Maybe if Stars would just see the light and return latereg in 3x:s to 90 mins. Also, now with sats. They're very popular in .fr.

With all these bad changes to players they could even make this.

I'd be Ok with 90 minute entry period for these although I think eventually it could kill the games if people start catching on, since there'd be a big risk of no one joining early. Raking the rebuys is just a gross move for everyone affected negatively. Obviously if the players being rebuy raked stop playing the 2x-3x sats that is far worse than changing the games to 90 minute entry periods.

seeing as all the regulated countries need to buyin with cash at events now unless they satellite in, wanna start running sats to a few of the bigger side events? the 2ks-10ks?

Would really love to see a $215 STEP/SNG to the super tuesday. With 9 entrants payouts would be

1st = super tuesday entry
2nd-4th = step 4 ticket ($215 value)
5th = $105

Should be a super popular game. Thanks.

this is a great idea, especially for the 10k HR (make it unable to be unregistered just like the main too)

Sounds good to me.

sats for the $109 "1 Billion" seem pretty weak.
$1 freezouts? that meens only 1/120 players gets to qualify!
i'd suggest to make them at least $1+R 2xT/3xT, or both formats for variety, and also some bigger freezouts like a $11 turbo/deep/normal speed.

This change would benefit me so much. But my benefit would come at the expense of a recreational player who's not smart enough/experienced enough to see that he's a fool to play the full 90 min when I can buy 11 units for the price of 2. I don't want to win money off of recreational players because of a flaw in the structure.

lol

cross posting from MTTc Live. Seems like a pretty smart idea, i can imagine the unregistration thing would be a problem though

At least one fish would play these! Me!!!

There's also lots of recs who prefer to latereg. You seems to forget them

Stars could make it so that with this new change T$ will also become non-tradable, so just grinding T$ would not be enough. You would actually have to use them to some tournament.

I suppose some recs with brains would late reg but the vast majority of late reggers are regs who know the ropes.
The non transferable of T money is a totally separate issue. I'm sure Stars has considered it and maybe it would be a good thing... but I can see a lot of regs and recs alike not liking it. Lots of recs are trading T for $ in the P2P transfer thread so if they ever decide to there is a lot of factors to consider and wouldn't be a clear cut choice either way.

I think this change would truly be good for the games. Right now T-money will easily go to pro's who buy it to get highroller-events (Stars should really check how this is going) and many players just grind it, trade it, play little more same sats and cashout, then repeat. Or is there even chance to cashout it directly after selling T-money, I don't know.

By not allowing people to sell T$ it would certainly make both satellites and tournaments softer, as "professional" T$-grinders would either have to start actually playing other tournaments too or change their main game. I think that greatest problem with current MTTs in Stars is clearly that fields are too tough with so many players being specialized in small niches. Of course there are other problems too, which should be taken care of.

There's a reason why in many other sites 200$ tournaments may have even softer fields than 22$ tournaments in Stars.eu.

Regarding the Hyper sats of everything this is a blatant mistake from pokerstars I will explain why below.
What was going on in the Sat Hypers
One particular player, someone who almost every sng grinder knows Jorj95 boasted about making a killing from these games. A few others started to target them word got out and there was a boom in these games.

Some interesting figures for you I heard some players mention playing 1300 of these games a day. I have tracked the traffic for all the major games, and can say as a fact that more Then 1300 games for each stake leve,l below $100 were running a day. I believe it was much more than that, but I will work on 1300 games per stake level to be conservative and avoid inflating figures.

I made a spreadsheet of these and rake generated but it’s a mess when I post spreadsheets so here is some simple numbers for each stake level how much rake would be generated a day.


game annual Rake rake after 60% RB
3.75 199,290 79,716
7.35 427,050 170,820
18.75 1,281,150 512,460
36.75 2,135,250 854,100
74 4,128,150 1,651,260
total 8,170,890 3,268,356

The situation with the changes
Pokerstars announced a rake change for these games, from my own study of the games I had a feeling the games would be unbeatable after losing my cool on the forums quite publicly, I ran the numbers I was slightly wrong, the games are still beatable.

The only problem is that only the top elite regs beat the games now and there win rates are very marginal. They were small before but over large volumes that led to a highly desirable hourly rate. Now the hourly rate is much smaller and compared to the huge variance simply is not worth it.

The games have dried up compared to what they used to be, and seem to barely run at all now. I am slightly surprised by this, I was expecting that to happen but thought the regs would try and squeeze their last bits out before the games die in January. I guess huge variance games are not attractive if you can only play them short term.

Pokerstars motives for these changes
I found this change to be particularly odd as I had a feeling this would kill these games I have tried to figure out pokerstars motives here and have a few assumptions it could be any or a combo of these.


