can't believe Kimbr isn't in here issuing an official statement. very annoying.

hopefully it's because they are just testing this out for a few days and don't want to say anything yet.

Excellent post. I think this is actually just a move to keep fish deposits lasting longer similar to removing 5k deposit option. Upper management must realize once the fish are gone site is gg.

Ban seating scripts and issue warnings/bans to people who sit at tables and refuse to play. Problem solved.

Global Poker is proud to be a social gaming site that focuses on providing an enjoyable poker experience for recreational players. Over the past couple of months, our team has noticed a small group of players using tactics at our 10/20 $weeps Cash tables which are not conducive with recreational poker play.

After some careful consideration, we have decided to remove these tables indefinitely in a bid to ensure Global Poker remains friendly for our recreational players.

All other limit tables are still available in both Gold Coin and $weeps Cash play.

We thank you for your message and your continued support of Global Poker.

Are you changing any rules? Disciplining any players? Identifying the behavior for us to report it in the future? Is there any reason the same thing won't happen at 5/10? How is removing a stake that is important to the games the answer rather than even the most basic things I just said?
As for our continued support of your site, that remains to be seen. You don't make it easy.

It got most egregious at 10/20 because when certain players are on regs from lower stakes want to play too so the competition for seats is more intense since more players want to play. You don't see 10/20 regs moving down to play a certain rec player at say 2/4. This was happening at 10/20 simply because it was the highest stakes game on the site.

If you don't think this will continue happening at 5/10 now that that is the biggest game on the site then you are kidding yourselves. The solution to this is to actually address the behavior itself and not just eliminate the highest stakes game. There will always be a highest stakes game.

Either make changes to the software so that the problematic behavior can no longer happen or make rules penalizing it.

What tactics were they using? What makes you think they won't continue to do it at 5/10?

This is the dumbest solution Global could come up with. Save time and just remove “sweeps” games all together.

I can see Global's position on this, but I think people in this thread (some more eloquently than others) raise a very good point.

10/20 being the high stakes, brought about the tactics you speak of, and are not rec friendly, no doubt.

So then what is the current thought process if these same tactics develop at 5/10, the new Global nosebleeds?

Is there just one person making these decisions? It's incomprehensible that a group of people could arrive at this solution together. Now everything is as it was before, except you just randomly removed a stake from your game offering. It's concerning to us that this is something Global has thought about for months, and in that entire time management couldn't see the flaw in their solution...one that's so obvious it's the very first thing that comes to mind.

Is it possible for Global to recognize that it's a bad solution, and revert it? It's so frustrating to us players when for 2 years we've proposed ways in which to make the playing experience better, and time after time those are overlooked....only to have a random change to the site that is so clearly thoughtless.

I applaud the ingenuity, but I would have tried increasing the rake first.

The current solution of removing 10/20 is pointless because as others have said, 10/20 isn't the problem. The entirety of the architecture of Global Poker is conducive to excessive bumhunting/edge-seeking. 5/10 is the new 10/20, and nothing will change. I will outline some problems and solutions.

1. No software rules weakly enforced or not enforced
-Players used HH trackers/HUDs for > 1 year and received a very light 1 month ban
-Seat scripters still present, unclear if they've ever been punished/warned etc
SOLUTION: More harsh penalties for rule breakers, less lax enforcement of rules.

2. High rake, no reduction for HU/shorthanded play exacerbated by lack of VIP program
-Creates no incentive to start tables; additionally, there is no incentive to put in volume in tougher games because there is no volume goal you can hit (ie, supernova/supernova elite, or equivalent on ACR). $5 rake for 10/20 HU and $4 for 5/10 is unbeatable between decent players. For reference, it's $0.875/hand on ACR at these stakes after 30% RB.
SOLUTION: Give a rake discount for HU/shorthanded play. This will lead to more games being started, and games breaking less quickly when a rec player busts.

3. Infinite table spawning
-This is obvious and stupid. There is no real competition for 6max tables because everyone can just go sit a new table.
SOLUTION: Just make it so only 1 or 2 tables with no hands being dealt spawns.

