That's exactly what they want. They are reducing the VIP rewards for the same reason. They don't want non-losing regs they want depositors and new players. They could reduce the rake and still make a fortune but that's not their strategy.

I assume it is their colour code equivalent of basic information, allowed, vs more detailed/complex advice - not. Clearly it is arbitrary but H/M/L would seem to fit basic.

Maybe PT4 will ban him then.

FFS, It's pretty clear the PS rule is 2 colour thresholds per stat regardless of how people want to misrepresent it.

one of the reasons i am no longer a losing player is because i have developed a HUD and color ranges and the ability to read it which allows me to play volume. take that edge away from me and i may as well take my robust HUDless strat to partypoker where i know no one else has a HUD. after all, where will they stop ? if its logical to take away colour ranges, why not take away HUDs altogether ? where does it stop ? if there's no logic to it other than trying to turf out regs and they cant even provide a bot free environment (they need players to find the actual bots then take my colour ranges ? there's nothing automated about colours !), i'll take the hint and go make a ton of rake for some other jokers.

I can see myself swapping PS for multiple sites instead. A mixture of ipoker, 888, Party and one or two others should provide enough volume between them. Amaya seem to have a casino attitude to poker ie only the house wins except for a few big winners who are good for marketing purposes.

The new rules are really terrible. It's as if they just wrote down 100 features of poker software and then put them into a hat and drew out 30 at random then said "all of these are now banned on our site". There is no consistent pattern that explains the reasoning behind these rules, they're just random. They've crippled random parts of software in hopes of reducing the edge regs have so that they increase profit.

They are also trivially easy to work around. Consider colour ranges. To get around this, HUD devs could add a new feature that resized a hud statistic based on ranges. And such that if it was below a certain amount, it would auto resize to size 0. And by having multiple of these stats, you could make it functionally equivalent to having colouring based on ranges but yet not breaking any rules. You could also look into doing things like creating a custom font that was a giant list of bar charts and such that would normally be banned - but because it is technically text and not graphical, it would be allowed.

The rules were drawn up by bureaucrats who have no experience with HUDs or poker, and they aren't capable of writing rules that aren't riddled with loop holes. This is a disaster for Pokerstars.

The worst part of this for me is the complete lack of communication from Stars and the lack of respect that implies. They asked for feedback, got hundreds of pages of it and commented on nothing. New rules are introduced with some strange inclusions/exclusions, again no communication from Stars despite lots of feedback.

Are reps no longer allowed to communicate on here? Why start the thread in that case? It's completely up to them to decide what is allowed on their site but some communication would help, even just to explain/clarify some of the reasonable points that have been brought up.

Interesting. I had presumed the auto-rate functions were banned entirely. I always found the auto-rate colour boxes were very useful for reminding me who was the "target" when I was playing several tables. For my purposes, the colour boxes were almost more useful than the HUD stats themselves. Obviously Stars has colour-coded notes and avatar rings built into the client, but the automatic marking of player types isn't in the spirit of the new rules. If I play on Stars in the near future, I guess I'll be manually rating players if it's still possible, because those boxes were great.

They can read our minds.
They just aren't very good at changing them.

P.S. Solid summary post from Karganeth.

You know they can't stop me from installing a virtual machine and installing all my third party tools in there like poker stove where I can punch my information in.

They can't, unfortunately.
I refer you to post #14 in this thread:
We were saying the same things in the NVG Skier thread back in May! Pokerstars is a slow-moving ship.

I even forgot I said that. . I will have to say since then I have revised my views with the bottom statement I made about softwares aids. If EVERYONE has access to the same tools then there it should be ok to use. With tools like jiavaro accessible to everyone, then that should level the playing field.

Jivaro seems like the perfect HUD for recreational Players as far as i am concernd. It looks really good and isnt overloaded with Stats but gives some help.

Amaya should just buy up Jivaro and integrate it into their Client. Give the opportunity to enable/disable it and some preconfigured Options like slim medium large. Make some really short introduction Videos on Youtube.

Real whales just dont care about anything despite to gamble and wont use it anyway but the motivated fun players get some help to catch up.

Since most bans of third party software cant be enforced without banning local HH storage(and even that wont stop the programmers and cartel bumhunters), which would give a free pass for Bots.

This seems like the best solution to me.

Very well said. The lack of clarification / communication is verging on the absurd. Made even worse by Keith (not his fault, no doubt unable to say anything else) telling people "this is the thread to get your answers".

One week on, I still have no idea if I should rework my huds to use two thresholds. I'm not the only one, by any stretch. Fizbin's post on PT4 forums is spot on - besides the "two threshold" issue, vast swathes of HUD functionality are banned by letter of the rules. Clarification is needed, and soon.

