Dear Pokerstars,

As the new buy-in structure for your ring-games does not assure that in the way as it used to be for years, I have to say goodbye.
Anyway, I want to thank you giving me the best possible playground for the last 3-4 years. All the best for the future.

Everything happens for a reason!


Regards

hankat

meh... I always hear this but honestly I fell like if we are equal.
I mean if he plays with 20bb stacks we are playing 20bb stacks effectively.

If stars at least openly and honestly said they've done this to maximise profit then i would have a lot more respect for it.

The whole masquerade for requesting advice on rat hole time input (where consensus appeared to suggest it needed to be over 1 hour long to have any real effect) and stack size input (where 2 or 3 suggested 20-50bb and the overwhelming majority stated that 20-40bb stacks or 20-30 cap games were needed (not including the people who wished to maintain the previous buy in structure)) is a complete charade and at the least very patronising to many of the long standing customers who pay for Pokerstars' service.

Whilst I may not like business decisions I can accept the fact that business decisions have to be made but don't treat me or X% of the community here as if we're just idiots (which is exactly the way many are feeling). Irrespective of whether the outcome benefits us directly or not.

Again, we have the actual professional blackize who I think is SNE saying something and then a bunch of play money/micro-stakes/spectators jumping in and giving their 2 cents like they actually have any idea what they are talking about.

PSSteve needs to come clean about the "Play Panel". Every person I have seen talk about this who was on the panel has said that they hate the changes and that this was not their advice to PS.

Can the mods start banning the spectators who have decided that they are going to take a contrarian position in their spare time before high school starts. There are too many voices in this thread.

Wow...

Calling for actual moderator enforcement of an Echo Chamber.

No, Steve said that the 20bb buy-in player needed to have their own game, thus the creation of 20bb-50bb. My question to Steve, is how did they manage to come up with 20bb-50bb as opposed to the wide consensus of 20bb cap or 20-40bb buyin?

And yes, its an amazing observation to point out that Poker Stars is a private business and they can control their profit margins.

The problem with that is when Steve comes on here and doesn't say "Go F yourselves, we are increasing our profit margins" but instead tries to pass off these changes as what the community wanted, as if Poker Stars "cares".

No. Blackize just disagreed with me. That is fine. What sucks is having a bunch of 70 post donkeys coming out of the woodwork to simply take pride in the fact that 90% of the players hate these changes and then make a bunch of terrible posts which have no value,the equivalent of a child banging pots.

+1

Why do you ask opinion of your player if you don't care at all anyway
change 20-50bb into 20-30bb CAP poker and that's all

+ Hu is a complete joke at least with the old margin I was playing only on 50-100bbs table, now shorties join me with 40bbs which is very frustrating

You (like many) are once again confusing "the loudest posters on 2+2" and "all players".

I think that is a very harsh statement to make, everyone who plays on Stars and has their game directly affected by these changes should have a platform to express their opinion.

Or is it just if you play over $xx buy in and have a post count of +500 that you can make your feelings known.

We have been though this a lot.
There is no inherent mathematical advantage as such (actually there is an infinitesimal one but it's so small not so as to be relevant).
HU there is no maths advantage at all obv.

There is however a strategic edge in the sense that shortstacks have an ability to make +EV shoves over a much wider range of raises than if they were full.

A fairly wide range of pre-flop raises in position is optimal full stack play.

As a concrete example if a full stack button is stealing 35% with a 3BB raise (standard play).
A full stack blind with AJ or 66 has a difficult decision and if he chooses to defend his blind is committing himself to potentially some quite tricky post-flop play oop.
A shorty can just make the +EV shove and forget about it.

Now it's possible for regs to adjust a lot more than they do.
In this scenario the reg should be tightening up and raising for lesser amounts.
And (often because they are playing so many tables) they don't even see the shorty in the BB and just make their 'standard raise' with 87s or whatever.
To that extent I have zero sympathy for them.
They are just lazy wanting to be able to play their standard game when adjustment is possible.

But in other scenarios with other deeper stacker players in the pot then adjustment to the shorty can lose more EV than it gains. When shorties start shoving OOP over iso-raises and the like you can see their presence does have a detrimental effect on the regs' BB/100.

And it is perceived as 'unfair' because shortstacking is
(comparatively) easy to learn,
significantly lessens/removes the advantage of position,
the full stack regs can't avoid losing out on BB/100 one way or another compared to a scenario where everyone was deep, and
in the sort of numbers we are seeing they can basically turns whole tables into 20BB battlegrounds (where even the full stack regs who are much more skilled poker players than the shorties actually lose).

None of the above are really about an inherent mathematical edge, but that doesn't mean that they don't have some fair points about shortstacking being cheap, lazy, and bad for the complexity of the NL game.

