Ring Games Promotions
During this session we reviewed our plans for future promotions and got feedback from players. While these days I feel comfortable being more open with our plans in many areas, promotions does warrant some caution. I don't have many details to report in public.

I am able to discuss one idea that we will not likely be implementing: incentives for table starting. There are three main reasons that this is not likely to happen, listed in no particular order.

The first is that the amount of additional table starting that might occur due to the incentives would still only be a small fraction of our total amount of table starting as we start a lot of tables already. It would be unlikely that the value of the additional tables would exceed the cost of paying the incentive for all started tables.

The second is that we expect that there would also be some negative impact of introducing the incentives. Some players would no doubt go to the extreme of playing only as table starters. I have not heard suggestions for incentives that would keep such behavior from being problematic in some way or another.

The third is that we hope that once group mode becomes default for new installs, the 'play now' button combined with table starters will solve the problem of new table generation.

What are you talking about? Recreational players goal is to play middle and high-stakes with the best from the best.
Ok you super skill respected 2+2 users lets see how you can argue with stars, you have balls only for abusing russian shortstackers so take secregated player pools soon.
Game over.

Sit & Go Promotions
We demonstrated the Golden SNG promotion on PokerStars.test for the player reps. You're now all able to see the promotion in action on the PokerStars.com site. There were a few ideas about how we might do something similar for other games on our site, which we are currently considering.

We discussed some of the weaknesses of Battle of the Planets, including:
-not well integrated or visible in the client (could be fixed)
-ongoing promotions less valued by players and less interesting to communicate
-primarily rewards regulars, while our current focus is on exciting recreational players
-excludes some forms of SNG, including Fifty50 and HU
-triple shootout not well appreciated by any segment of players
-Complications make it difficult for some players to understand

However, we do know that there is a segment of players who still appreciate the promotion. We are still considering and discussing internally as to what we might do. We might decide to stick with the promotion but alter it somewhat and improve its visibility in the client. We might alternatively decide to run BotP only for one-week stretches and do the same for other SNG promotions from time to time, including Golden SNG.

There were a few other promotions ideas discussed that I not going to detail in public.

any news about playing 40bb?

Anonymity is a worst idea ever. Nobody want to play against bot from poker room. I really afraid playing anonymus tables.

If anybody dont want to select -> play zoom poker.
The only thing you want to make is to force regs to play against ecahc other and get from them more and more rake.
Pokser Stars are lying they just want more rake from regs by this solution. If you want to make recreatioanl player to find the table faster witout siiting long time in the waiting list just make more table starters.

you can reward and stimulate regs to create new tables. For example who start new tables gets 1.5x or (2x ) VPP first 20 hands for example.

The way to remove table slecting is the stupid way and it wont solve the problem to help recreational players to enjoy more the game it just make more rake for stars from regs.

Look at NL400 +. Regs create tables and play 5 max tables already if they want. So there are enough tables to recreational player to sit in. So many empty seats. You just want all regs to play against ecah other.

I think just every reg think the same as i.

PLO Rake, session 2
We discussed what we would want to accomplish during a follow-up PLO meeting and how to best go about it.

Rather than hold additional elections, letting already elected representatives suggest players for the meetings seemed like a more efficient way to determine attendees without creating concern that they were selected by PokerStars. Players suggested included Skjervoy (blopp on 2+2), kaninchin (from PokerStrategy Germany), Joeri, and napsus. I also expressed hope that we'd be able to bring back at least one rep from these meetings for continuity.

Phil Galfond and Ben86 were also suggested. If they are back in Vancouver by the time I am there for VIP Club: Live on July 13th, I hope to meet with them there to discuss this topic and more. I expect they both hope they are still in the WSOP main event at that point.

We also discussed what we should have ready from our side prior to the dedicated PLO meeting.

The follow-up PLO meeting will happen next week. We are hopeful that the majority of recommended players will attend, as well as at least one of the players from the April meetings. We may add one or two more players if we get additional suggestions from April player reps in the next day or two.

Heads-up Cash Games
We recognize that the HU cash lobby is sorely in need of improvement. As with some other problems, there are segments of players who see the same problem that we do but have different reasons for disliking the current situation and different goals for any change. In this case, there are segments of players who have goals that differ from each other.

Our primary concern is for recreational players. Many suspect that we dislike HU cash tables because winning players win a lot of money relative to the amount of rake they pay. If this were the case, we could simply raise the rake at HU cash game tables and be done with it.

The real problem with these tables is that recreational players lose their money so quickly with relatively small chance of winning compared to many other games. This is not a good experience.

We are poker. We do want to offer the forms of poker that you as players want to play. Our expectation is that serving you well as customers by delivering you the games that you want to play will benefit everyone in the long run.

So, we plan to continue to offer HU cash games in our lobby for those who seek them out, but we are unlikely to make them more prominent than they are now. Quite the opposite, we'd like to reduce or eliminate the lobby clutter caused by the excess of HU cash tables that have 1 player seated.

Concerns of winning players about the HU lobby tend to revolve around some element of 'fairness' of who gets to play against desirable opponents. Different segments of players have different opinions here such that it seems impossible to satisfy everyone. Indeed, any change will benefit some players but harm others. The harmed will not be happy.

We have two 'finalist' proposals for changes to the HU lobby. One of them is described in detail in a lengthy business requirements document that is ready to go to development. The other requires some more work.

Nick will be leading a discussion with the community before we select and implement one of these two options. I expect this discussion to occur over the summer.

We also discussed both options in detail with player representatives, getting good feedback for both.

Heads-up Zoom
We initially deployed HU Zoom on our site several months ago, but only for a very short period of time as the big blind was being posted on the button.

