because while everyone else is playing the new regular, they can get more games vs fish ( assuming a finite restriction on games being played by each player ). So, I think it's quite clear from this example that the optimal response is to deviate and capture a slightly higher utility ( I'm asuming that most people want to play fish, not regs, a view point I feel is supported by the current game conditions * also assuming rational utility maximizing agents which I'm certain we can make a strong argument isn't the case among regs but w/e ) and this is done by not playing the new regular, and playin more fish while free loading on the players who do attempt to discourage the new reg from moving up. So, without guaranteed co-operative play in the lobby game ( which I think is more or less what you get at 1ks???) nobody actually should pick up the slack in playing more vs fish when you can freeroll on someone else playing them instead, and in playing them, ultimately guarantee that of the population of regulars, you're the guy taking the hit in equity by trying to stop players moving up. We're very bad at long term foresight and maximizing/understanding our long term EV ( i think i could also make a very strong argument for this being the equilibrium over a much longer period where regs continue to move in and ultimately the games degrade based on the unpredictability of future events )

When I express concern over the longevity of the games, it has nothing to do with player pool liquidity. The current state where we allow players to game select goes a long way to keeping the avg level of play very low, and the games a lot softer. If we incentivise regs to play one another/study/improve we're not only reducing the expectation each time we play a reg, but over time, the recs in the player pool adopt many of the same strategies that regulars do ( look at current betsizing trends/preflop ranges etc, the difference between fish and regs are minimal in a lot of cases, esp among regfish that account for a lot of our winnings) and as regs begin to sure up many of the leaks/weaknesses in their game and get closer to more optimal play, then fish will begin to mimc these ranges/betsizings and our edge vs them begins to evaporate almost as quickly as the edge of a "good" reg vs a weaker one ( who either got better or left under our new conditions ). So, i think a system where we force people to play vs tougher opponents, ultimately will lead to a much shorter life expectancy for how long the games remain beatable to an extent that they're worth playing.

Just my 2cents

1. The promotion is not that attractive,especially if someone play $60 or under.
2. Battlenet style lobby system would kill the game above $100, you'll end up playing against good regs most of the time.

I think current HU cash lobby system needs improvement too , ZOOM style HU cash lobby would be a good solution which recreational players would like a lot.

Battlenet is a terrible idea, taking away game selection makes husngs so unattractive. Try doing that in other forms of poker and see how quickly people hate it.

wut, why no love for this? Best idea i've seen

Well it's hard to say how this would potentially work with the few details we have so far. We need Pokerstars to really clarify their plan before we can speculate on how it may or may not affect things.

What I would say is that Stars have made it clear they want to improve the recreational player's experience and clearly this is an attempt at doing so rather than an attempt to increase reg v reg action and thus rake/profit as some have proposed. However, what annoys me is that other games have been left untouched for many years despite a much more predatory environment.

Also one concern from the side of Chadders and the other reps seems to be protecting the longevity of the games which is of course paramount, with no recreational players we have no games at all. However, I think that maybe on their end they have misjudged the situation and maybe panicked almost at the thought of games drying up in the long run. Feel free to correct me if that wasn't one of the main motivations in proposing these changes, obviously the future in this regard is open to debate.

Finally, it might help us as regs to understand the perspective of the recreational players. I believe I'm right in assuming that Stars consult with reps from that side as well and it would definitely help in our understanding if we could get some views and opinions from these guys. Do they really feel like the husng lobbies are predatory and are playing less as a result?


I think this has potential to be good but that is only assuming regs have control over their game selection. Completely removing our ability to game select and forcing reg on reg action would be extremely unfair. It would help a lot if Stars could clarify their proposal further and if the reps could make themselves known as chadders is the only one so far.

At this time, PokerStars does not prohibit the use of table and
tournament registration software such as SharkyStrator.

As these software pieces are merely executing a series of
commands, none of which involve any poker logic, the
classification of these tools are similar to that of any other
permitted macro or hotkey like program.

Just leave the lobbies alone, most of the world is in recession now so there is less recreational money around. How are people able to get duped into pokerstars goal of driving players margins down. Money pokerstars makes its pure greed. Players make books, create software, charge money for training, usually carping on about sharing and giving something back. BULLSHAT, they are almost always doing it because they are sell out merchants. Its not hard to spot those in this life who would do anything for a dollar. The lederer scums off this world. Pokerstars may as well send the regulars application forms out for jobs at McDonalds if they continue to squeeze margins creating a communist poker enovironment

this part is just hilarious(also untrue probably)... hahaha

it´s no secret that Jossel2008 was one of the other reps

please please please make HU CAP games a king of the hill format.

hahahahaha dead lobby. You mean a competitive lobby where the best make the most money and the weak have to move down to where they respect their bumhunting?

Infinite lobbies

PLUS

built in auto sit functionality

PLUS

reduced rake (or increased rb) for reg wars



This way, strong regs have incentives to play weaker regs to protect their lobbies. At the sametime those strong regs can open sit without having to worry about registering with the built in auto sit function.

The recreational players get to open sit this way, also they can pick which opponent they want to play. Recreational players play for fun, so I'd take a wild guess that they won't complain if lobbies were set up this way.

