This is key. Think about it. We are losing, one by one, all of our options to deposit/reload. A lot of players are at least thinking about going into bankroll-protection-mode while they see what happens, knowing that if they bust their bankroll, there won't be a lot of good options to deposit.

Not everyone can easily get to a Western Union office--think about players who are disabled. And there are people who live in places in the US, like Alaska or the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, where there isn't even a grocery store within 200 miles, let alone a Western Union office.

DONs were one of the best ways to slowly but surely grind up a bankroll while keeping the swings under control. I've played enough SNGs and MTTs that the switch won't be too horrible for me. But for those specializing in DONs, especially the Supernova Elite grinders, I can't even imagine what these people are thinking.

People in this thread have said that taking away DONs from players who have it as their specialty is like getting fired. For an SNE grinder, it's more like saying, "You can still work. But starting next week, you'll get paid $50,000 per year less."

Is there a decent amount of traffic on RPM dude?

I may have to join you there after the 15th

great idea. Only thing that sucks is that i guarantee they've already thought about don's since stars addem\d them in oct '08. But I guess that was before Stars decided they wanted to hand off the business of the don regulars. maybe now they actually WILL start them. I am definitely gonna send 'em a letter also but not urs only cause i think we should avoid form letters. Everyone should just say their own thoughts that way they won't stop reading the emails cause of bing he same letter. If they feel there is a market for them on their site then tilt.....here I come. Ya got me for sure!

I hope u were being sarcastic. sounded like u were defending 50/50s.

People in this thread have said that taking away DONs from players who have it as their specialty is like getting fired. For an SNE grinder, it's more like saying, "You can still work. But starting next week, you'll get paid $50,000 per year less."

Exactly. There are few options now but to either try and learn a new game for a lot less profit, quit poker, or move to another site. DoN grinders like myself are truly left with few options. I should acknowledge that pstars did make a legitimate attempt at replacing the DoN with Fifty50's, but they are by no means a reasonable alternative. This is due to both lack of traffic, a different structure (I've studied DoNs for 2 years now), and inability to multi-table effectively. Needless to say, I won't be able to hit 800k vpp this year.

There's always triple draw.

Yea stars really screwed this up. They should give their players what they want. Yea announcing it at least a month ahead of time would've been a very easy way to help out their loyal customers. That said though, as poker players we have to adapt. We are in a dicey time in online poker. There is little competition and the entire game could become illegal overnight for US players.

Pros need to have several contingency plans. You can't leave your livelihood to the mercy of the poker sites and the US government.

Edit: Can't you play on party smilie?

Well I'm kind of new to the other sites that offer DoNs. I am researching them right now in fact. I just looked at cake, but their site information seems kind of sketchy and traffic is low. I will check out party, thanks for the suggestion.

I also just emailed the following to fulltilt:

Hello fulltilt staff,

I am a regular player on pokerstars site playing double or nothing tournaments which is to be discontinued as of Feb 15. Is fulltilt going to introduce DoNs in the near future? If so, I speak on behalf of many regulars when i say I will be bringing my services over to your site. I have paid over $12,000 in rake this year alone playing $104 DoNs. Combine this number with the thousands of other customers DoNs will bring to fulltilt, and there is a very hefty profit to be made. Thank you for your time,

If you aren't the most tedious poster ever, you run whoever it is damn close.

You studied DoN strategy for 2 years? It's basically "play tight, make friends with the regs"

Since you don't have the privilege of pm i will post the answer here
below 20$ good traffic
my stake 20-30$ take 15 min to open 6~8 tables
50$ a little less trafic than 20-30$ games
80$ no trafic

but after 11 pm 30$-50$ are dead

if you sign through a good affiliate you can get 60% rakeback
35% site rakeback(paid daily)+12.5% if you do 500 don (site promo) + 12.5% or more with rake chase from affiliate

P.S Since PS are not interested to have me (i'm casual player), i move to rpm for DoN's games and play my cash game another site(i got a nice deal)

Curious what your thoughts on DONS are now, rizeagainst. I know for a while you were really getting on FTP to add them, but this was before the Chinese cheating scandal broke etc.

Still playing them. Think there's a future for them? Still want FTP to have them?

Full Tilt shouldn't add them, the more sng formats a site offers the less traffic each game receives as the player base is spread too thin.

FT already has super turbos, standard sngs (normal and turbo speed), & matrix sngs. Adding another type would be ******ed.

Thanks for the info Dlogic.