That said when post after post from full stacked regs in all these threads is basically 'please ban decent shorties and/or funnel all the fish to us so we can more efficiently rape them over 24 tables with our HUDS' I'm not so sure that 'purity of the game' is really their main concern

On the flip side 'purity of the game' isn't high on the agenda of a ratholing shortstacker either

Stars,

The player base is overwhelming in favor of 20-30bb instead of 20-50bb. Why did you choose 20-50bb instead of listening to us in the initial thread?

Thanks.

im gonna have to agree with this

Because Stars has taken a strong stance against manipulating players into playing any particular game or buyin. And if they made the buyin 20-30bb as would be logically coherent with their ratio reasoning and in line with the requests of the players, fish would be less likely to play in those games!

.........

+1

I am starting to look for alternatives to play, there are not many for a imac user, but Stars give me no choice with the decision of promote a loophole in the poker game instead of fixing it for good.

This is a very sad decision by Stars

this is a good post

I remember a long thread many years back on shortstacking with an excession and iceman on betthepot or something like that

which is why a low buyin game is best for the average guy.
I've had to break down and make a strat post in the ZOO to show how the presence of a shortstacker or two at a table of deep stacks actually allows the average guy to play looser and to lose less with 2nd best hands. As much as the average guy might not like 'shovebots,' he likes tightening up his hand range and losing enormous pots to professionals even less.

And, no, I'm not making any of this up. It's all in the table data for anyone that wants to seriously understand the issues rather than just come in with simplistic assumptions about what they think they know already.

What many look over is shortstacks allow for more hands to see a flop (as long as the deep stacks are not acting LAG preflop).

I've been thinking about this point. I realize I am not getting through to quite a few 2p2ers on some basic human behavior stuff when it comes to putting money at risk. While I gave the correct responses with prospect theory/loss aversion, it's occurring to me that many of you do not know what that is. Not everyone has taken graduate seminars in behavioral accounting like myself. Let's see if I can make this clearer with some examples.

The average guy is playing poker. He wins a pot for 30. He wins a pot for 40. He wins another pot for 30. Then, he loses a pot for 100. Now, where is the average guy at? Most of you in this thread seem to think the guy is back to even. While that is true in the mathematical sense, it's not true at all in the psychological sense. The average guy feels big losses disproportionately to gains. This guy will still feel like he lost. This is not something controversial. It is well established in just about every study performed.

Now, the difference between a 50BB min or 40BB min game compared to a 20BB min game (or 30BB min) is that the proportion of the outcome space where the average guy has a big loss over the session goes way up. For the health of the poker economy, you want the average guy to book some wins, but mainly lose a little over and over. Losing a little is something the average guy can and does lie about quite easily. With a deeper game, the average guy books wins less often. However, he books big losses much more often. Big losses hit that average guy right in the gut hard. The average person overweights the experience of big losses. What does this mean? It means the average guy will find other outlets for his discretionary funds. He will come back to poker less often. That leaves less money in the poker economy for both the sites and the professional player. You want the game to have some element of luck. You should want the game to not have big losses.

Simply excusing this away by saying the average guy can change what stakes he plays is not correct. The trade-offs between rewards and risks will still be ugly at a deeper min buyin game.

I have seen nothing to suggest the decision makers in the game structure change that took place understand this type of thing.

I looked over a few previous threads regarding this issue, before they made the change (including the one in HSNL you are mentioning where they asked about the rathole timer)

I'd have to conclude the same as you. The previous threads were consistent in the idea for changes to the structure and timer. I had not run across one post that said 20-50bb was a viable solution and can only assume PS picked this number on purpose.

The suggestions for a ratholing time limit were also over 1 hour. Stars chose to basically make it look as though they were addressing this issue but their fix was basically only cosmetic.

Sorry guys, jmillerds I also see your point from last night much clearer now. There really is no reason to continue to tell stars what the problem is here. They are either incredibly ignorant, or know exactly what they are doing. It would be nice if stars could show their players some respect and make a statement concerning their decision that would be in line with why they made it, rather then to sugar coat it and hide behind a false pretense.

stars knows exactly what they are doing no need to be naive. the only problem that i realized years ago is that I'm a slave to their site so all I can do is bend over and take it when they deliver this kind of nonsense.

lol, the only ones who are crying are the ones crying before

if u dont like the changes, move to full tilt, no sites wants u bumhunting nits neway. ur the plague of online poker

long live shortstacking

that's not true...


atm there r crying people like me (who were obv crying b4) and even alot of players who were fine with the old system started crying now, bc the new system is even worse...

Just to make that clear, I hate any godamn shortstack with the bottom of my heart, but under the old system I was able to play my 100BBs stack vs. other 100BBs players and shortstacks...

Now I have the possibility not to play vs. shortstacks at all but unless I'm willing to start playing a midstack strategy I have roughly 35-50% fewer table to pick from.
And even if I wanted to play with 50BBs max. the other case is that I will probably not playing my usual 24 tables bc. it will get very nasty when have a mixture of 3 different tables with 3 different stacksizes and have to make my decisions in seconds...