New red tornaments: Hot Builder 6max

From the night to the day PS has became the site where I play the less tournaments...so sick. R.I.P. Rake Stars

The issue is these are the only people we have contact with and I use the word contact in the loosest sense. We don't get to talk to the upper management that may or may not be making the decisions on the structures/schedules but we do get to make our point to Luke/Bryan who are getting paid to consult with us and as I'm sure many feel, lie to us.

I'm not sure what I was expecting in terms of the new schedule, I guess I'd assumed it'd be cleaning up the less popular tournaments and adding in promotions to make a more complete schedule but what we've got instead is shorter structures with the same rake. Whether that's Luke's fault or not is neither here nor there, he is the one representing the company and with that comes praise and criticism (more of the latter with recent changes).

the posts that were full of things such as "xxxx is a ****" is what i was referring to.

You can call them out for their decisions as much as you want. If you bring evidence to the table and are not rude just to be rude.

there is more than one way to say the same thing, and if you communicate in one way rather than a different way, there is a better chance the party that you want to listen, will listen.

i apologize for what I said and will not censor any frustration posts.

Please, fix the structures to 10/15 min blind levels and put more tournaments 5-15$. Please.

i'm a micro mtt player 0-$3.30 my usual buyin. I use to have a skill advantage especially in the 6max mtts, now they are all hypers wtf!

Also i'm from Australia so I just went to make myself a new schedule and there is 1 tournament an hour which arent hypers this a joke

Fair enough, I'm not having a go at what you said but as a long time follower of this thread it seems that they're very selective as to what they reply to which is only going to worsen the relationship.

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Leviathan has put it well, other random thoughts:

1) don't be naive about Luke changing anything just because you were nice and provided positive feedback, corporate interest and greed rules now above everything
2) calling for patience is a bit funny, we were patient in the past with some of the changes and remember how long many of them took? or how many of them didn't go live at all?
3) we have rights to complain about bad service/product offered
4) Amaya has done nothing so far to earn any 'benefit of the doubt', therefore they don't deserve being easy on them. They keep pushing bad changes trying to increase profits, they seem to be failing at it because they treat poker business just like casino. They're most likely hurting both themselves and players long term
5) they also resorted to shady tricks like not informing majority of their player base about rake changes, basically stealing from SNE (it's okay to cut rewards, it's not ok not to stick to your rules previously set), misleading information (i.e. pricing graphs in 'revised pricing' blog post, but really, pretty much every change was sugarcoated in some ******ed explanation)
6) Luke unfortunately tends to be pretty stubborn and relying too much on his own opinion in my cases, and therefore as a rep it's also hard to be easy on him. Maybe he's working hard but if the effects are not there then it's hard to take that into consideration, since he's in charge majority of this thread were battles for something of some sort and it was always hard to get any good done
7) Luke has also been selective with responding to feedback he wants to respond to, he avoids difficult matters or matters that he's not going to/can't change
8) we expected Amaya coming after MTTs eventually, sure, but it's not about that. It's just that it's fine that they offer casino, sportsbetting, spin and goes, it's all in their right. But once they started destroying cash games, sngs and now mtts and it's hard to agree with this. Customers should be able to choose type of game they like best, and not be forced into games that they want. Instead of destroying games you don't want people to play how about you improve games you want people to play?
9) if Amaya wanted to increase profits and focused on offering good service instead it'd be much easier to agree on it, for now it's just milking every single possible spot there is. But as someone said you can milk a cow many times but you can only skin it once and this applies to Amaya and Pokerstars very well
10) if recs are the target and every change is towards them why the tournaments don't grow anymore? why gtds are going down quite drastically over past 2-3 years?
11) I like calling for positive, but it only applies to majority of life. Here it unfortunately doesn't work. Please don't fall into trap of censoring posts though. One of your posts Asj sounds like you just read a very uplifting book from Murphy and now you're all for it
12) saying that the schedule is good it's just structure that needs to be fixed is slightly naive and misleading as well. The only people who benefited from it are offpeak players and HS players (I think? Post from Marty saying he has almost as many tables on iPoker as on Stars made me doubt it). The root of the issue is much deeper than that

And I also love this quote from Free99:

Understood. I will tone it down

This is unacceptable !

The early game is fine with 8 min , and it actually plays deeper because of the 5k stack and some added levels but in the late stages not only we have only 8 /9 min but you cut down a lot of the levels too: 2.8K, 3.6K ,6.4K ,9K ,35K ,45K.

Bring those back and everything will work fine !

Oh and satellite84 - you're really underestimating how easily business can go down, no matter the size. If 888 updates the software and party can uphold positive trend with pretty much everything they can easily become top 3 together with pokerstars with no clear leader. So it's not really a nonsense and not really a distant future at this pace. Why FTP went down you think? Sure, maybe that wasn't so surprising, but it could be a sign of what to come as well. Also look at how many great business that were huge 5-10 years ago are now extinct in the other markets/industries.

