Other than getting Daniel on the record (ffs Joey you are the media) did he say anything worthwhile.

"**** your coin conversion" - dnegs kinda

The Detroit Lions in the NFL just did (even after the guy admitted he is not capable of running another NFL team). Happens.

+1
Yup, both sides seem to be guided by biases.

in the last couple of mins Dnegs basicly admitting he is the reason why they removing SNE and vpp-s in high stakes, Amaya's intention was just to cut back a couple of the rakeback %-s.

he is soooo out of touch with internet poker, at one point in the interview he was like he invented the deposit bonuses in 2015 and was so proud of himself after saying such nonsense.

and he and Amaya clearly dont know how much work is to get SNE even at high stakes, bunch of the SNE grinders regularly have to play in -EV games (due bad mental state or tough zoom field) because of volume requierments. Dnegs talked about SNE like it's "free money and candy for players have some free time pressing buttons for a couple of hours a day", meanwhile breaking even mass tabling is very far from easy, and way harder than being an ambassador of poker for multiple amount of that money what an SNE gets.

i think Negano should grind 20000 vpp-s this december and reconsider everything he said about "players with robotic habits" and SNE-s gratuitous bonuses.

the truth is 500 SNE players' bonus equals like 100k players' bonus on lower Vip levels and Amayas intention was to **** on as least as possible players face for the same profit.

I think the way he was talking about SNE costing $100's millions and equating it to deposits, not only a logical fail (as SNE get RB on rake THEY PAID), but actually I think he was using the term SNE, when he was probably talking about SN. What he said in terms of figures and general thought about how easy it was to get would make more sense if he actually meant SN, rather than SNE.

Still doesn't mean he wasn't out of touch and said some very ignorant / out of touch things, but that IMO would make more sense in terms of what he seemed to be relaying about how Stars had briefed him.

the whole point is, how on earth can he compare the net. deposits with the room's expenditures?! the deposits are NOT the poker rooms profit/income ffs, those are the players' funds.

Well no. It was total nonsense. The first half of the podcast basically sounded like DNegs had been briefed by Stars and it was that briefing he was regurgitating. His "arguments" sounded like they had been crafted by some PR bod, with limited knowledge of poker. It was like last time about the number of depositers and speed at which they go bust.

It seemed on in the second half when pushed by Dani that DNegs started to release how ridiculous a lot of what he had said sounded and started to adjust his positioning / perhaps being honest about actually how he feels. Or maybe it just became clear what massive holes there were in the arguments initially presented.

First, I have to say that I'm 100% on the players side. However, that statement makes you (and the players side) sound extremely spoiled. Nobody is making another get SNE. No, it's not easy but those players chose to play **** games and to get extremely stressed due to a low win rate to get VPPs when they could've been playing less and game selecting more.

I keep hearing about how amaya wrecked ongame as a site.

Can anyone shed any light on what they actually did? I can't seem to find a trace of the things they checked to ruin the site.

Also great job joey on getting the balance correct and bringing in dani when you did.

I think what is most overwhelming concerning long term is its clear the higher ups at amaya have no clue how the poker market works.

Plus they need to be changing up the marketing people. Might be the worst communicated plan in history (if they have one) the PR team massively dropped the ball on this.

thanks joey for standing up for us!! Really appreciate you

i don't think he's that hardly driven by stars, i don't think Dnegs is a muppet.

but i do think Amaya disrespect/look down on players with announcements like this, I 100% doubt Dnegs is that dishonest to say this deposits/bonuses correlation as an argument, i think that is just Amaya's resoning of the whole situation for the dumb internetpoker nerds and he (Daniel) just havent really thought about it.

@.isolated: yes, sorry about that, that deposits/amount of bonus given correlation as an argument completely pissed me off.

The amount that players deposit is the absolute maximum that Stars can get in rake. If there are 50 million in deposits, for example, it is impossible for them to take in more than 50 million in revenue. So if player bonuses exceed this amount, they will be losing money. It was not a logical fail by Daniel.

