Yeah makes sense, think it made less sense before the edit lol.
Anyway this is generally agreed, a pretty big focus of the meeting I went to last year was the fact that recreational players are very important for the long term sustainability of poker, both pokerstars and the "pro" players.

I think a topic should be freerolls and how can the format be changed. As it is now, you must play for many hours a big field MTT, earn a ticket to the weekly final, play again for many hours and hope to cash. Other pokerrooms are giving away money in freerolls easier than this.

PS needs to put more amateurs in the game. Another thing.. offer a small credit to inactive accounts and see if those players will come back. Find a way to track big playmoney winners and put some $ in their account to play with.

Something which I hope you could mention David at the meetings (if successfull in getting enough votes) is I've always been after a low-mid buy-in regular weekly MTT with the same structure as the Sunday Million

Maybe not quite as low as an $11 buy in, as the average number of runners you get in the Sunday Storm... having the Sunday Million structure in that tournament (with a 10k starting stack and 15 minute blinds) the completion time for a tournament like that would be absurd

Maybe somewhere inbetween $11-$100, perhaps $55 buy-in
This tourney may attract alot of runners with a good structure and the lower buy in and the completion time may be even more than that of the Sunday Million but with the better structure I'm sure it will attract a bigger crowd and what's another 2-3 hours ontop of a 10-12 hour grind

Hopefully many mid stake MTT regulars will agree with me that the MTT schedule is completely absent of regular weekly medium stake MTT ($25-$100 buy in) with a structure as good as the Sunday Million

I appreciate there are alot of bigger issues to be discussed such as the rake% but I thought this idea can be reviewed fairly quickly without too much discussion, either a straight "yes we will trial this" or "no can't do it"

Last of all before I can cast you my vote David, who's that in your avatar?

Did Stars even remotely touch on the fact that the system of rake charges losing (let's drop the euphemism 'recreational' as it's quite a misnomer) players vastly more than others? Or that their VIP system gives far less back to these players than others? Stars seems to like to keep repeating their mantra about the value of losing players, yet are unwilling to give anything whatsoever to extend their time spent in the games or improve their experience. It feels like a Brazilian logging company who spends their free time preaching about how important preservation of the rain forest and associated ecosystems are. Words are nice and all.. but if you want to preserve the trees it's not too complex - stop chopping them down like there's no tomorrow.

One thing to add.

The reason why fish no longer play poker online is that it is not fun for them. the same fish still play online casinos/bet on sport/ play live. It isn't even about losing but more about that not only people don't chat anymore but also there is a bunch of the same regs timing down on every table.

If you check the numbers for betting/online casinos/ even live casinos the numbers are way better than in poker. So the problem isn't the lack of fish the problem is that they don't want to play online poker anymore in current ecosystem. Most of the recreational players I know feel that online poker is boring and thats the problem.

Honestly it has nothing to do with rake like Do it Right claims (have any of you seen bodog/bovada regs complaining about the rake? there is plenty of recreational players so people don't even notice the rake that much, 888 has probably one of the highest rake in the industry but they have plenty of games and regs make solid profit there because there are recreational palyers that make the games sustainable).
The only reason rake is unbeatable for many is that there is not recreational players,period and games won't get better with rake decrease as many here claim (the reg vs reg action is a myth, regs don't play each other so as long as there is a mark people play, no marks no games)

It is a mistake for you to think and write this. There is a battle going on in several U.S. states, and the American Gaming Association has been successful in spreading damaging accusations about PokerStars, and inserting exclusionary clauses in legislation and regulations. They are ahead on points, and you don't appear to be aware of it. I am telling you that leaving PokerStars to do the heavy lifting while you teach others how to drain the pond faster is counterproductive. Turning your back on the situation, just because you live far away from it is shortsighted. The prize is the U.S. recreational player base. You may not like it, or even acknowledge it, but it is a fact. Getting a big piece of it would benefit U.S. players, international players and PokerStars.

Tell us again. What do you plan to talk about at the meeting?

I have two proposals:

1) I would like to see the VIP tiers re-adjusted. The regular VIP level requirements increase in 3x to 5x increments. I don't understand why there are only two annual VIP levels, and they are 10x(!) apart. Once you get to SN, there is not that much of an incentive to grind more than you need to. You only get an extra 1,5% per 100K vpps in rakeback, after all. There needs to be some kind of 300K-400K intermediary annual tier. This way, you can preserve the 3+x multiplier between levels. Perhaps you can bump the FPP multiplier to 4x. I realize this is going to cost PS money. But just as PS makes money from people going for SN and SNE, I think you will find additional activity from people going for this new reward level - give players a reason to play more!