1. Pokerstars felt that these games were not recreationally friendly I assume the original purpose when they created these games was to provide a recreationally friendly lottery to get into tournaments and boost tournament player pools and guarantees. In fact if you factor in paying for the regs rake and profit and their own rake the recs lose a lot real fast on these it is not pretty there.


2. Pokerstars wanted to boost traffic into the spin and go games and saw these variants as a threat to that. So targeted them. This seems less logical but I will explain why in the next section.


3. Pokerstars believe that what they offer is much more generous than their competition, and feel that by offering such cheaper services they are just throwing money away.

Why in reality these changes do not work
1. This can be remedied much easier rather than killing the games so they hardly run and hiking rake up to punish the casual players more change the pay-out. Simply award a tickets to the tourneys and not tourney $s. A reg can easily exceed hundreds of thousands of these games in a year, however just of the figure of 100,000 games a year if they won exactly 1/3 of the time they would have 33333 tickets if this was the Sunday mil sat it would take 641 years for them to spend it if they played every week no reg will target these games now and it will be rec friendly and boost tournament player pools.


2. Spin and goes are undoubtedly a success from a business perspective despite the hostility many regulars and aspiring players like me have towards them. However the player base that target the satellite hypers are predominantly aspiring players and regs not lottery seekers it is not likely that many will move towards the spin and goes from this pool and even if every single player from this pool did pokerstars would still lose as it would be very difficult to play as many spin and goes successfully due to the different structure. One game is a push fold only variant the other has some level of post flop play and requires more attention been 3 handed.


3. This I believe to be the real reason and it is a bit short sited, Pokerstars are right no one offers hypers like pokerstars hyper sats for 2% rake I would be surprised and grateful if anyone could find these like that elsewhere. However these are not Hyper turbos in the normal format they have a different pay out structure and I have not found the blind structure elsewhere either. Further there is a reason pokerstars has the traffic it does and this was due to a highly attractive game which has now been killed effectively.

It does not matter that no other provider offers the same services at the same price the evidence shows that Pokerstars are losing money with this change, and therefore will be throwing away millions of profit a year that they could have had. Even if every other decision pokerstars makes improves there profits and they double there revenues losing a few million here is still a needless mistake and waste of money.

Regardless of whether people want beatable games or prefer softer games or weather sites elsewhere offer the same or not one thing and only one thing matters to pokerstars and that’s profit I don’t blame them for that, but this is not a profitable move and they are losing money they could make here.

Solution
As mentioned make the satalites what they were intended for keep the rake the same as it was award tourney tickets for these games, eliminating the regs and boosting tournament pools whilst been a friendly shot at a tourney for casual players.


However why lose the regs why indeed Pokerstars have stumbled accidently onto a rake cow here and not to exploit that is not a sensible decision, solution bring out a game variant for the grinders that like these. Call it triple or nothings or something similar, keep the rake as it was so the games still live.


This will keep your rake coming in whilst boosting the tourney pools. Also note many regs targeted the highest buyins they could find with some even grinding $3000+ games. The only reason these games were not running throughout the year is pokerstars were not providing them they can change that. Sure the rake will be low but if you offer the games across many stake levels grinders will seek to rise to the top, and grinders fighting grinders all the way up to four figure buyins over hundreds of thousands of games each stake level annually is simply a cash cow. Why the heck would you want to turn away from that?

Outcome if they listen

Hard to say but many media commentators in the industry have stated that the new owners Amaya appear to be ignoring the customers. Amaya admitting they made a mistake in one area even if its just this one area and adjusting their decisions would give a lot of re assurance to many here, and help to calm the flames.

More importantly, this would add millions if not 10s of millions to their profit for the next year.

(prepared in word does diff format here tidying up bear with me)

These are scheduled around the clock and are the only sats available at the moment.

So, i have to get 1st/237 or 3rd/151 for a chance to play the "1Billion"? Quite a longshot, wouldn't you say?
How about catering for the rest of your players, not just the micros but also those that have an abi of $10 for example (or $5, or $20) that can't afford to pay the $109 but still want a decent chance to qualify for it?

Thanks

Luke Silver,

The 6m hyper SNGs are obviously going to be completely dead (except for the rare 2k+ buyin ones) after the rake hike. A completely insane move IMO and really hurts the SNE grinders who are the only reason the $74+ ones filled anyway. I have no idea what those guys are going to do as it's not so easy to just jump over into the slower structure hyper SNGs and expect to play 6 tables well, let alone 16+.

You made a lot of interesting points but I don't think that giving out tourn tickets (instead of T$) would change matters much. The rake is just way too high period for a 6 max or even 9 max with a hyper speed 10 BB structure and such big antes.

