Originally Posted by big bwalz
Cliffs on my experiences and what I’ve seen happen at GP since I started playing sng’s and occasional mtt’s there 6/17.
MTTS –
Early on the structures were very fast, I don’t recall or have screenshots but I think they were close to the turbo/regular speed sng structures now. People posted about it and the site added levels around July I believe.
Around August/September the mtt payout structure was changed. It was increased to pay around 20% of the field. In the 1r/1a games a min cash pays ~2.3 buyins, so if a player does the add on and rebuy, and mincashes they still lose ~2/3 of a buyin. A reg from the mtt sweat thread posted about it somewhere, then said it changed back but the lobby I’m looking at now for the wknd $500 gtd 1r/1a 6max $3.30 has the figures I posted above, mincash pays $6.90.
The payouts are better in freezeout events and ones with smaller field sizes. The MTT’s IMO are pretty good now overall and relative to other US facing sites, GP lowered the variance by the slowing down of the structure and then slightly increased it by the payout changes.
STTS -
In May, end of June, the sngs were amazing, until 10/13 when GP made the following changes.
- Changed the blind structures, removing some levels making much faster game
- Reducing the time of levels in non turbo games from 10 to 8 mins
- Increasing starting stacks from 1k to 1500
- Removed $3 regular speed 9man games entirely
- Adding hyper turbos raked @ 7%
The current blind structures are close to what I think the MTT structures used to be, and the current MTT structures are what the SNG’s other than hypers were before the changes. Below I will post GP’s game offerings, along with WPN for comparison. I can’t log onto Bovada so maybe somebody else will add that info. I looked at BOL and was going to add it, lobbies seem somewhat all over the place, rake between 9-11% for all formats, 6man payouts ~65/35 but a little off one way or the other in most games it looks like, too much of a mess to compile anything. There was good traffic though fwiw while I was browsing the lobby for the purpose of this post. Merge has to little traffic IMO to be a part of the discussion not to mention they’ve banned winning players among other things.
IMO on GP currently, the hypers actually have more room for play due the smaller blind increases, in spite of the shorter level durations. They are a better game to play for highest hourly rate because of the deceptively high variance nature of the turbo and regular speed games and how much longer the latter 2 take to play, imo. What I would really like to see happen is maybe reduce the rake in hypers to 4-5%, bring back the old blind structures in the other games but keep the shorter time levels as a compromise? Or keep the same structures and drop the turbo rake to 6%, regular games to 8% too since they play so fast. Bring back/add some 9 man non turbo regular speed games at the smaller/medium bi levels. The sng buy in levels have the same problem cash games here used to before 3-6 & 5-10 were added, too large of gaps.
Hypers
Global
500 starting stack,
7% rake
3 min levels
Payouts – 9mans 1st 50%, 2nd 30% , 3rd 20%. 6mans 1st 65% 2nd 35%
10/20, 25/50, 40/80, 60/120, 80/160, 100/200, 125/250, 150/300…
WPN
500 starting stack
4.5-6.5% rake depending on buy in level and # of opponents.
2 min levels
Payouts – 9mans 1st 50%, 2nd 30% , 3rd 20%. 6mans 1st 65% 2nd 35%
10/20, 15/30, 20/40, 25/50 5, 30/60 6, 40/80 8, 50/100 10, 6 0/120 12, 75/150 15,…
Turbo and Regular speed STTS
Global
1500 starting stacks,
5 mins for turbos, 8 min levels for regular speed games
10% rake for both turbos and non turbos
15/30, 30/60, 60/120, 100-200, 150-300, 200-400, 300-600, 450-900..
Payouts – 9mans 1st 50%, 2nd 30% , 3rd 20%. 6mans 1st 65% 2nd 35%
WPN
1500 starting stack,
5 mins for turbos, 10 mins for regular speed games
9% for turbos, 10% rake for regular speed games
10/20, 15/30, 25/50, 50/100, 75/150, 100/200, 100/200 25, 150/300 25, 200/400 25….