I know the notecaddy graphics/scatter plot are gone, what about the text notes that notecaddy generates? Will they stay or are they gone too?

How I felt reading some of the reactions:

seriously though its not fair to punish regs who use colour thresholds effectively and efficiently with the pretense of targeting those who use programs which automate the decision making process. my thresholds dont automate anything ? they just let me read the pattern of numbers quicker than if they were all mono or had less thresholds. banning bots and automated dynamic stuff makes sense. a totally random arbitrary limit on colour thresholds doesnt.

i've never used so much as a badge while playing. i dont use odd oracle or anything even when away from the table and can only imagine it distracting me if i tried to use it while playing. i know they can analyse my click patterns and they know i am legit because i click 1000 god damn times a second while 4tabling zoom @~650hands/hr and consistently build up massive timebanks on all tables

guys i have aja hud with all badges.... but agree with pokerstars.... dont you all see how terrible tight boring the games have got .... hense why no fish want to play....

i hope they catch you sickos running VMs to use badges ect.!

I still don't understand why no information has gone out from stars, apart from in here.

And how will the rules be enforced?! Will players be warned, or will you just ban+seize $200k because someone missed the 3-color thing in the HUD?

@coach999 they cannot do that. There are so many ways around it its not possible. Trust me i'm in IT, I know.

You should.

The reason you still don't know what everyone else knows is you don't want to believe it so the information isn't going in.

I wonder if another legal workaround is to add the same stat to your HUD five times, and just use different thresholds and colours for each version. With the use of custom fonts, it's probably even possible to make some sort of badge-like structure.
Years ago, someone used NoteCaddy to make a HUD that looked like this:

Looks kind of like an 8-bit precursor to Jivaro to me.

support@pokerstars.com
12:20 PM (3 hours ago)

to me
Hello Jesse,

Thank you for your further email. We understand your frustration with this situation and we will do our best to address your concerns.

As stated previously, we permit heads-up displays (HUDs) to alter the colour of an individual statistic based on a *maximum* of two different thresholds. As with the previous example, a HUD may show a VPIP statistic in red if it is less than 20%, white if it is between 20%-30% and green if it is greater than 30%. So ten colours would imply that far more than two thresholds are used, and hence would now be prohibited as we do not wish for the data to be displayed in a manner that provides too much guidance to the end-user on the appropriate action to take in a given situation.

We do understand that you still must "figure out a situation" for yourself so to speak, however, one must appreciate the larger topic at hand and the debate of HUDs and third party tools used during game play in general. There are other sites who have taken measures to ban HUD use and statistical data of any kind altogether, and yet others that have not implemented any sort of rule or guideline on using or enforcing use of any type of third party tool. At this point in time, we have decided to strike a balance between these two extremes. We wish for players playing multiple tables and in high volume to consider actions with the aid of tools with information accrued only through their own game play, but we still believe that additional measures must be implemented in order to regulate such tools as described above.

We believe that allowing HUDs to set too many colour thresholds for individual statistics can create many situations that provide too much guidance, particularly when used in conjunction with other features and tools that remain permitted. Regardless of whether the colours are user defined, the HUD would be providing more guidance than we are comfortable with. To draw an analogy, albeit an extreme one, we prohibit automated bot programs from playing even though the strategy is defined and updated by the bot developer or operator.

I trust that this helps clarify our position. If you have any other questions or concerns, please let us know. Best of luck at the tables!

Regards,

Alex
PokerStars Game Integrity


my response:

i havent spent the past couple years in some lab cooking up an AI to make my decisions
for me. i've spent them developing a HUD and learning how to use it effectively and efficiently. i've never used a single ****ing one of whatever these tools you're talking about are. don't even know what they are. table ninja ? note caddy ? odds oracle ? i've literally never used a single one of them and never will. the only thing that has changed about my game over time is I HAVE IMPROVED, and one of the main reasons for that is streamlining and customising my HUD, and the color thresholds are an extremely important aspect of that. NOW YOU'RE MAKING ME FEEL LIKE I'M A CHEAT. like i'm somehow doing something wrong by improving my game. there is NOTHING automated about a single decision i have made over however many hundreds of thousands of hands i've played on your site. every single decision has been made by ME.

your argument is akin to saying that because terrorists sometimes get on public transport, you're going to stop everyone from catching a bus. making loyal customers feel like they are cheats is a disgusting attitude. on my first warning i will withdraw my remaining funds and go find a site where i am made mo feel welcome instead of made to feel like a cheat.


best of luck killing online poker !


regards,
Jesse

For the most part 3 colors is plenty because you need a huge sample before more than three would be statistically meaningful. And huge sample tends to mean illegal data mining usage.