We do plan to fix this issue and redeploy HU Zoom, but not as a replacement for HU cash games. There are legitimate reasons that players may not want to play HU Zoom even though they like HU cash. Most commonly mentioned is that HU cash play relies heavily on history with your opponent, a flow that is lost with Zoom.

There's no reason *not* to deploy it for those who want to play it. There are no liquidity issues with HU games.

So, we'll give it a try when the blind posting fix is complete.

We did have a long discussion about how many hands should be played against an opponent prior to moving. The strongest arguments were made for the options of 1 hand and 2 hands. As 1 is how we currently have it implemented, this is what we'll try first.

New Jersey
We were pleased to be able to get feedback directly from a New Jersey representative. Most players were able to provide input on this topic in some way.

Particularly given the current situation, there's not really much I can post here as far as an official PokerStars position on this topic. This one's in the hands of the lawyers for now.

I wasn't present during the meeting for scheduled tournaments and satellites and don't feel comfortable writing a summary from the notes because I do not work with these tournaments myself. I'll see if someone else will write the summary.

Other Items
There are a few things that we said we'd work on that weren't yet covered in the reports. Here they are:

-Push RSA token and/or PIN harder to regular players
-Consider a major PLO tournament on Sunday
-Prioritize PokerStars 7 over other development to get it out as fast as possible
-Add ability to search for a tournament by name in the mobile client
-Add a mobile section to the agenda for the next player meetings

My apologies for the length of time it has taken to post these reports. Criticism is clearly deserved.

In an attempt to make amends, I will spend my entire workday on Friday answering questions on twoplustwo and one other forum. I will create a dedicated 'well'esque thread for the purpose, but it won't truly be a 'well' as there will be information that I simply can't provide. I will do the best I can, though.

I'll start by 9am UK time (4am Eastern) and continue until at least 5pm UK time (noon Eastern), taking at most an hour for lunch.

No, they haven't been. Ever since they were introduced, the amount of blind grimming have increased to a new level.

I believe that Starters were supposed to be some kind of KOTH system for 6m games (not talking about FR here, cause high stakes FR is dead). Ideally, some 5 best regs would sit there and wait for either the opponent willing to battle them or for a rec player.

In fact, Starters are filled up with scummy bumhunters, who will either play a table, if a mark sits down, or leave before the first big blind comes to them otherwise. Since they are allowed to join Starters right after the table starts, they don't lose a chance to join new Starter for the same stake. They do have a 30-minute penalty, but since they are already seated at needed Starters, that doesn't change much.

Of course, there are some better regs, who don't want these guys to sit in a 5-ppl Starter, so they join 6th and get grimmed. That's the current situation at Table Starters, every high stakes reg would confirm (unless you ask some grimmer, of course)

That could be very easily solved. First of all, ban all these grimmers from Starters forever (or for a week at least). Then kick a person from every Starter in addition to 30 minute penalty after he grims and leaves the table.

I've read this post about 1/2 dozen times and I still have no clue as to what you are trying to say.

Fantastic!

I think this idea is really good. As it is now I doubt most recreational players even know about the BOP leaderboards. Having a "promotion of the week" where it alters between BOP, golden SnGs and whatever else promos that could be implemented and have it in a way that its graphically appealing to rec players would go a really long way I think to get rec players to put in more volume.

Steve,

I understand the position that Stars has chosen to take regarding seat scripts, and while I would personally like to see seat scripts banned and that ban enforced, I will respect that Stars has made a desicion on that topic for now.

However, your report makes no note of fairness with regards to physical location and the possible remedies that could fix this imbalance. I'm sure that you're aware that seat scripts are able to detect and take a desired seat in milliseconds. This makes the latency between the player's computer and the pokerstars servers a significant determiner of who 'wins' the seat. This latency is largely determined by the physical distance between the player's computer and the pokerstars server.

As competition between seat scripts has been increasing at mid to high stakes, I feel like this issue of physical location will become more significant and amount to more of an unfair and arbitrary advantage. I would urge you to at least consider this issue and discuss possible remedies to level the playing field.

Thank you.

Re: RSA tokens being pushed harder to regular players, a cell phone version similar to what ftp has (had?) or like gmail uses would be awesome

That was written on 2013-05-19.

Have you set a date for this meeting yet?

Stock markets have similar problems. One way to solve this is to decide based on the time when the client received the request, rather than the server. So suppose that I click "join table". The client on my machine puts a time stamp on the request (the time stamp is in universal time, and is in millisecond resolution). When the server gets a request from some client to sit down, it waits another second or two to see if other requests come in, and after it waits it looks at all requests for this seat, and chooses the one that has the earliest timestamp. As far as I can see, the only way to circumvent this is to hack the client's code.

Late next week.

I've been as hard as anyone on you in the thread. But appreciate this post. gl

Stock markets STRUGGLE with this problem. I know - I worked on this.

I think Stars need to maintain a global "table interest list". Anyone who registers interest on particular table gets added to the table interest list, and in order, they get a 10 second window to sit at any open seat at the any table that they have registered interest on. But it they refuse the seat, they lose their place at the top of the list, and get re-added at the bottom. As an incentive to speed things, if they answer no in less than 3 seconds, they only drop back to the 50th percentile on the interest list. If you reject any seat, you lose your priority for all seats.

Have I explained this sufficiently?

+1 to everything Do It Right will say in this thread.

Excellent.

As a discussion point for your meeting next week, let me give you some personal stats:

I'm was playing 25plo zoom until I got told I was mad by a forum reg friend. I've played 15796 hands at 25plo zoom this year. I've won $57.98 and paid $428.92 in rake (which is only 10.9bb/100 rake). Please explain why I should play on Stars without SN (which I'm never going to make).

To paraphrase George H, that's one for me and seven for you.