Sounds pretty good me, will definitely hit that up when PS implements these stupid changes.

I don't really get the people saying stuff like 'DON regs are ruined now, it's not proper poker, they don't have the skillset for normal poker, they're terrible post-flop' etc. etc.

Different game structures warrant different strategies. Someone who has specialised in cash games for 2 years is going to struggle transitioning to SNGs - a substantial proportion of their skillset relates to postflop play whereas SNGs (at least when stacks get relatively shallow) are primarily about preflop strategy. Furthermore even within the same basic game (e.g. MTT SNG), there are different strategies for hyper-turbos, turbos and non-turbos. A specialist in any one of these may have difficulties playing the other but it's hardly like they'll be incapable of adapting lol...

These kinds of comments also seem to suggest that DON regs only know how to play one way and that play won't work in 'proper poker'. Please... it's not like I'm going to play a cash game and fold AT on the button because I think 'meh, it's not really worth risking my stack given how small the blinds are", whereas I will gleefully fold AT on the button in a DON while the blinds are 10/20.

Yes, DONs are easier to master (for minimally thinking players anyway) than other formats. Yes, they're formulaic. Yes they present opportunities for collusion (and especially accusations, reasonable or not, of collusion) and yes, they're unbelievably boring before the bubble. But they are nonetheless a valid form of SNG, a ton of players love them, and they generate a HUGE amount of rake for stars. In fact I wonder if the substantial loss in rake from removing DONs (no way will people take up fifty50s to the same degree, they won't get even half the numbers, I'm sure everybody is clear about that) would still be better for stars compared with their costs (including time-related opportunity costs) of investigating DON collusion accusations, by this time next year...

It was a nice format until every idiot in the world figured out how to cheat in them, and then realized that finding such cheating is almost impossible to prove.

I played DoNs on many sites at many stakes for a long time and was very profitable. Most of my recent history being on Merge, they seemed to be getting shadier and shadier. Not just the cheating, but the strategy is too simple to be sustained for the long term. It's basically solved and pointless format now IMO, I gave up on them quite a while ago and am grinding cash games now.

I also think many regs do not bring up how often there is a situation with implied collusion. IE, 1 regular player will not drastically **** with another regular player's equity (ie spite call) in return for the same favor. The players in these games see each other enough that this becomes a complicit agreement, even if it is never talked about. This allows fish accounts to get drained to reg accounts more effectively.

I think the format should be scrapped across sites. Strategy is too simple, cheating is too easy and eventually occurs within even honest regs.

No future for DoN IMO.

I think this format that Stars has come up with is a better idea but still creates very, very odd table dynamics that other people have already brought up. IE the bigstack folding AA in the SB vs a BB player with 5 chips behind on the bubble because he doesn't want the game to end, he wants to pad his stack with the other players' chips before it is over. I'm not sure how common this will be, but it seems like it will be happening a lot down the road.

Of course, once this becomes an established and legit strategy in the 50/50 format, then people can use this strategy to hide behind when they are simply feeding another player chips in order for him to survive because they are friends. The two will be virtually indistinguishable in terms of play, like DoNs, it will take thousands and thousands of games to really establish a pattern of collusion, until then it will just get chalked up to the weird end game table dynamic and many people will get fleeced in the process.

So I guess I'm saying that 50/50 format doesn't have a great outlook either. STTs on the whole don't have a great outlook, given how often they are raked and their profitability is pretty limited.

I guess that's why I'm playing cash now. And improving quite a bit. I'm really happy with cash now, can get up/leave the second I want instead of having to close down TN autoregister, wait for all my games to end which takes at least 45 mins. Plus I think I am staying more sane with variance in cash games at least so far. And obv cash games have more skill and it's not even close.

I'd advise you or anyone that was/is in a similar situation to just let go of these "half the field gets paid" formats now, and actually STTs in general.

GL to you sir

Don't agree with Rize's post at all. One look at the Sharkscope leaderboards for $36-$100 2010 total profit for DoNs, 6-max SNGs, and 9-max SNGs should prove my point. There were 17 Stars DoN players who cleared $20k and that number would be more like 30 if you include the cheating scandal refunds, which were substantial in some cases. Meanwhile, on the 9-max turbo list the ONLY Stars player on the entire list is SpaceGravy at 19th with barely $10k in profit. How unbeatable is a format if even the regs who run red hot for a year can't clear $10k before rakeback.

