Earlier this year when the HU-cartells went on strike, I couldn`t believe what I heard about those activities. The majority of players, who don`t know about their existance would absolutely disrelish it. An elite group of players, segmenting the playerpool because it`s their right to play the fish and keep weaker regs, who don`t deserve it (in their personal view), away from bumhunting.
The problem is that stars tolerates the cartells. The only way to stop them is to make the existance and activities of cartells knowingly to the broad public and so put pressure on stars.

On the one hand you have ppl complaining about bumhunters, and how it's not good for the health of the games. On the other hand you have ppl complaining any effort in reducing bumhunting is not fair to the bumhunters.

Can't please everyone I guess.

recs like being massaged by the cartel more then by bum hunters. still the cartels are bum hunters bum hunting bum hunters and fish and reg fish the like. this smells like a zoo.

Would be nice if PS Steve would chime in even for with a short statement, maybe people would chill a bit. I think pretty much everything has been said by all parties involved, multiple times. By now it's turning into something completely different from what this thread was intended to be.

So PS Steve to the rescue?

Some posters seem to think its fine for a pack of heavily armed special forces troops to surround the lambs as soon as they're born and blow them to ashes using semi-automatic weapons before they have any chance to learn to stand up on their own legs.

Hooah

I welcome the ENFORCEABLE banning of all software/seating scripts. Don't think it's possible right now tbh.

the recipe is actually quite simple: ban software use, enforce what you can enforce.

Nope, it is make HUDs and trackers seek approval, that approval dependent upon operators having approval on the software functions and access to the data used by those Apps.

That way you get enforcement.

i can see no contradiction, except that you insist on kicking in the wrong door

Nope.

Its:-

1. Mimic every single 3rd party software available at market and either produce it as "official" open source third party software for free or within the poker client. Adjust the poker client so that unofficial software products become laggy / buggy / incompatible. Rinse. Repeat.

2. Anonymous poker tables during real time play

2.1 Make all flops unseeable to those who have folded as an anti collusion measure until next point takes effect

3. Open hand histories 24 hours after time of being played, dating back to hands since inception (c. 2001). Poker needs transparency and a playerbase invigilating.

3.1. Oh no but this will solve online poker.
3.1.1 BS it will
3.1.1.1 The traffic will adjust and mixed games will flourish, like it or not, mixed games/new variants are the future of online poker
3.1.1.1.1 If everyone plays GTO, Super Lag GTO becomes the new GTO

4. Reduce cash rake. I have further suggestions on this but cannot be assd to share.

5. Add NL Omaha hyper sngs at 50% rake of Holdem Hypers. Explore other variants for hypes also.

6. Add STT Headsup ladder rankings on player profiles, on mouse over like country location. Similar to cases www.MyLeague.com ladder calculations. Let this become a universal "division" based system. Use promotions to generate new traffic towards this format.

Says another member of the cartel. What you guy's are doing is what most of us would call cheating.How can you sit their and defend yourselves when it's obv to everyone that what you guy's are doing is cheating?

gg their is no chance stars is going to allow this any longer, yall shoulda jsut stfu about skier sw but your all so god dam greedy yous couldn't help yourselves. I say it again GOOD GAME

Yes it's so obviously cheating.

Seems like you failed to read all my posts.

1) I am nor was ever a member of a cartel. In fact I didn't like the idea of playing in cartels since I wasn't a high volume player, so their creation was actually pretty bad for me personally (I guess another thing cartels are unfair for).

2) I actually feel skier has done nothing wrong, and feel that husng.com and indeed stars should have handled it better. I understand the frustration/worry some regs who faced skier's team might have however, so them airing their complaints to stars is understandable.

3) How can you sit there and make blind accusations when you have no idea what it actually means to be good enough at poker to be a cartel member? You most likely have no clue what skier's software means either judging from your post.

Not gonna read/post any more until Stars makes a further post ITT.

no one is reading all posts. best thing to get recognized here is to jump in and either scream BAN or NOT.


@DrawNone (to lazy to find your post, hope i picked the right SN)

just read a bit over there in husng, yes baards stance was shocking, openly admitting that stars supports this. there was an outcry and chicagory cleaning the threads of unwanted comments ..as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

i PMd some boss-mod to get data on how many posts the mod deleted from the threads. boss-mod did his best to make it look like he was looking for the data but said gave up after manually checking a couple of pages back. my request to run a database query to find out was never answered.

How on earth do you know 100% their is no collusion! Don't make me laugh. Get back in your space pod an come down to earth!

What do you think pokerstars are investigating right now? Bots with similar stats sitting in pairs at the same tables!!

Where there is money someone will find a scam to alter the odds. So errm ultimate bet wasn't a scam? And full tilt pre-black Friday.

Outside of pokerstars you have no idea what's going on! We don't have access to the inside of pokerstars either. But they are regulated but won't ever beat all cheating. What's to stop you and a friend buying two mobile dongles for your laptops and sitting in the same room at the same table on stars? Both dongles from different service providers? Different location ip/s if one is using a proxy server? Pokerstars can only do their best and the scammers will try upping their game. It's a cyber war of AI no one will beat.

There was an initial outcry because somebody posted illegal and misleading stats about 1 of skiers students who had stats very similar to skier in some spots. As it turned out, this was because of good software (that skier was very transparent about), intelligence and studying hard.
The initial thread created a whole cluster **** of accusations and misinformation which then made Pokerstars reconsider their initial decision. When that happened, the initial thread made clear to Pokerstars that reinvestigating skier without investigating all the other poker tools that were potentially more powerful was not fair.

