1) divisions and all the threads that have been set up are incredibly transparent.
2) pokerstars allow seat scripts, for husngs and all other games so they control the seating
3) refer to point 1

I agree with you that it looks pretty shady. You brought up the inflix twitch stream earlier- how does he get into those juicy games at 200nl 6max I wonder? Does he ever show the seating script he uses?

You have to bear in mind that regs have talked to stars about numerous changed they could implement, and have talked with the sharky creator a lot also. Both of them seemed pretty shortsighted and ignores everything. Just look at how long add-table option has been asked for (and agreed by stars to only have benefits).

So regs took it upon themselves to reduce the bumhunting. I agree wholeheartedly that it looks very shady- but there really isn't anything that can be labelled as collusion going on, and the system has improved a LOT since it was first introduced (200s e.g. was purely by vote with not many rules until recently- so many worse regs stayed in for longer than they should have).

1. XFlixx (Pokerstars online pro) exclaims at 2 hours 34 minutes on his twitch stream late June recording, as Nefirmative diplomatically justified divisions in the chat, "I don't think recreational players would like that (divisions/cartels). If I was a recreational player I wouldn't like that. I'd stop playing (HUSNGs). Maybe we should tell Pokerstars. They can't like that. etc..." for about twenty minutes.

Inference: Few recreational player know or regs outside of HUSNGs and when they find out they are outraged! Wide-spread ignorance is not the same as Pokerstars ensuring transparent fairness in the games. Duh.

2. Pokerstars dilemma is that they can't take full control of seating as they undoubtedly should without banning all the obviously shady-looking division group-seating scripts as recreationals would have a fit if Pokerstars themselves did it the division way but if Pokerstars got rid of divisions the regs would have a fit so Pokerstars doesn't know what the hell to do. That is not the same as saying they "approve."

Inference: Pokerstars has plausible deniability by looking the other way while third party software includes some shady features that benefit regs to the detriment of fair play.

Unfortunately for Pokerstars this is what chess programmers call the horizon effect: in many lines say the programmed player is about to lose their Queen, the most powerful piece. So if the look ahead function is say, 6 half-moves, the program is incentivized to find some stalling moves that push the loss of the Queen over the horizon as if the Queen loss won't occur.

Similarly Pokerstars short-term uses plausible deniability: "seating scripts are within the ToS. We are not aware of anything to be concerned about. Blah, blah, blah..." but long term they are scared like crazy.

The weird thing about you and others that support the status quo is every now and then there are little admissions in your baloney and then like a HUSNG reg having lost your all-in, you get a new stack, reboot with the same old unchanged story as if you've admitted nothing. It is really funny but a terrible debating style.

We're not debating, we're explaining how it works - warts and all. You seem to be on some never ending quest to try and win an argument to support your little theory on how HUSNGs should be played.

You come in and talk about collusion, transparency and a whole bunch of other crap that's barely applicable.

The reality is that we are a bunch of poker players who have been provided an environment and we want to make as much money as possible in that environment.
You and other cash players push that advantage by using software that allows you to instantly bring up an exact spot vs your opponent during a hand or by looking at a plot graph linking bet size to hand strengths or plotting timing with hand strength or by sticking a badge on an opponent that tells you how to play or by using dreaded seating scripts (for those that don't play zoom).

That doesn't feel like a fair fight for recreational players in those games. How about you start spending your time cleaning up your own game and stop clogging up this thread and other threads in a game that you barely play.

How can they deny it ? They know about the cartels and have commented on them on twoplustwo. For UK players who play in the same pool as everyone else :

"PokerStars holds its license with the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC)"

"The core principles the Commission upholds through effective regulation and public engagements are:

2. to ensure gambling is conducted in a fair and open way"

https://www.pokerstars.uk/united-kingdom/

Imo the cartels are neither fair nor open. Not many players even know of their existence and they are not legally accountable to the players.

Dissapointed, keep destroying online poker Pokerstars

Tim you have ignored most points made. You have no clue about what effects changes to husngs will have. Contrary to your irrational belief, if stars somehow banned sharky/cartels no one in them will have a fit. Hopefully stars would implement something else in that case to curtail bumhunting in husngs. Look, I'm not even in or ever have been in any cartel and I'm defending this system because I think it's all in good faith, and reduces bumhunting.

Yes recs don't like to know about the fact that games are built around them. This is not news. In fact a non-negligible number of recs believe online poker is rigged- should we cater to their irrational feelings too?

Why don't you tell inflix to show everyone his seating script programs. What would recs feel about that? Why doesn't he play 60s turbo husngs if he wants to get fish- oh wait he would be sat by a reg there anyway.

Pls tell me anything that I have admitted to then later backed away from that counters my argument.

well when you break down memory techniques and maths you find your able to do a lot more then you may have thought. I am starting to find that.

there are people that have memorized the entire Koran word for word, and whilst I have a distaste for all religions especially the Abrahamic ones, I have to recognize that feat as a testament to what humans can be capable
of.

there will always be people that can do that but there will always be a limit to what can be done. I heard that the heads up limit holdem bot had trillions of bits of information or calculations no human is pulling that off.

sure if a game is solvable by humans, then that's just the way it goes and the game will eventually die out to be replaced by another.

