MA as in people sharing 1 account or people using more than 1 screen name?

Hey mexican_natis, since you're posting itt and attended the last meeting, were you guys allowed to participate on creating the list of subjects on the menu (I looked at the agenda for previous meeting), or did Stars create it by themselves?

I kinda agree that if Stars' position on banning seating scrips is a definite no-no then it's probably pointless to discuss it at length as there's limited time anyway, *but* it should still be at least quickly brought up make sure it's still their stand and ask why (I suspect it's rake greed).

I gotta say that even that I disagree with their stance regarding the seating script issue I prefer the way they are handling that - at least they are actually saying there's no way they'll be banned and that's it instead of the "we'll look into changing this" -> nothing happens. Which is just a waste of everyone's time yet they seem to pursue that with almost every issue.

If banning table scanners ....why not ban:
-huds
-note caddy
-regs discussing strategy versus other regs

They all give you some kind of advantage over people that don't use these things. Yet no one ever responds to this b/c they know they are being huge hypocrites. Sorry that I dont want carpal tunnel or that I like not ever looking at the lobby or that I dont want to play with a table full of short stackers. I love seating scripts and would be forced to play less tables without them. The tables that I would sit at would be exactly the same without the scripts..... if I am clicking through a lobby and see a table full of short stackers and nit regs and another table with a lone fish im going to sit with the fish... obviously I am the only one that would do that because the rest of you only play against regs? Why did durr have to lay odds to get HU action? Probably because everyone game selects. Without a hud though my habits would completely change.... no longer would i know that a guy is cbetting 80% then checking 70% of turns or that a fish limp calls 90% or has a wtsd of 40.

Summary:
huds: completely changes the way everyone plays the game.... gives you a huge edge over anyone not using one
table scanner: lets me play more tables.... doesn't change the way I would game select without it, lets fish play at a full table instead of being destroyed at HU

Yet even with Stars saying they wont do anything about, tons of games that don't require seat selection (ZOOOOOOM, SNGS, Tournaments, etc), fish being able to play right away at a full table instead of getting owned heads up, .... all you hypocrites wont shut up about it. So again I will ask: how is having note caddy and knowing that a fish donk bets river as a bluff 90% (9/10) fair but me not having to click through the lobby a huge issue?

I can't disagree with a lot of what you said.

yea,well hypocrites being hypocrites as usual.
And the reps that are already chosen basically will reverse freeroll us into talking about the scripting issue again. Either it stays as it is or table selection goes away as they've already stated.

What's the current status of the rathole solution? It was talked about at the last meeting, solution and time frame was decided...and yet the deadline passed and it wasn't implemented.
Shouldn't this be an important point in the agenda?

Also although I don't play PLO and limit, rake is obv a big deal there and that should always be on the agenda.
(hopefully DIR will attend a future meeting)
CAP is also a raketrap but given the nature of the game, less decisions, easier to mass table, player liking to play their "favorite stack size"...I'd say that should be left as it is.

Also attracting new players...how would a rep who is a reg know how to attract new players?

I agree about huds in theory, but in practice there is 0% chance they will ever get banned because they are too big a thing nowadays. I don't think seating scripts are (yet) so that's why I'd like to pursue banning them. But obv if Stars says there's 0 chance they'll ever ban them, there's not a whole left to discuss.

Promo ideas

Challenges and pro's like Isildur is always entertaining for people. And should drive som rec's in and get publicity for poker as a sport and challenge. Pokerstars should def try to replace the role Isildur1 with his challenges. Noone will be the same but Im sure there are good fits that could be marketed well and create the action.

Also what FTP started to do with durrr seemed a good idea. Both his challenge to the world (obvs turned into a joke) but I'm actually thinking of the promos where randoms could win a chance to play him in 3 hu sngs or something for y money. Give them a shoot at playing the best.

The WCGgrider vs Sauce seems v cool but it looks like its the players seeking these things out not the sites facilitating it.

Idea

Also I heard someone suggest an online big game (cashgame, 5 pros, one amateur). Sounds like a good idea for BOTH NLHE and PLO, easy to fuel people into it. And its an opportunity to make online pros appealing.

A 6max NLHE and PLO challenge (a bit like the HU challenge for NLHE) would probarly be popular as well. Just make sure the site actually have sponsored pro's playing them (can also loan some FTP pro's).

A cool idea could be the pro's (stars and ftp) vs the field. 3-6 players vs 3-6 players in 6m NLHE and 6m PLO (different players for each game) 4-6 tabling with random seat draws. Do the NLHE and PLO a month apart or something.

Team winning the most totally wins, no reason to softplay since people play for their own dime (at least the field people) and winning from another person on your team doesn't help you.

Pokerstars could offer a price to the winner so its incentive to play for both sides.

Im sure Sauce/Galfond/Kanu/Oddsen/Ben86 (Im forgetting some NLHE crushers but thats besides the point) would love to captain the fields teams, while whole team FTP + Daniel N, Mercier and ike is natural Stars/FTP choices. Obvs dont need to use FTP people as well but assume its easier to fill the playing rooster that way. I would love to be able to play in anything like this for PLO.