As for collusion in poker, sure it happens, I was just making the point that it has nothing especially to do with divisions and cartels in HUSNGs.

People learn the game at lower stakes.
As people step up stakes, opponents become more sophisticated
The thing about being a midstakes+ HUSNG player is that you sit at a table and you need to give action to whoever sits you - good, bad and indifferent.

So recreational players are lambs to the slaughter just as much in HUSNGs as they are in cash games - it's just that HUSNG players also play lots of regs and can't get away anymore with being bumhunters - which I thought was actually a good thing and the whole King of the Hill concept was something that many smart people think can reinvigorate heads up cash games.

In theory, sophisticated, yes, but, lets take a theoretical example and look at it practically for a moment.

Lets say, we want to review the skill breadth within the $30, $60, and $100 divisions. Each player within all 3 pools battles every other player for 50K games hands (play money sngs). Do the same players end up being ranked 1st-300th in the same order as the Divisions?
- Imo the answer is literally "categorically, no". There is a vast difference between sophistication/skill breadth and entitlement.

The divisions are a pyramid scheme; those at the top of the $200 Cartel basically get a freeroll on every other lower member in the $100, $60, $30 divisions, as well as competent non-members. Plus they are "entitled" to higher value fish due to 3rd party software that keeps them very well fed.
In addition to this, "defined delegates" do their battling for them in structured swarms at lower stakes, carrying out border patrol for them, minimizing any outsider attempts at getting lobbies in the 200s.

Imagine there is a soldier in the 30s who is the best husng player in the world, why shouldn't he be allowed to just take a pop at the 200s without staking vast quantities of BIs+RAKE against generals just to get ordained by these generals protecting their own patch of land against both outsiders and their own soldiers.

If your in a Cartel Division you really need to seriously consider the implications of whom you are making money for in the long-term. Stars need to take ownership of the system imo and open it up to all, including funplayers.

There have been 2 people in the last few months go from outside the cartel/division system to $200 division members (and it took them approx 3 months) so if someone is sitting the $30s and truly one of the best players in the world, they should just go and prove themselves.

On the categoric "no" re: the ranking between the divisions, it may not be perfectly ranked but the system created makes it as fair a ranking system as possible.

Pokerstars should be concerned not only with making sure there is no collusion in their poker but also no appearance of collusion. The HUSNG cartels reek of the appearance of collusion to any recs who learn of their existence. This is because in analogous group social behaviour such as politics and business and good old history of humankind wherever there is group behaviour there is an incentive for subgroups to employ all means necessary to overthrow the hierarchy.

In other words, there is obviously a strong incentive for subgroups (coaching/staking/peers) within divisions to become close associates via Skype, via real world not just to jointly coach and improve their skill but by all means necessary (database sharing, data mining, collusion in SpinNGos) so that they are not kicked out of the division for poor results. The division "owns" access to recs. This is *obviously* a powerful incentive for weaker regs/bumhunters to collude else they are forced down.

Without divisions/cartels players are more likely to stay individual poker players with less contact with others and less incentive to collude. In 6-max and FR cash games where there are no divisions (as far as I know) players in non-Zoom compete on the speed of their seating script but they don't collusively have a group script that collusively avoids competition. Bumhunters with extremely fast scripts get to play the stakes of their choice.

I sense (wrongly perhaps) that Pokerstars deliberately created SpinNGo's with a blind queue to suck all the recs in and away from HUSNG's to try to rid themselves of the bullying cartels that have bullied PS into continuing to allow them against PS unspoken best desires for best appearance of integrity. But SpinNGos blind queueing is being similarly subverted by SpinWiz-like tools.

BTW, technically, why can't Pokerstars block registration software for SpinNgo's and enforce a blind queue for all? Isn't this similar to blocking cheats in other PC games? That is, don't they only need to code so an AHK script can't electronically press Register, forcing Register to be manually pressed? Or does SpinWiz access software handles directly (in which case there are many technical ways to encrypt etc and block access)?

My biggest concern with SpinNGos is the appearance of collusion by 2 "friends" sitting collusively on a third rec and this collusion enabled by any non-PS queueing such as SpinWiz. For example, there is nothing to stop someone from writing private software with functions similar to SpinWiz to increase the chances of 2 friends being sat together at the same spinngo and then sharing hole cards to collude to win. They don't need to softplay each other, they just need to beat out the third registrant and then battle it out and share profits. SpinWiz' random first place prize incentivizes this: every man for himself if random prize is 2x but collude and share profits if random prize is bigger than 2x.

The only way to stop this appearance of enabling collusion is for PokerStars to software enforce the blind queue.

given the current PS lobby perhaps (and a distorted definition of "fair" that favors existing regs) but a truly blind queue would be much fairer to all in both appearance and actuality.

So you dont think its a freeroll?

Think college fraternitys and hazing, think racism, think genocide, think state-sponsored denial of universal human rights of other states such as refugees, think certain countries claims to "exceptionalism."

You cannot seriously claim cartels/divisions and meritocracy in the same sentence and not be met with derisive laughter. The entire history of humankind is replete with people grouping together into cartels to secure gain over individuals less-organised but often more meritorious.

Think comprehensive job interview - that's all it is

If the $200 player didn't have to defend his own patch and continually prove himself then it would be a free roll but that's not how it works - in fact people who have "free rolled" by only playing at levels below their division have been kicked from all divisions.
I don't think this would happen if it was the cushy club that some people have asserted.