Even if those things were banned, there would still be some people using untraceable HUDs (e.g. Google Glass) or seating scripts. And since Stars client can't monitor what are you doing real time, people will exploit this. And no, I don't have a seating script.

The change can be dramastic for $50/$100 CAP games (which run a little more often that non-ante $50/$100 40-100bb afaik), since there would be almost zero guys, willing to battle there without a mark. The 40-100 tables are not that good in Zoom, bc good shorties might join it and prevent 100bb regs from battling (or force them to buy-in for 40bb, making it 40bb CAP effectively). Thus I really believe the amount of ante games should increase, whilst non-ante games should take a hit. That sounds kind of fair, even though I will not benefit from these changes (yes, clueless shortstack itt ).

Showing only the total number of players [and maybe tables] (not entries!) seems like a good idea to prevent the predatory atmosphere. Say, a whale joins the pool, 20 players follow him, he leaves and the whole pool leaves as well. That would be even worse than a current situation, where the whale leaves and the table breaks a few hands later. But there will still be an observe option (if you delete it as well, what will railbirds do?).

Another thing that can happen is that recs will stop playing 50/100 and either play 100/200 or 25/50. Which is not really good for the regs, cause I believe recs will choose the latter (and cause there still aren't CAP tables higher than $50$/100, come on!).

+1
50% of my action these days are 3-5 handed reg games.

Pretty much anything that lets me just boot up poker tables and focus on playing seems good. I guess I have the attitude of a recreational player though :/

It just sends me on insane tilt when a huge contributor to beating the games is politics/angleshooting/expensive-hard-to-get-maybe-illegal-software, rather than being good at poker. It seems like zoom will make it so that being good at poker is important again, which I think would be a nice change.

At the moment the time to act at Zoom is significantly lower than at normal high stakes ring game tables. I see absolutely no reason for it to be this way and it is really tilting to play for pots of several thousand $$ and have so little time to act. Will you also bring the time to act at high stakes Zoom in line with the normal high stakes ring game tables?

Amen

I hope you guys realize Zoom only works when you can't see who's in the pool. Else it gets bumhunted hardcore, obviously.

ban all software that helps you plz especially hud which can make people pretty much auto drive plays instead of playin poker

+1

Agree 100%.

+1, except it's possible they come up with a must move, limited seat change system that could work okay too.

*** cross posting what I wrote in high stakes PLO thread ***

There is a recurring question asked in the PLO forums..."Are you a pre-rakeback PLO winner?"

The data shows that the rake is too high and the returns pre-rakeback too low. Everyone saying Zoom only as the future are not understanding that Zoom only is fine, if and only if, some structural things get fixed first. If you got a group of impartial poker players together and told them you were creating a "fast fold" game and wanted their opinions about it from a health of the game perspective, those poker players would tell you that you better put an ante on that game.

Zoom as it stands right now, without antes, is a nit fest. PLO win rates (and NLH) are already bad enough. You are fated to a future of nittier games with lower win rates unless you add an ante and probably deepen the stack size of Zoom.

PLO pre-rakeback winning is already hard enough. If you don't fix the structural problems with Zoom, good luck in a Zoom-only future.

Isn't tablestarters only superior to zoom only, or at least offer both (given certain regs and recs prefere having a table dynamic metagame etc) ? Obv this would only work with an enforced 18 hands+ rule, but just making it outomatically take all blinds for 3 orbits shouldn't be a problem to implement/

Friend gave me 7 day dataminez NLZ500 hands. Those hands was datamined so that means that it should show real rake take numbers. Can't provide similar report for regular games, because I don't datamine or buy hands, so don't have hands for non NLZ500.

BTW do not get confused - that is just ~320k hands (x6, because there is 6 players).



Yeah, pushing everything to zoom is easier than disabling easy seat, right? :|

We will deploy Zoom pools for all games we currently offer for regular tables.

For PLO, this means we will spread both 100BB & Ante 250BB 6max tables.

For NLHE, this means we will spread 20BB CAP, 100BB, & Ante 250BB 6max tables.

So much this. I can't believe people ITT claiming rec players will suddenly love Zoom when it becomes mandatory. Zoom's been around for a long time and most recs still aren't playing it at small & mid stakes. I'm pretty sure implementing Zoom-only across all stakes (obv stars long term goal) would actually drive away rec players not make them happy.

This is a very bold claim.

I agree that zoom is a totally different poker than on regular tables. I think pokerstars should try to find other solution to all these angleshooting problems

+1
50/100 ante reg 3-4-5 max ( and sometimes even 6max) games are running a lot since summer, and if zoom would be done the bad way , it will kill most of those games. Im not really sure what is the good way to do it atm, hope you (stars) got the solution .

zoom500 is unbeatable for average regs in long run, ninja good post.
Fish will not be playing at only zoom poker room.

The action at 50/100 NL Ante as of late has been great, reg on reg action, table starting etc. I think stars should not make the change to this particular stake/game.

Maybe you should do a survey ?

I dont think you imagine how big the impact is gonna be on the state of the game... zoom is NOT poker.

Sauce said everything, the problem are the softwares.. Being good at poker isnt as important as it used to be when there is so many softwares guiding you to a 3bb/100 winrate. For christ sake, they give so much of an edge that I am scared just to name them...

As you are aware, poker is a game of incomplete information. Whoever has the most information about the opponent is at a significant advantage. When that information is obtained through game play, while you are gaining information on your opponent, your opponent is also gaining information on you. This natural balance keeps the game fair.

When the information is obtained through datamining (sites that track players without you playing in the games), it does not come with the observer giving up equivalent information about themselves. We think that this is unbalanced, and consequently, we prohibit datamining sites and services.

At this time, PokerStars does not consider Head Up Displays (HUDs) and personal hand history trackers to provide an unfair advantage. Their function is to collate data that you have already observed through your game play, as described above. They do not give you data you should not have, but instead simply make accessing the data you already saw easier.

Our concern with regards to our unfair advantage policy is to be sure players do not have access to data they should not. For example, information about players they did not play against or information derived from hands they did not participate in. This is why Return On Investment (ROI) style databases and datamining are not permitted.

We do value your feedback regarding HUDs and trackers, though we are unlikely to ban them in the future.

Regards,


Game Integrity Team


lol at thinking people would be able to know everyones % without a computer program telling them

Every day I see regulars who knows percentages. Actually they buy hands from hand mining sites and they know percentages better than I do. They even know MY freaquences better than I do!!! But... They doesn't know anything what to do with those numbers

What definition of a reg was used when filtering this loss data (to show the total loss of regs, not everyone - the latter evidently equals the total rake)? The contributed rake and rake share shown are so close, as if there were very few recs in the pool (who rake up to twice more than regs, making regs' rake share aka dealt rake 10-30% bigger than their contributed rake, at least in SSPLO).

Mind that someone with a small sample size should rather be considered a rec and filtered out, both because regs play more often and because there are too few recs who actually play enough hands to confirm their high VPIP - most of them go bust within a few hands.

If there was no filtering at all (and the difference between the rake totals exists because of a numerical error), then the data just shows that the rake share is 2.8 bb/100 per player; regs' real (attributed) rake might be significantly less (recs rake more), and of course no info about regs' winrates can be obtained without filtering.

I can't see how this will improve the number of recs in these games.

There are recs who previously would have played 50/100 who will simply not play these stakes any more (at Stars) because they don't like zoom.

The recs who do play and were previously getting ~80 hands/hr will now be getting 200-250 hands/hr and losing their money 2-3 times more quickly than before.

Within a month or two of deployment the NLHE game will pretty much never run.