I don't think the whole situation is about raising rake. If Stars thought they could increase profit long-term by raising rake they probably would have done it already. In my mind it is mostly about decreasing the skill disparity on the site by kicking off some pros. As poker theory progresses, the skill disparity increases which decreases the total amount of hands played for each dollar deposited. And Stars' revenue is equal to rake multiplied by total amount of hands played. The problem, though, is they will actually be kicking off the marginally winning pros (the guys for whom losing rake back will send them off the site) when they'd actually prefer to kick off the biggest winners. I assume this is the most favorable way in terms of public relations (as opposed to just banning the biggest winners for example).

What stars should also be doing is promoting games like limit holdem with a lower skill disparity or creating games that are more luck-based, which they already seem to be doing.

so youre trying to say stars losing money because of bonuses with a less than 100% rakeback system, and its not a logical fail by Daniel.

the player funds are withdrawable as well, what about that. and pokerstars happily rakes deposits from 2014 or earlier, it is not an annual thing.

I am not saying that Stars is losing money. I am just saying that, hypothetically, bonus money paid out cannot exceed net deposits without creating a liability. Bonuses paid out in, say, December 2015 may exceed deposits in December 2015, but what matters is net deposits to date vs net bonuses.

Think of it like a government taking a tax. If there is one million dollars in the economy, the government cannot collect more than one million dollars in taxes. So if they are paying 1.5 million in services to citizens, they will be losing money (assuming tax is their only revenue stream).

You're operating under the assumption that the player balance goes to zero every year. It doesn't. Obviously these funds carry over year to year so paying out more bonuses than deposits from a given year does not necessarily equate to a liability. The SNE program is a two year deal so you would need to look at deposits from both the current year and the previous year in any sort of related financial analysis.

Yes, I know. That is what I was trying to explain and why I said "net deposits to date."

Wrong is a practical sense.

Money withdrawn out of the "ecosystem" by winners cannot then be raked as revenue. Needless to say, money needs to be deposited before it can be raked as revenue by the site.

Depositors are far more valuable than grinders as they can't be replaced or removed from the equation.

Personally, I would swap Ansky for Daniel representing online poker all day long every day from an internal policy influencing position.
Dneg's did not come across that well imo, in the last 3/4 of cast he basically just ripped off Dani's points and wrapped them up as his own inceptions...which at no point did he mention prior to Asnky bringing them up. Someone who does that, can't represent other peoples best interests.

this

I don't have any details but I think cliff notes is they bought it for something like 70M and sold it maybe a year later for 150M or so . Don't quote me on exact numbers but it's in that range.

You'd have to dig thru the notes on their financials for exact numbers.

So I guess "ruined" is a matter of perspective like everything else in all the various VIP/SNE threads

Joey did a great job with assist from anski, but joey's PM box is full so fail

wouldn't surprise me if dnegs bad blog would be him leaving stars

joey, i tried to pm you this but your inbox is full.

i really like your podcast and i watch it often. i just finished watching the latest one with jmo and i agree with yours and jmo's general comments on drugs - that the negative views about them are largely a product of social indoctrination, a lot of the bad rep is blown out of proportion, etc. but i was still cringing hard when you started talking about doing heroin for a month and then quitting. i have never tried it but i have "second-hand" experience from being in a relationship with a girl who started out with doing percs and vicodins on the weekends to snorting $300 worth of heroin a day. i live in vancouver where there's lots of support for drug addicts and despite all of this she will probably be progressing to shooting it eventually.

addiction in general is very poorly understood (video oversimplifies things, but still gets the general point across well):


but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not attempt do this or even take it as lightheartedly as you seem to be. at the very least, don't consider trying heroin until you're a lot more informed about the topic of heroin addiction.

there's a british photojournalist, lanre fehintola, who decided to immerse himself in the culture of heroin addicts (criminals/prostitutes) to capture their experiences better and got himself addicted in the 1990s. his plan was somewhat similar - get himself addicted, report on the happenings from the perspective of an addict to give a "realer" story, get off. he wound up being addicted for well over 15 years. he still might be. here's two documentaries about him:

his friend documents his struggle with addiction here:


his friend documents his attempt to quit cold turkey:

I won my biggest pot when I was pinging on speed playing 2/5 at the Crown Casino. That pot helped me build a roll which further spawned my success and my life as a was professional poker play was set in stone.

Csb!

Yea but have you considered how your drug use incidentally hurt the player(s) that lost the pot? The victims....