Payouts – 9mans 1st 50%, 2nd 30% , 3rd 20%. 6mans 1st 65% 2nd 35%
General info about BOL
Starting stack 1500 regular and turbos, 500 hypers
Rake – between 9-11% for 6-9 man regular speed, turbo and hypers
Level times – hypers 2 mins, turbos 5 mins, regulars 8 min
Blinds for all speeds – 10/20, 15/30, 25/50, 50/100, 75/150, 100/200, 150/300, 200/400, 300/600, 400/800
There are many different ways to analyze those game #’s. A couple easy ones are as follows.
- Time into game where bb is 10% starting stack
Regular speed games
GP – bb = 8% of starting stack @ 17 mins
WPN bb= 10% @ 41 mins
Turbos
GP - bb = 8% of starting stack @ 11 mins
WPN - bb= 10% @ 21 mins
Hypers
GP – bb = 10% starting stack @ 6mins
WPN – bb = 10% starting stack @7 mins
- Time into game/ % of chips in play preflop as blinds.
Regular speed games
GP = 4.4% @ 41 mins
WPN = 1.6% @ 41 mins
Turbos
GP - 4.4% @ 26 mins
WPN – 1.6% @21 mins
Hypers
GP – 6% @ 10 mins (60/120)
10% (100/200)@ 16 mins
WPN – 4% (not incl 10% antes)@ 11 mins (30/60 6)
6% @15 mins(60/120 12)
Some closing thoughts..
WPN and Bovada have a casino and a sportsbook to constantly feed its player pool, people(recreational players) who play other games in the same client that stop by the poker room to recreate. Same with Merge, , BOL, ITOPS and all the other USA facing unreglated sites which GP is, other than GP. GP only has a facebook playerpool, some poker media advertising like this forum and articles on paid for new sites and word of mouth. Once the player pool isn’t winning as much or as often and wonder why and/or if they can/should expect to on GP or anywhere else and starts looking around..
WPN has a flat 27% rakeback program or a rewards program that’s almost exactly the same as pokerstars old supernova elite system, players can choose on sign up iirc and are allowed a 1 time change if they decide to switch, and theres multiple skins for the network. HUDs are allowed there, and they are used on bovada and BOL, there are cardcatchers and hand converters that can be used to scrape the data and import it into existing hud software in real time for live in game use.
The removal of the hand replayer and hh’s from dealer chat and increasingly fewer posts from the mods, the changes to the games detailed above I will be spending my time and $ elsewhere until or if any changes are made to make GP more appealing to me. More and more players are hearing of this site, games are getting harder I feel some recent poker related changes are very player unfriendly. I’m all for the promos, facebook stuff but as OP said, GP has a monopoly on the US “legal” market and is taking advantage I feel and damaging the site, industry, playerbase, poker economy as a whole etc.
Idk if a sitout is the right thing to do, maybe more of a petition? I made my thread about my cashout of roll because posters such as Splaya have said to speak with your $ instead of forum posts, and that if the site isn’t appealing to a player then not to play there. So when it became too unpleasant for me that’s what I did, withdrew and told the site and community why.
GP does have awesome cashier functionality. The recent game changes are not and cannot be offset by a soft player pool (which is getting less soft) and fast easy cashier transactions. Cashier and bad players are useless to me if games are too high variance structure for much long term profit expectations combined with zero rewards program.
I feel the poker industry as a whole, not just GP have been trying to convert poker into a casino style game for years now and they have made the game a lot less profitable and enjoyable for many. I always thought people player poker to compete, and have an expectation of winning if some skill was developed or applied to poker games as opposed to just being happy to play and not caring about or having a positive expected $ outcome. Sports betting and other forms of gambling are better avenues for that, easier, more fun, far larger potential winnings etc. I’m concerned that once the fb/znyga player pool dries up and the true “poker” offerings keep diminishing the game as a whole will kinda just die off. It’s a great game, a historical game; I feel as players we should protect it and ourselves.
End of novel.