Maybe give both teams a competition winner ('random' ) as well for each game and give the teams / capteins a few weeks to coach them.

Was gonna edit in:

or use some of their team sportstars as the last player on each team (Nadal, realRonaldo, Becker, etc).

How could wouldnt it be if they relatively speaking did good in this game? Or won a huge pot vs the other teams known players?

How about HUD free tables?

To attract new people one way would be to scrap the quarterly supernova freeroll, and use it to pay a celebrity that has millions of twitter followers to play on stars, and tweet they are doing so. Pay the star with half in bankroll and half in cash to play and tweet for a 6 month period, bound to get followers signing up to play with them.

The problem here is that this would acknowledge recreational players about the existence of HUDs. I still would guess that 50%+ of players have zero idea what a hud is. The only solution in that neighbourhood would be anonymous tables but I don't think people would like that.

Big +1 to everything here

Promo ideas sound fun ^

Ummm if that this idea would get more players (more revenue for Stars) then why should it come out of current players VIP rewards? btw I think your idea does have some merit but this attitude that players should do without to accommodate new players is absurd and needs to stop. They make a fortune.

Speaking of the VIP program I have noticed a continually steady decline in the way of rewards that used to be constantly added to the prize pools. This is an issue that should be brought up at the meetings. An exact dollar figure of rewards given in 2013 compared to 2011 would be quite interesting to see imo.

You still are not explaining how seating scripts even hurt stars or rec players? Rec players get to play 9 handed or 6 handed right away instead of HU. Regs like me get to play more tables. Stars makes more $$. The other regs that are complaining have zoom and a million other games (and poker sites!) that dont require table selection.


The problem here is that its a ****ing terrible idea. Go play on party poker or the plethora of other crap sites that listen to terrible ideas like this that lead to no huds and no table selection and wcr rake. How about people acknowledge that there are a ton of people making a good living on stars the way that it is. Or that there is a reason that Stars is super popular. They are doing a ton of things right so stop complaining about things that you can't even come close to proving or quantifying is bad for the games.. cause it can lead to something that really is bad like no huds or no table selection.

Reminds me of all the people talking about WCR being way better for regs and not a $$ grab. Or some kind of "industry standard".... hint: when you are the industry monopoly you make the standards.

So tilting.... why not focus on promos, rake, and keeping countries from banning poker.

PokerStars has the website setup to drive winrates close to zero percent but in turn created more winners on average the past 2 to 3 years based on their incentive program, allowance of certain software's, etc. It all helps out the average regs more than it helps out the better regs which were crushing before these changes at a huge expense to the RECs.

What happens when all the recreational players are gone? You are left with a player pool of 'meh' regs and "good" regs. Will this be a sustainable pokersite? Certainly not for the "Meh" regs. Unlike fish they don't necessarily play poker as much for the entertainment value as for the $ and they wont be making it anymore so games will die out.

Cause I was once a new player as were all other current REGS in this thread.

With that said most of the people in this thread are only thinking of their own self interest as a REG currently so maybe Pokerstars should be asking the new prospective players themselves.

I like the idea of some promotions but the main problem is getting people to play them. Stars isn't just going to throw a bunch of money at one of their pros to play some big matches. I think they need to refocus some of their team online because of this. You need to be sponsoring people who will play nearly anyone at their stakes. ie not nanonoko and Mysters bumhunting HU.

This is why Isildur provides so much value to FTP.

great so our own chosen reps think of ideas like anonymous tables!

So stars is bigger than all of the other websites combined...and this trend is not looking to reverse anytime soon.

So what do we do? We copy ideas from the small unsuccessful sites?
You'll go there, slap Steve around and tell him "Listen, moron...here's what you should do: copy the anonymous tables from bodog and vip system from 888".
And he will say "who are bodog and 888 ?"

Like others said above Stars is the biggest website for a reason: because they do mostly the right things...why the **** would we change them? You want 888 vip system go play there, you want anonymous tables go to bodog, you want 3% cashout fee and segregation based on skill go play on party.
Cake had no huds policy, how many fish jumped ship there?
Let me play on stars, I like it!

I was for the meeting but really it seems that every reg is pushing his own personal issue. even if it's a minority.

Is the problem attracting new players or retaining them? I'd imagine it's more of the latter.

Regardless promotions are a reasonable idea. One promotion that I really enjoyed from another site was a "mystery ticket" promotion. After you payed a certain amount of rake(very little) you received a mystery card out of a lottery pool. Of course most of the prizes in the lottery were weighted towards minor prizes but it still was a lot of fun scratching off all the tickets.

I think a casual player would really enjoy such a promotion as it gives them a chance to win big in theory by only playing a small amount. The prizes varied from cash, iphones, to player points, etc.