The weaker regs are forced to either improve or move down.

If its more recs we want how about promotions to attact recs rather than regs?

During the golden sng promo the traffic was great new recs were appearing every hour. We hardly ever have any promos on husng. Promos should be a frequent thing not once a year, if you have promos that can reward anyone at husng not just the high stake regs like this promotion you will find the volume of recs would increase.

Things like play each other 250 times in 1 month and happy hour only really benefit those chasing biggest bonuses and playing higher stakes. Give promos to encourage players who do not play so often who do not chase rake bonuses.

Volume of recs has gone right down and a lot of that is down to sharky allowing every single user to be a bum hunter.

w.r.t enable share option + battlenet

I believe this is the way that will most encourage a competitive environment whilst not causing an outcry amongst the regs who hate the idea of battlenet. The high stakes with a battlenet would be such that people would just communicate via skype to create the same environment there is now, which would basically be a replication of the one lobby system eventually.

From a recs pov he can assume the people sharing are friends, you can even advertise it like that. The semi regs that may know the inner workings of pro's relationships will realise what is going on but its not different to the lobby monopoly we have for high stakes regs atm.

In the lower stakes there player pools are large enough that there will be heavy competition and would be somewhat sustained by the nature of the default not share option.

I think one of the best things about this is you don't have to worry about tweaking rake, game generation time, or having systems based on traffic. Any miscalculation in rake or game generation time will no doubt destroy the games unless it was swiftly fixed.

If you want to encourage competition you can cap the number of shares people have or reset shares at fixed time intervals. You could make this number low and easy to toggle so that in a session people would be able to share with enough ppl to keep them happy but not all so there would still be sustainable competition but also dynamic based on traffic, so for ex 3 reg friens are on they can avoid each other, 12 are and reg on reg action is certain because shares are capped at say 10 ppl per stake.

pokerstars introducing hyper HUSNG to the site is when things started to change. how are hyper heads up sng good for the game? the rake is half but they probably run four or five times faster than turbo speed. the non pros lost their money a lot faster, its like in football having no grass roots and all the money going into the premier league. Now after a couple of years with the cancer getting bigger pokerstars obviously have no regrets as short term they made loads more in fees. But now its going wrong they want to just squeeze margins of people who play for a profit. Hyper HUSNG are the cancer of the HUSNG world similar to the digital roulette machines being the cancer of the bookmakers. A couple of players who run coaching sites, sell videos etc obviously love them as they make money. Players will receive coaching and the hourly rate for most isn't great. Unfortunately the human race is mainly full of followers, very few leaders. So a couple of people can influence a larger number usually for personal greed. INDEPENDENT views are needed, not those of people with bigger businesses relying on the outcome nor a union style block vote, this is not the Labour party..... even tho the pokerstars ideology would seem is to have a communist style site.

This battlenet system simply will not work if you are going to replace the old system with it, its a dead before its even started. Loads of regs will just leave and that will mean less rake for stars.

This in no way at all helps recs, if you want more recs offer things to them not create a system that benefits the elite players and promotions that benefit the high stake rakers.

Everything was fine prior to sharky, I was even living in Thailand with a slower connection and had no problems with the games, now its just ridiculous and its scaring away the recs to other games. Offer them something to come back and just ban auto reg software. A script is one thing but having software scan the lobbies and sit players is just a disgrace.

I agree we need as many views as possible so I'm plugging this thread wherever I can. I would hate for statements like yours to dominate the discussion as I'm sure you feel the same about statements by me.

Fair statement regarding the promo, we prob didnt realise in our meeting how hard it was for low stakes players to clock this volume vs each other, the targets should be smaller.

I have addressed close to every concern with my idea and you are still just flat out saying it wont work without giving much logic or reasoning about the problems it will create that will make this failure happen.

Yep, unfortunately the population of 2+2 hu players is probably less than 1% of actual hu stars players and almost all of them are regs.

So what, anyway atm there are ~10-20 regs waiting for lobby all the time/not playing, if they leave what changes?
Thats because then was way less regs than now.

So what? So then there is less rake for stars meaning less money which means its a bad idea for them to implement this system.

Exactly, there was way less regs then because now everyone can move up because of sharky and just get in line, not many would dare to sit first when there was no sharky because you just knew you were going to get sat by a better reg. It has also created hundreds of bum hunters at any stake its used on.

Majority of my games I sit first, say 90%. So I am not a bum hunter with a gripe. I know personally of a few players over the last year who emailed pokerstars about sharkystrator and generally this was the kind of reply they got back..

At this time, PokerStars does not prohibit the use of table and
tournament registration software such as SharkyStrator.

As these software pieces are merely executing a series of
commands, none of which involve any poker logic, the
classification of these tools are similar to that of any other
permitted macro or hotkey like program.

Obviously it was bad and players knew it before it became apparent to all. Pokerstars are totally fine with it tho, unless they think of a system to make more profit squeezing regs even more then they wont allow it. I absolutely hate all kinds of additional software tools for poker, people needing a number in the corner saying how many bb they have or a computer telling them at what streets people are betting and all other stats. That's what your brain is for, even tho I know I would make more money I will probably never ever use that kind of software as I like to use my brain and not depend on electronically collected stats.