Can you let me know when you find out please

Can we get some $38s 6m hyper-sats to the $109 'billion' MTT in the lobby please?

well my point was not just to award tourney tickets instead of t$ I wanted to become a hyper sat reg and obv it would have defeated the purpose of the games for me.

the point was if they wanted to make rec friendly they could have done that to keep the regs out without changing the rake at all.

then they could have copied the format completely kept the low rake and just put a new sng variant for the grinders.

the point was with the SNE grinders playing so much and wanting as high as possible not only did stars have high 7-low 8 figure rake they could have boosted this.

I had really hoped to learn the game variant and make the money and was putting a lot of work into it.

when i realized that the changes would lose pokerstars money i made the best presentation i could to explain why what they did was a bad idea and how it could work better.

but I am a small part time winning player who was going to start trying to hit it big with poor communication skills and a social disability. Also considering that my annual rake was probably exceeded by some of you guys in a day, I realistically learned pokerstars were not going to listen to me.

However I thought if I could get the attention of the people i was trying to emulate they would have more time to hear me out as it directly relates to there income.

I thought that maybe if they could grasp my ideas and present them better to pokerstars been SNEs that generate millions in rake annually. Pokerstars might listen. and actually see they are only losing money here.

the math i attempted to post here was just very conservative calculations of the rake made from these games that stars wont get now.

I dont know if pokerstars would listen if SNEs tried to communicate good ideas to them, but I do not really like the idea of spending six months trying to memorise some stuff and working with icmizer to just then give up and move on.

I had to try any way i could to get my message out and heard.

I can take working hard at something trying and failing if need be, but what I can't stand is working hard at something and just as I am about to finally put all that training into action and go and fight having chance taken away from me.

I want my shot, I had to try.

I appreciate the advice some SNE's have given me, I am weighing up targeting standard hypers or another game variant altogether but that debate is for another thread and I do not want to derail from my central point here.

I don't talk to any of the other HTSAT regs so I have no idea, but it's looking like Stars declared war on the SNEs who grind these and little else. Unless Stars has a massive change of heart I have no idea what the best move is for attempting to retain SNE without taking pretty big losses and massive variance to break even at best.

To make matters worse, Stars declared war on 6-9max hypers (nonsats) by removing Battle of Planets, thereby increasing the rake on those, albeit not as ultra significantly as they did with hyper sats. I can't speculate what the long term implications are as well with the Spin and Gos, but the prospects are looking fairly bleak to try to get SNE next year if your trademark game is hyper sats, or even reg hyper SNGs unless you're one of the best and play very high stakes, but that's tough if your ABI in hypersats is $100-150. I think Stars is phasing out SNE although I don't see why they would do this as there are plenty of hypersat regs giving them many hundreds of k rake per year and keeping the games going.

LukeSilver,

If there was any sanity in the world Pokerstars would have increased the rake up to 3.5% at the bottom levels and moved on a sliding scale up to 1% or so at the top levels. The way the rake is/was structured was idiotic as regardless of the buyin everyone was paying 2%. The games in 2014 were pretty much unbeatable at 74s and higher without serious game selection, being SNE, and being very, very good at adjusting/multitabling.

To make things even more idiotic, the payouts were structured in such a way that the vast majority of payouts were given in T$, which kept the regs (and losing recs) in action, and most of the regs winnings (money they can withdraw) came from VPP milestones and FPP bonuses, which Stars makes a big profit from even from SNEs.

I am on your side as a player that really enjoyed these games and the strategy involved real time, but Stars seemed to take a knee-jerk reaction and basically destroyed all the games except maybe the lowest (where people are ignorant of rake) and the highest (2k+ where there was no real effect on the rake). Utterly depressing stuff. The best thing to do is e-mail them and complain, and learn a different variant, and/or take your business elsewhere and inform them of your decision.

$11 deep turbo freezeouts running every couple of hours around the clock would be pretty nice

Yeah quite a few people have mentioned hyper turbos to me but it would take me a bit of time to catch up to the standard, and in the mean time, pokerstars could easily hike the rake or do another change there. if you could 100% guarantee me the games there will stay as beatable as they currently are the rake wont be changed and the vip system will remain more or less the same for the coming years, definitely.

However since I am confident the answer will be the exact opposite of what i would like for every point there, I think its better to focus on strengthening my current core competencies. I have a good record in fixed limit sit and goes and tournaments so with a bit of work should be able to plug leaks and beat the cash games.

wont ever make as much as I would have from the sat hypers or hypers but i can probably get to standard to make an alright hourly rate there much quicker. and since we probably only have a year or two left its better to focus on a game that would take me a few weeks/month or two to master then a game which would take me 6-months to a year or two.

I will try sending an email to stars when i have the energy doubt it worth much but might as well try.

Why are there so few $320 ko sattys today... feels like much less than a regular week