From Stars website: Saturday, July 13 at 14:00 ET, the Weekly FLHE tourney will see its prize pool quadrupled to $20,000 guarantee

Why is it tomorrow instead???

Tried out a $1.50 promo tournament last night. Blinds seemed to go up quite quickly - are these hyper turbo tournaments?

im cool with this. my main concern is stars allocating promo money that is mostly going to regs.

Yep, and the fair play system is simply the logical end to promos like these. Regs crush recreational players-run out of recreational players-segregate players.

I mean LHE is dead either way but promotions geared toward high-volume regs is horrible for what's left of the economy. Convincing regs to take a short term paycut is pretty much impossible though. YEAH WELL I GOT 94% RAKEBACK TODAY!!!11!

I guess this really meant: Please pretend I still read this thread.

Joining a large number of waiting lists isn’t against the rules, even if you later leave your computer while you are still on them. However, we’re always more than happy to hear about specific problems players are having or behavior that is getting increasingly worse so that we can decide whether to take action.

No, we are not currently looking at limiting waitlists in any capacity, but if we decided to go down the road of removing table selection in an effort to combat angleshooting, this problem would go away too.

We did very briefly discuss LHE during our April player meetings. Our data shows that LHE regulars have healthy winrates after rewards for the time being. During meetings early last year, LHE received a lion’s share of the discussion time, and we made a large reduction in Fixed Limit rake at that time.

Although the promo is over, for future reference Heads Up play at 6max tables does qualify. The table is what is included in the promo.

The tournaments chosen for LHE week were spread because they are what we thought would run on a consistent basis to provide a good experience for those who were participating, without forcing them to wait an onerous amount of time for a tournament to start. In addition, it is the size of the ticket we gave away during the promotion.

For all game-specific promotions, we’ll put together a schedule that we think is appropriate, based on past feedback and what we think the players involved will play.

Is there a specific alternative tournament that you think would have attracted a lot of interest from players?

Apologies for my recent absence from the thread. I have just returned from holiday and have caught up reading all the posts from my last presence.

iirc 1/2 and 2/4 had a rake increase though, 2.8% and 1.2% respectively

important 'gateway' limits for players moving up the stakes

As per Limit MTT's the only reason I don't play the 215 on Saturday is the structure is pretty bad. Just 2 more levels of play would make a big difference.

removing any table selection is kind of a harsh solution. A max. on declining seats would fix both problems.

Either way, I'll be sitting on every single waitinglist 3/6 and below tonight, let's see how fast they can fix this if they really want to
Why does pokerstars always wait for the moment too many people become douchebags instead of fixing things to prevent it?


I don't know what casual players want, but some variety couldn't hurt I feel.

$1/$2 and $2/$4 saw a rake decrease each time we changed rake last year. I’ve included the progression of rake at those two levels below.



If there was an increase in rake seen on a per-hand basis after either of these changes, it was entirely due to changed game conditions. Using the older rake structure, in either case, would have resulted in higher rake paid during those times.

The HTT structure is off-putting for anyone who has a clue. I'd like to play some tournaments when I'm getting a little bored of cash games but HTTs are crapshoots. There are plenty of normal or turbo speed tournaments for NL so why not have some for LHE?

LHE should be introduced as the perfect game for the beginner to try out. It's not as intimidating as NL, where you can lose an entire stack and have to decide on bet sizes. LHE is simple and all you need to do is click bet, raise, fold or call. For someone starting out, this should be appealing.

The problem with LHE is that playing more post-flop poker means more opportunities to get exploited for bad play. This means beginners really have no shot of winning, get bled dry and most likely quit. A game like NL you can get lucky and scoop one big pot to erase a bunch of mistakes and come out ahead despite bad play. This is much less likely to happen in LHE.

When it's being said that winrates are healthy "after" rewards, you can see where the problem lies. Winrates need to be higher prior to rewards for games to be healthy. Not many sane people would want to put themselves through the swings of LHE just to break even and get all their profits through rewards. Most would either quit or switch over to another game.