2) Rather than impose restrictions on table selecting, I like the idea of rewarding people who DON'T table select. You can change the behavior of players on the margin by changing the reward structure. Currently, you offer a 5,5x VPP multiplier (per $ rake) on most tables. Why don't you offer only "4,5x" VPPs on a "regular" table and "6,5x" on Zoom and if someone uses table starters and STAYS on the table? This should work well on Zoom. It's not clear to me if table starters tables will die out faster in the current system. So you may need to implement a "random seating" feature (also paying 6,5x) that will fill in any empty seats on a table starter that has started to break. You can obviously adjust the numbers as necessary to keep the total rewards about the same, or retinker to have the "table selectors" pay for part of Suggestion #1.

The second suggestion, in conjunction with the first suggestion should help maintain an environment where the players are incentivised to play as much as possible. And the people "paying" for all these benefits would be the aggressive table selectors.

That is an understatement:

(these are overall numbers, not the PLO numbers).

This shows the 17.3 BB pretty much goes to Eastern Europeans and how bad the problem is:

Currently they play ~70% of all the hands at microstakes, quickly killing all the fish.


This we also need, a welcome back bonus, but first PS must make sure the fish are better protected. A nice timing for that action would be when the USA comes back.

Fish no longer play because it's not fun for them?

Isn't that why nobody longer plays? I mean stakes go down to the pennies so it's not because of an inability to afford it, at least for anybody in a first world country. The idea of swapping to alternative profit models is not to benefit any particular group, but rather to increase the general level of fun for all players. Think about what rake does. If you sit down and play a while and do about the same as the other players, maybe a little better - maybe a little worse, you're going to come out a huge loser. That's not fun. If you're playing microstakes and you play much better than your average opponents, you're going to be about break-even - perhaps still losing. That's certainly not fun. This isn't even getting into what we were talking about above regarding rake specifically destroying weaker players. There are alternative profit models to rake that don't suffer from these problems.

Here's an interesting statistic relating to how rake impacts games. Just about 1 year ago today Stars was averaging around 25,000 play money players. They then decided to start raking play money. I predicted here and throughout that thread that that change would likely drive away players for similar reasons as I'm discussing here. Since then Stars has lost nearly 30% of their play money players plummeting down to 17,600. I suppose you're going to claim that's just a really interesting coincidence? Since it's play money it gets rid of all monetary/legal confounding issues. It's just poker plain and simple. Introduce the rake and millions of people decide they don't want to play anymore even when a reload is just a [free] mouse click away.

So you're going help international players get some USA action by talking to Stars in meetings? How does that work?

That is the best ****ing idea I've read as far as increasing activity on the Pokerstars goes, you deserve a cookie!



Pokerstars could maybe even chuck in another level underneath supernova, 50k annual VPPs maybe?
This would be costing Pokerstars money yes but the increased activity from these additional annual levels could massively overcome the costs

You can run forecasts on what you expect the additonal activity to be against the costs but you won't find out for sure until you try the new additons

You can run accurate predictions on prizepool guarantees but there isn't any forecasting software in existence to predict how many people will react to these new additions and how much their activity could increase

Great suggestion

PS: a ZOOM tournament in the Sunday schedule with a big guarantee would be good, as there's no ZOOM tournament if memory serves me right with a bigger guarantee than $8k
I could be slightly off on the biggest ZOOM guarantee prize pool being $8K but there's no big ZOOM tournament on Sunday yet which would be a good addition

Would discussing options and strategy for an hour or two upset you much? Why are you so open to other topics but not this one?

Your numbers suffer from at least two major flaws.

1. You are assuming the evil Eastern European doesn't pay any rake. Imagine a fish and Vlad sit down heads up. They both pay about 20bb/100 in rake. At the end of exactly 100 hands the fish is busto and Vlad has all the remaining money. How many bb did Vlad net? Yeah, not 80bb but 60bb.

2. This isn't heads up. We're discussing 6-max. And a table with one 27bb/100 loser is actually a pretty good table for the state of today's games!

Let's look at what happens after 100 hands.

Our fish loses 27bb/100, 10 goes to the site
Vlad loses 10* to the site
Viktor loses 10 to the site
Boris loses 10 to the site
Andrei loses 10 to the site
Ivan loses 10 to the site

Collectively our evil Eastern European micro grinders just paid 50bb/100 in rake. Our innocent high value fish only lost 17bb between all 5 of them. Uh oh. Our game destroying Eastern European sharks are actually all losing players as well! Their loss rate is obviously going to be much smaller so the inertia of a bankroll along with variance can keep them swimming a lot longer than our poor fishy, but in the end they're all going to end up belly up.