Pokerstars recently ran a "Golden SnG" promotion which ran in a similar lottery type of style. Also a fun and more entertaining promotion for the recreational players and REGS alike.

they already know. i am to lazy digging out sauce's post on the issue, but i would put it like this: just let go. it's yesteryears technique you are trying to defend. the sad thing is that HUDs directly lead to anonymous tables as there is no other way currently known to keep ever evolving software aids at bay.

try to think about it, it's a deeply challenging logical puzzle. i have a hunch that a possible solution is somewhat related to daniels latest rant on the first card issue. what information is needed (has to be given out to the players) to make this work on the internets?

Relax mate I don't think anyone here is suggesting anonymous tables. That's obviously something that would never happen anyway, and a terrible idea. I was only saying that in response to the previous poster, who suggested hud-free tables. My point was that it's a bad idea to highlight that some tables don't have HUD, as that will point out to fish that things such as HUDs exist. Thus if anything like this would be suggested (which I don't think will, because it's pointless and never going to happen), it would have to be something more subtle, and the only comparison I could come up with (whilst 20tabling and trying to post in this thread) was "something like anonymous tables". Obviously no one is going to suggest any of the ideas you mentioned.


And while I think the never-ending subject of whether HUDs should be allowed is interesting, it's a VERY moot point to discuss. They will always be allowed and whatever you think of them it'll stay that way. Thus it also doesn't make any sense to discuss this in the meeting. I'd like to get a marginal amount of input from Stars regarding the seating script stuff, but if they've already made up their mind about those as well, then it's moving on to the next subject time, imo. No point wasting time regarding anything they've made up their minds about anyway.


Also, even that I'm trying to keep an open mind I have to say I'm very skeptic that Stars would do much about seating scripts or anything similar that maximizes their rake. Their business model is basically very different from other sites. While most other sites cater for recreational players and screw winning players over in various ways, Stars business model is to create infinite marginally winning regs and force them to play infinite tables. Basically they want a bunch of players to win $0,50/table they play. They actually WANT the games to be clotted by 850-tabling robots who have all these ninja seating programs and huds with stats for every opponents turn check-raise-4-bet-fold-frequency in a 3bet pot. I'm only very familiar with the MTT world as that's what I play mostly, but in those they make everything a turbo, structure them in the ****tiest possible way, same with payjumps, and the result is that Stars is the only site in the world where no one has a more than 40% ROI. This is why the people who win the most from the site are dhilton types (note: this is not an attack vs dhilton, the man's got sick work ethics and I have deep respect for that) who play 40 tables at a time and basically have a premium robotic push/fold play. You are forced to reg every single plebby $11 turbo to maintain the highest winrate possible. This is their business model, it won't change, and that's why I think it's extremely unrealistic to expect them to make changes to say the seating scripts stuff. But I'd still like to ask for their reasoning though.

That's interesting to hear that there used to be more open discussions here on 2+2 between players and reps, but that PS has since shifted to this system of meeting twice a year with selected reps.

Maybe one benefit to the new system might be that it forces players in the collective to pick two or three big issues that matter the most to the most number of people, so that they can be discussed at length and better addressed at these meetings. For example the rake for PLO - I guess progress was made at the April meeting in reducing the rake at the microstakes?

But maybe a downside to a system of majority rules might be that there's the potential there for some voices to get lost in the fray. For example the Zoom pool - for whatever reason, we just don't seem to have as vocal a presence as the PLO group ... not sure why that is ...

It would be interesting to see the feedback process made part of the discussion at the player meeting, since it sounds like a lot of players really liked being able to interact with PS reps here at 2+2. Although, it sounds like these player rep meetings have been productive too - would it be possible to have some sort of mix of both? Would it be possible to at least have a discussion on having some sort of mix of both?


PS Some very high quality people we had the chance to select as reps for this meeting! Wish I could have voted for everybody But since we were only given one vote apiece, and I'm hoping that a feedback process discussion might take place at the meeting so that Zoom players and others might have more of a chance to discuss game-specific issues with PS reps, I voted for OMGClayDol. I recognized you right away from the 'Hand of the Day' promotion thread from last year. GL with the vote, and GL with the meeting!

PPS And thank you PokerStars for offering these meetings!

Agreed, good idea.

it depends. your 800 tabling robotic overlord is not likely to be a depositing player. i'd say if you can convince enough people that what they are playing against is not a machine and/or is actually fun to play against, fair deuce. but for now i am not convinced that this is not just a trick to make the graph look nice, when at the same time net depositing players are running away in droves.

so what i'd like to see is some work ethics to improve the overall EV of the game, not just the EV of a subset therein. i guess we'll notice once the chat at the tables kicks in again.

I think the problem with having something like a WCGgrinder vs Sauce match is that it has no appeal to rec players. Sure Stars could put a banner in the lobby promoting it, but I think the majority of the rec players would say "who?". Besides Daniel I don't think there are any Poker Pros who draw much attention from the recreational players and these type of promos will have the same outcome as something like Battle of the Planets.

I think the last idea you say is really good, and is something that should be pursued harder (although I find the Nadal picture in his bathtub and iPad to be pretty creepy). It would be a lot easier to promote to the rec players. You could much easier draw in new players promoting the Sportstars than an online guru.