Promos like 50% extra VPP do absolutely nothing for the health of the games. I would rather see that money spent elsewhere in hopes of getting new players. Introduce some more creative promos like a Hand of the Day where eg. whoever hits 56789 of spades with their hole cards for a Straight Flush wins a share of a daily jackpot. This would be great for LHE, because you are playing more post-flop poker and thus have increased odds of hitting the jackpot. An added benefit is games would get opened up more with this jackpot and you will have people playing some hands they wouldn't normally play in hopes of hitting the jackpot. This means more rake paid and likely better games, which is win-win. I didn't think through any of the logistics, but something like this or similar would at least be an attempt to get more recreational players onto LHE.

If a promo like that runs, it'll be on all games.

I don't think beginners have less chance of winning, I'd argue the other way around actually.
Although the VPP-week was extremely good for high VIP-levels, it does attract new players too. When there's a billionth hand promo going there are more regs playing, it would be the same with a specific-hand promo. Whatever you do, high VIP-tiers will take advantage of it, but it'll also attract new players.

Either way, we're still a stud-week and 2-7 week short, so don't expect a specific LHE promo in the coming months/year imo.

Hi all

Literally have just joined 2+2. I have been reading forum posts for a while now (years probably) and thought I would start to contribute and join in discussions. I am from the UK and play poker on PS. I almost exclusively play 6-max LHE cash games and the occasional tournament (again almost exclusively LHE). I consider myself an intermediate player at the 5/10c 10/20c level and have a win rate of about 1.3BB/100 hands over a sample size of about 60k hands. I play it because I believe I can read hands a hell of a lot better than I can in NL and I can exploit the poor play of other players to a greater degree.

6-max is a game that aggressive players love and it's very popular in no limit and more popular in LHE than a full ring game (without any of this crappy hyper-turbo business, it makes for a ridiculous game style that doesn't translate well to higher stakes LHE). I think PS should be offering some 6-max LHE tournaments at a low buy in (say a dollar or something) as I think this would attract more interest than the current daily full ring LHE tournaments. I'm not trying to do away with full-ring, just I think 6-max is the future of LHE (at the moment) to stop it from fading away.

+1

Stars is too dense to even remember to make this years $215 WCOOP a 6max. its a waste of time trying to focus their attention on the micro's.

there is a total of 4 full ring games running at and above .5/1 right now, and around 35 6max. which is normal.

BUT, if they are listening. please change the daily $11, and weekly $215 6max.

NOBODY PLAYS FULL RING

THE DEFAULT FOR ANY LHE TOURNEY SHOULD BE 6MAX

WRITE IT DOWN

Any update to all of this? Still a large issue down to 1/2 and should have 1 non dealing table open as in 10/20+.

I'll pass the feedback along to BryanS, but please make suggestions for scheduled MTTs in either this thread or PM them to BryanS-PS.

I'll add this to lower levels shortly.

I agree FL is a great game for beginners. And that extra vpp promotions don't do much but shut up the regs for a little bit. But I disagree that FL offers more opp for exploitation and makes fish's money dry quicker--I think it's the opposite. You're more bound to the restrictions of the game.

Bump my own post..

Good post

Yup. One advantage of LHE for beginners is that in any one hand, they can't be exploited for large amounts of money. Also, playing too loose isnt as big a mistake in LHE as it is in NL.

waiting list abuse has gone out of control, at high traffic hours there is hardly a table above 2/4 open without 10+ players looking to "join" it. it feels like the king of the table thingy has only made things worse.

Yea waitlists have gotten a little longer since the change.

Also, has anyone else noticed that auto-reload at tables doesn't work when you join through a table starter? I play with a HUD covering my stack and was upset to find that I was all-in on a table all of a sudden. Anyone have a solution for this? or do I just have to buy-in 100BBs deep on table starters? I will email stars as well, but just curious if this is happening to anyone else.