2*. My numbers, and yours, are somewhat inaccurate. Fish pay substantially more than regs in rake. It would likely be more accurate to say our fish is paying 20bb/100 in rake and the regs are paying 8bb/100 in rake. It actually doesn't change the story at all. The fish is losing his skin, but so are our evil antagonists.

# - There's some other small mistakes. For instance, casuals get nowhere near 40% rakeback. That's a 300k VPP supernova with perfectly optimized spending level of rakeback. For a casual you're looking more in the 0-10% range.

Why did you misquote me

But anyway, it's because Stars has no control over whether USA lets them in or not, wtf are you some random dude going to change by going to Stars??

That is correct, yet they take out hundreds of millions out of the poker economy.

This is what I am assuming:

Good point. You wouldn't get 20BB/100 (this isn't PLO only) but it's probably higher than 10BB/100. As I mentioned I guessed the BB/100 and rakeback. This doesn't change the fact these evil East Europeans take out all that money and kill our fish prematurely.

I owe you an apology. I was attempting to write replies to OMGCLAYDOL and to you at the same time. It was meant as a reply to what he wrote.

Sorry CocteauTwin. It was not meant as a reply to you. I wrote nice things to you, and now they are gone.

but then you wrote this:

but then you wrote this:

Are you willing to be patient to consider all point from all parties, except this one?

Are you under the impression that PokerStars is succeeding in returning to one or more U.S. states? Is victory just around the corner?

Are you under the impression that PokerStars doesn't need any coordinated help from their large base of registered players in the U.S. and all over the world? Are they going to succeed without us?

Are you under the impression that it doesn't matter very much? Are there already more than enough players with money on PokerStars?

What are your priorities at the meeting?

please grow up, i explained very clearly and politely why the point you made was invalid and even went out of my way to not embarrass you (see my initial reply).

i can only assume you realised i was right as you only replied

oh and lol this, which i ignored
i only said the above which is of course quoted by itself and not with what i was replying to after you wouldn't stop bringing up the same wrong point.
i think any reader can see pretty clearly the problems but i'm going to summarise this one last time..

1) Stars already wants to bring pokerstars back to the us. I would bet they have spent multiple millions on legal fees and are continuing to fight as I write. If you tell them we need/want the US market, they will say "we know". can you offer something new? it's a priority already too, so telling them it should be more prioritised won't help either..
90%+ of people will back me up here, you're not going to make the us situation better..

2) The main problem is you brought this all up as a magical solution that would apparently stop all the problems we have which is 100% just not true.

stop trying to make me look bad, i clearly never said the us market isn't important, in fact i specifically said both stars and i think it is

Of course I have something to offer.

I have already re-written the criteria for the selection of the sole internet poker provider in my state. My draft now contains objective criteria that would contribute to the selection of the best internet poker provider here, rather than protection of the AGA's status quo. I removed the exclusion clause that was put in the previous bill, that would have made the world's most successful and popular internet poker provider ineligible to be even considered.

Through a stroke of luck, I have some access to <an influential person> (although I want to use it carefully), and some state legislators. I would prefer to have some ****ing coordination and suggestions before going further.

You have been to these meetings before. If you can convince your contacts there that this should not be discussed at all at the meeting, I will drop it.

They don't even need to publicly announce their preference. Get them to stomp their left hoof twice for "we don't want to discuss this". I will respect their wishes.

Coordinated effort please.

This has been brought up a few times by friends/MTT players and I'm pretty confident there is potential based on how popular the zoom tournies during COOP are. That being said, it may take time. Also perhaps it should be on a weekday since for most players adding a zoom table is quite difficult when they have so many MTTs up during the weekends, especially Sunday.

Oh sorry forgot to answer about the avatar last time, EVERY one asks, I've had so many skype msgs and PMs on 2p2, unfortunately the answer is I don't know - I literally just googled something a while ago. She isn't someone famous.

And will definitely take into account your suggestion, I suggest reminding whoever gets selected if it's not me about this so they can forward it, I agree with most of what you said but I think a solution would just be making say the big 109 a bit better in terms of structure, perhaps a bigger starting stack or something. I think the Million's popularity is important in terms of it as an offering so making say a $109 with the same structure would take away from that. Not sure about this, anyone is welcome to give their thoughts.

Quite a lot of the focus was about giving more back to them, and some of the promotion discussion certainly considered what would be better/more enjoyable etc. for recreational players. Rather than say BOP which is much more of a reg promotion atm.

I will vote for you if you come up with some good promo ideas for diff games like nlh/ plo cash, sng.

I would love it if Do it Right would 'do the right thing' and agree to throw himself into the ring for these meetings.

I would also like to nominate Raidalot. The guy talks a lot of sense.