4. Ability to sit without playing -> table camping
-Sometimes when certain players are online, there are many full tables with 5-6 people sitting out. Other sites have implemented sitout timers that can be called by players, and the sitting out player gets picked up when time expires.
-Not only are there no penalties for table camping offenders, they are OFTEN rewarded by getting in great games due to their tactics
-I should note that this is only really a problem at the NL tables. The PLO players have mutually agreed to not do this, and it has been quite effective for over a year. Thanks for ruining the site, NL players!
SOLUTION: Aggressively warn/ban campers. Start with a warning of a week ban, then a week ban, then a month, then 3 months. That should do the trick. Sitout timer should help as well. Dissolve any 5/6 or 6/6 table that is not dealing hands for > 1 minute. Maybe even 3+ handed.

5. Additionally, having 1-2 high stakes no rathole games has proven successful. See ACR. 10bb min/max buyin, but you cannot reset your stack to 10bb unless you sit out for an entire week. I'd love to see something like that implemented on Global, maybe 25/50 stakes. Makes it a lot more exciting for railbirds/observers -- nothing exciting about watching some 5/10 6max action...

I have more ideas about implementations that would address issues, though some of them are more advanced. The ones above are extremely simple and would make a huge difference for regs and recs alike. Again, if anyone from Global would like to get in touch, my DMs are open.

Kindly note, I'd love to see these changes or some form of them implemented even if 10/20 is not re-added to Global.


Best,
Evan

I am just going to leave it here.
NL2k players are great and they deserved all the money they won.
This is for 6 months in 2018. You can extrapolate




Just in case image won't load

Link
Link

Seating scripts aren't fun for recreational players, and they directly caused the incident where people were forced to camp high stakes tables in order to get action. Does global have any plans on banning seating scripts? Seating scripts seem to go much more against your philosophy than having 10/20 tables.

Apex,
my code was't perfect in the beginning and I didn't monitor all the stakes 24/7, but I think it is around 50%, so yeah. most likely top regs on NL2k could pull 400k in 2018.

Little stats:
From 13,606,137 hands that I have in db

7481 players won money
2254 won more than $100
419 won more than $1000
67 won more than $10000
4 won more than $100000

$3,919,000 won total over 6 months in 2018 (probably 50% of all hands)
$2M won by top 50 players, so 0.6% of players won 50% of money

no wonder that NL2k killing ecosystem.

what the ****!? how do you have this!? your admitting to having a hud ?!
what the **** man
all the other databases are anonymous

Not sure about others but it took me no more than couple of week to build my own HUD.
Javascript software is not the best idea ever. And I didn't know **** about javascript when I started this project. So I guess more experienced people could build it faster. I never gave my hud to anyone and GP did ban me at the end.

GP really started to do something about all this stuff, so props to them.
I think in the last couple of months they really raised the bar and doing good job, so hopefully for all the other players games will be more fair. The thing is that I know at least couple more methods how to do undetectable HUD even after they started to use some additional tools. It's just not worth the time.

I would guess their processing costs, rate of chargebacks and burden on the security team is the major issue here.

To make a educated guess based on in-depth data I've seen from other US sites that in reality, at worst, the behavior lately made them take another look at the ecosystem/tipped the scale in favor of removing 10/20.


Global doesn't have any of the secondary incentives to offer 10/20+ compared to a site like ACR or Pokerstars. (highstakes gamblers on sports/casino wanting big games, or promoting the site through nosebleed action for example.)

For them, it's much closer being really black/white. It's outright profitable, or not. (and 10/20 is a pretty big inflection point for where winnings vs rake paid vs costs to a site starts to be really far apart.)


Given this, it's not the only factor, and simply killing game selection, or improving predatory behavior is not a real solution.

Cliffs: Sucks, but likely gg

More stats
I have 28029 players in the db, so I guess 20609 players lost money.
$3,764,000 was paid in rake over 27M hands (hands might be duplicate so I guess the low limit is 27/6) with average of 10bb/100 rake rate.

I estimate it to be 50% of the hands over 6 month period so let's say they got $7.2M in rake over this time which is not a lot given all the operating cost.

This is for cash games only (not including NL4)

I would be interested to see some of the 100nl and 200nl player results.

For research purposes, of course.

Haha, I am not going to do it. I even cut all the stats from NL2K players

I dont suppose you have any PLO stats?

No, no plo stats.
Yeah totally forgot about this. I guess they made like additional 25% there.

Good thing the don't allow you to get anonymous hh's! /s