The fact is, DoNs were hugely profitable for a lot of people before rakeback, but the same can't really be said for most of the other formats. Granted, there probably was still more cheating going on than other formats, but even despite that they remained profitable. As long as Stars kept mass cheating rings like the Chinese group at bay, they was still plenty of cash to be won, and it doesn't appear anything even approaching that level of collusion has occurred in the year since 2/14/10.

It's pretty much a huge blow to all formats. It obviously sucks for DoN regs, but as Doctor Poker points out, there are a ton of regs who are at least decently skilled at poker who will make already tough games like 9-man and 6-man SNGs and even NL100 and NL200 cash games even tougher. I could be wrong about Fifty50s, but I don't think it's much more viable at this current rake level than 9-max SNGs, so really it doesn't do much to alleviate the fact that tons of refugee regs are now gonna make other game formats tougher.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm crying or complaining in my post, not really my intent, but I do think it's an interesting discussion. However, it looks like the decision is final, and while I don't like it, all I can is work hard to learn another format and move on.

Yea, never played them and don't think I ever would have, but thanks for the informed insight, rizeagainst.

I was interested because you were a huge proponent of them and I wondered if your outlook on them had changed. GL to you as well.

Spite calls are ******ed anyway and in any game if you mess with a reg like this, the more tilt-prone ones are more likely to have it in for you afterwards. In particular this phenomenon exists all the time in cash games. With 4 regs and 2 fish, it's a battle to get the fishes' money and the regs tend to stay out of each other's way for the most part. I agree it's a fine line between an approach that seeks primarily to isolate fish vs. soft-playing regs, but I don't think many people will start throwing collusion accusations in cash games when this is suspected...

Honestly, I don't think the softplay phenomena is as widespread as one would think. It's easy to realize it would benefit the regs talk about it here with no emotion involved, but in the heat of the battle it's easy to want to "spite" another reg for a beat they put on you recently or b/c they've stolen your BB 4 orbits in a row and it's getting annoying. I don't think many regs have the emotional stability to carry out a plan like that long term.

On the flip side, it could become a viable strategy to make loose calls you know are incorrect vs. other regs in order to dissuade them from pushing so widely in the future. So it becomes a cat and mouse game of not knowing which regs are just poor players, which are trying to softplay collude, or which are metagame spite calling which makes this form of softplaying not have that much of an impact, imo.

I'll concede the profit point just for the sake of argument (although I find it amusing that my best piece of evidence for the format being raked too hard in relation to how much skill is involved is well, you)

The liability towards cheating is enough alone to justify getting rid of the format. And I don't think the cheating has every really stopped; the cheaters just got smarter about their cheating. The fact that you and others could remain profitable despite this is sort of a non sequitur.

People were constantly getting cheated in the games and it was virtually impossible to root out. Bottom line.

It will be interesting to see how the future of the DoN format shakes out in the coming months. It's possible that the Merge and Cake networks see an influx of players which makes multitabling those sites a viable option for the American grinder. A site like FTP could come in and offer DoNs and swoop in and take over many of the Stars refugee DoN grinders (probably wishful thinking).

If a bunch of American DoN grinders put together a poker house abroad with the intention of grinding the Euro-based DoN games, I'd probably be interested in that.

Why do people hate the Fifty50 format if they were former DoN players? Is it because folding your life away holding on with 1 BB won't double your buyin back from some guy who gets coolered? If you ran over the table you could win 3-4 times your money back in a Fifty50 offsetting this, no?

It is still not much of a point. I was able to sometimes 50 and 60 table $52s and $104s and still be slightly profitable before RB. I just really wanted SNE and didn't really care if my ROI was pretty. The only guy who tried that in 9-max SNGs ended up losing somewhere around I believe $100k pre-RB.

Can't really argue against this as it is a matter of opinion and it happens to be yours. The DoN regs seem to be near unanimous that they'd like them to stay, and those that don't play DoNs are glad they're gone b/c they believe it will drive fish towards their game format.

DoN regs don't want DoNs gone because they are DoN regs. Mostly anyway.

I play cash games on FT. Stars getting rid of DoNs does not help me. I don't have much of a dog in this fight...if anything I'd be biased towards supporting DoNs given my history.

I think DoNs should be removed because a lot of people were getting cheated over and over and over again in various ways, some small, some big.

If you ran over the table in a 180 you'd get over 50 times your money back. And in a large field tourney, you could win even more... wait a second... holy crap why do people even bother playing STTs when there's so much money to be made in MTTs?!?!