I also agree with the sentiment that these meetings should be in addition to interaction and discussion on the forums with the community.

edit: oh well too late, it pays to know what day it is.

Thank you. I am willing to try. I have added an action item to my list.

What would most think about the idea of having a bit of a flatter final table payout structure in MTTs?

I'm sure everyone agrees the payout structure in the final 9 paying spots is very top heavy, I though getting to a final table of a large field MTT should be enough to warrant getting a bigger % payout from the prizepool than you currently do if you're finishing in the bottom half of the top 9

I already said this in the CV thread, but IMO one of the absolute biggest issues atm is that Pokerstars doesn't communicate with players anywhere near enough. They pseudo communicate by creating 2+2 accounts who mostly post either semi-promotional stuff (such as NeilJ publishing EPT schedules) or post when someone says something negative about Stars (see NVG for random Stars superuser etc threads). They don't really communicate with players on the subject of how to improve, and even if they do they seemingly do nothing about ~any suggestions no matter how good they are.

Now I don't want to sound like a dick, but honestly I don't think that half of the suggestions, ideas, complaints etc presented in this thread really belong here. These meetings should be about the grandeuse things regarding the long term future of online poker as a whole (for example: rake in various games and declining winrates). I'm not saying that the posters are doing the wrong thing bringing these issues up (quite the opposite) but it's beyond ridiculous they *have* to do that here. Stars should have a rep in every single forum, there should be a thread for every game where a guy from Stars would be communicating with players on a daily basis. How much does one customer service guy cost, $20/hr? How many gazillions do they make an hour from rake and they can't hire 5 people just for that?

So imo, whoever ends up going should make a huge point about this. If I go, I'm going to print every single suggestion people have no matter how silly I personally think they are, pound the 10 pound book on the table and ask for an explanation why no one's been responding to any of these. I suspect that the meetings will probably consist of 15-20 hours of actual conference time, and while it sounds like a lot I doubt there's going to be anywhere near enough time to go through everything. So whoever goes should aim to have a pretty good filter for what's actually important, make sure these are the first and foremost things to discuss, and try to convince Stars to get reps on these forums who listen to players in the future so maybe in a future meeting there'd actually be time to only discuss serious stuff and not whether the 60/120 blind level should have antes or not in the Big 109. It's so absurd that 2+2 has basically all the biggest winners, biggest rakers, most succesful and smartest pros posting for every single game Stars offers and they don't listen to them at all, or even ask their opinion. Obviously they can't do whatever players want as they have a business to run, but it's ridiculous to not even aim for communication.

One thing I'd also like to suggest is a some kind of "2+2 committee". Now this is just a really broad idea, but since we do have many great posters in all subforums who are willing to (and already are) committing their time to make playing circumstances better for all us, we could have these committees for say NLHU, NL ring games, SNGs, MTTs, PLO, mixed games = 6 committees total. These would be people that would be elected in votings inside the forums similarly to the vote concerning which two of us ****s end up going to the rainy island. The point would be that these committees would be the filter between everyone's suggestions in these threads, and would be the kinds of people who see the big picture and what actually needs changing, and they would have monthly conference meetings with Stars (via skype or whatever). They'd scroll through forums, make notes of what people have been asking for, add their own, discuss them as a group to come up with a list of what they consider to be key items, and present them. And Stars would have reps attending these meetings on their behalf, and since this is a pre-voted "elite" group who actually understands their stuff, Stars would actually LISTEN. This way they'd also only have to hire a guy for two hours a month since they clearly can't afford a guy posting daily on 2+2 (must be a brokeass company). The results of these meetings would be made public and Stars would actually comment on why something is/isn't doable instead of the standard "we might work on this" (2 years later nothing's changed) bs.

As much as I'd love to present myself in a manner that'd convince people that I'm an expert on every game and have the best ideas ever, that's just not true and it's not going to be true for anyone else nominated either. It's just impossible for anyone to go through everything suggested even just in this thread (not to mention other threads) and have a clear picture of which of the stuff is good and which isn't. This is why, IMO, instead of focusing on singular subjects too much we should aim to make Stars communicate with players directly and that's why I think the committee idea is a pretty good one although it needs some working on.

I think their lack of communication and transparency regarding all kinds of security issues (also putting multiaccounting, vpning, grimming, all the SexyAngelina stuff above, the EPT security leaks, etc etc under this category) should be a clear #1 subject. If they got that fixed we'd have gone a long way and I'd personally start having some faith in Stars again.

I hope whoever gets chosen is able to see the big picture and instead of building an agenda of 9845 issues would be able to focus on key points. I feel like this is the only way to have some actual results, even that it would mean that Average Joe itt would not instanly get his suggestion to add an additional level to the Sunday Million go through.