And yeah, reds are 'smashing their guarantees' - which were reduced multiple times. Once they stop being smashed they're reduced again. To me it feels like overall traffic is consistently going down and that leads me to believe that casuals/recs that Pokerstars is catering to don't really appreciate the changes neither. Also posters signing up out of nowhere is some indication of that as well. If players had an accessible platform to voice their opinions you'd maybe see it clearer. I guess we need some sort of facebook/twitter activism/petition to get people to voice their opinions and show Amaya number of people dissatisfied, otherwise there will be always a claim that 2+2 is just super tiny minority and their opinions don't reflect average player experience.

Since almost no one made any specific suggestions about the Bigs structure I will take it upon myself to do some.

1. Just adding 1 minute after level 20 is nowhere near good enough since the levels are too steep from level 25 on.

2. Its okay for the first 2 hours to have shorter level 8/9/10 minutes, but if this structure remains levels should be adjusted for 2 additional minute levels every 2 hours.
E.g. - Big 11$ should have 9 minute levels for the first 2 hours, hours 3-4 11 minute levels, hours 5-6 13 minute levels, hours 7+ 15 minute levels.

3. If blind level length needs to stay shorter, then keep structure as is until level 25 (1k/2k ) but from level 26 on use the current Deep stack blind progression with a few tweaks for levels after 20k.




In summary structure in Bigs should be made so that there is more than 30bb average stack in most cases down from 27 left until the end.
I think its ok to have 25-30bb average before then, but once it gets to the business end of the tournament there should be more POKER and less GAMBLE.

This is a fu***** joke, worst structure than a TCOOP, Bingo Poker. The old structure was fast, it can be made 1 or 2 hours longer than the old and still be very far away from 12 hours. Blue tourneys with better structures are very popular. The people who want to finish early are going to play Hots or BB.

Like Luke said : "The implementation of dynamic structures. I am seriously excited about the implications of this functionality! Imagine a typical freezeout but the levels are eight minutes in length, then 10 minutes once the money is reached, 12 minutes at the final three tables, and 15 minutes at the final table. The ability to lengthen the excitement of going deep in a tournament in a dynamic way has a lot of potential." 8-10-12-15 min

But the idea of the schedule change is to drive traffic to faster structures, turbo, PKO, hypers (the schedule is flooded with them), to increase rake and reduce edges. So the structure change is consistent with that idea. We know where Amaya is heading.

A gambling site instead of a poker site

Some say improve margins, some say long term sustainability. Everyone says I want more money. Greed will win whoever it serves.

PLZ

O8/PLO needs old schedule back so bad, so many regs gonna quit(but maybe u want that?)

8/9max true form of HiLo.. No point in that 6max FLIPFEST...

With this schedule 50/50% between 6/9max would be best option in my mind.

Hope to see changes before its too late... for PS...

Heads up has been going since the start so 10 years and now they decided to remove all regular HU tournaments. It is clearly that they dont want HU players and they don't respect them anymore.

My suggestion to all people that disagree with their changes would be to stop playing for one-two weeks to show them that players are the most important in poker, not the company, tournaments etc. It will be great if this can be global so most of the players will pause their play for one-two weeks.
We can start a thread and agree on date just to hit them a little bit like they are hitting us.

- bring back nightly 162 - you can change it to 109 to be different from BB 162
- bring back nightly 55 or replace big 4.4 at 22 ET with big 55 / big 44
- i would like a regular speed KO -non progressive tournament at 55$( 27.28+ 25 +2.72) or 44$(21.82 +20 +2.18) --between 18- 22 ET.
-add more vanilla at 22-55$ price range- people need low variance games , not everything must be special with 1000+ players.

Sunday 6 max (old time slot) - $162
Sunday second chance (old time slot)- $215
BIGGER 162 in old time slot - $162
Sunday rebuy (same lot as current $33 Sunday rebuy) - $109+

Just don't see how the sonic makes the cut but all of these legendary tournaments die. Well I can see why of course but I find it absurd these tournaments ARE pokerstars, or they were.

how about REVERTING ALL TOURNAMENTS TO THEIR BLIND STRUCTURES OF 4 DAYS AGO ?

is that useful feedback and possible to accomplish ?

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Admit that you did a bad money driven "update" to MTT's, apologize to players and roll back EVERYTHING how it was before.

The best schedule imo would be old schedule minus the bad things it had, plus the few good things the new schedule has to offer.

The good things in the new schedule imo are the double reds, new majors, better adjustment to time zones. Also some bounty mtts in the non-holdem section seems fine. And maybe the re-entry option in micro non-holdem events such as 8game and horse.

Now take these changes (and other good changes I might not yet be aware of) and copy paste them into the old schedule with old structure etc.

Then also delete the 'bad' mtts from the old schedule (with overlay, getting cancelled,...)

I feel like asking for the little changes (longer levels, 9handed omaha etc..) but not questioning the whole abrupt schedule change and the motivations behind it is the soft approach pokerstars wants us to have.

But even then, I am no longer comfortabel to leave my whole BR on this site because I actually expect more drastic changes (charging withdrawals, overcharging euro/dollar conversions,...) To me pokerstars does not feels like a safe haven anymore but like a sleazy bar where you can get mugged by the bartender himself. They are butchering the product itself (quality poker).

Trust is gold in this business. Seem like Amaya overplayed its hands.

I expect a rapid decline in action and a higher money withdrawal rate after the SCOOPS if the old schedule wont come back.

gg

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