However if you have software that can do it then the game will die much faster.

and memorizing large amounts of data is a labor intense task that a few people will do. utilizing advanced software is a relatively easy task that many could do with little effort.

Yes unfortunately poker is only going to become more solved, and software will only get better. Tackling botting is the no.1 thing stars should concentrate on, but it looks like stars is taking the approach of diversification with sports betting, casino and fantasy sports tbh.

If there were no cartels then Pokerstars would have to make the games worth playing by reducing the rake or whatever. The core activity of Pokerstars is producing games software for people to play against each so they should be able to make a profit without taking much from the players.

OK you can convince stars to do that. Do you want to ban auto-registration programs as well?

I remember what extreme pain it was to play fastest fingers first and try to register an empty lobby as soon as it becomes available. It makes grinding husngs are a regs very tiresome and boring. But once you allow such programs as sharkystrator, husngs will just be like hucash lobbies with a huge long queue. The only difference is that ppl waiting literally cannot play each other whilst waiting.

I'd ban sharkystrator. They are just fleecing everyone.

lol no they are not. It originally started as a quality of life improvement software that everyone who grinds husngs wanted.

If it's banned and I'm a highish stakes husng high volume player I would pay a programmer a few bis to make a script that auto regs next open lobby. You really don't understand the situation well.

I'm not saying it's not useful I am saying they are charging a stupid amount of money for it.

So get coding, release a superior alternative and charge cheaper prices for it.

The price of a software to consumers is never a reason it should be banned, wtf.

This did not used to e a thread about HUSNG lobbies but hey ho, any sensible discussion re future steps seems to have gone by the by.

On HU lobbies - pre cartels they were broken. post cartels they are broken.

Cartels are not open accountable or fair. They may be better than no cartels (for some) but they ain't open or fair to casual players.

Without cartels we had "bumhunters" choosing to sit and play only a few "fish".

Now we have cartel members sharing the pain of driving out "bad" regs - not to help the poor bum hunted recs but to displace the obvious bumhunters with a cartel that is less obvious but seeks to monopolise the fish for themselves, collecively.

Net effect for the fish - well no hope of getting up against another fish and if the cartel is effective a BIGGER skill disparity between them and the person they get to sit with as they face "good" regs not "bad" regs.

It is an old fashioned closed shop craft union, with a deliberately high cost of entry to deliver a high benefit to membership. Cartels exist to benefit cartel members, not recs, not regs without the same full time volume required to gain entry but fundamentally the cartels are about bum hunting, it is about monopolising the bums for the cartel members.

We all know this. It is a symptom of a dying game and format. If the format was healthy then regs could just play and via skill alone win. Today, nah, they need their craft union (whic is indeed a form of colusion) and most need their software too, many need their illegal data to keep their spot in the cartel and of course the price for the cartel includes paying for the seating software used by the cartel.

Now all this definitely delivers more $$ to the software supplier, more $$$ to the cartel members and likely more $$$ to Stars but all that comes from the recs and the net effect is to make the games worse for them, to churn them faster, to kill the format.

It will all get nastier and quite quickly too. Fewer fish, fewer hopefull regs getting killed to try and get entry...just the death of the format as those paying the bills leave.

It is that very fragile ecosystem that Skier's software tipped in to chaos and public review of the TOS. It turns out that two or three able to beat the cartel and refusing to join the union caused mayhem. They had no need to join, their approach worked fine against the "good" regs - indeed taking them on with a clearer GTO approach likely works better against the cartel members deploying a similar strategy.

If one guy and a couple of his mates can tip the cartel and Stars into this mess then the cartels are inherently unstable, as the game format shrinks they will have to eat themselves, it will break down. All this before we get the really good adaptive HU bots using data mined player specific adjustments to blance GTO with player specific exploitation adjustments.

It is a dying format and when the cartels break down it will not be pretty. I note that someone stressed how the way that ex cartel members do not come back, do not fight their way back in to the cartel was a sign that they were healthily meritocratic...oh dear me no, if they were then some propomoton/demotion would be routine - instead those that know about cartels choose not to go for it again, they move on, they don't fight to get back in to the union, or if they do they find themselves stuffed. That lack of cartel members coming back is a symtom of the whole charade being a temporary, unstable phenomenom.

This temporary bit of craft unionism to protect a select few HUSNG players is doomed, the whole dynamic is based upon increasing the hit on recs, it is all about making it worse for them and it was invented because there were too few of them already....sorry but for all your rhetoric about hard work and embracing new technolgy you are the Luddite hand loom weavers and your craft union is doomed.

Meanwhile that poses a short tern revenue problem for Stars, they like that dying revenue stream and cartels helped prop it up for them, indeed it seems to have got Isai out the door and paid in full before the decline in revenues that was and is coming from HU got noticed by Amaya.

It should be banned anyway. Pokerstars should control their own lobbies.

You do know that the power of the software is not the code but the monopoly don't you? You get that it relies upon organsing all those signed up in the same system to do the table selection not just the code itself?

The software power is driven by it's ubiquitousness not the code, without each subscriber signing up the power of the software is largely lost. This monopoly power makes your suggestion pointless. The barriers to entry are huge.

Someone could spend £500m building the best poker client ever and another 500m trying to sell it but Stars still has the power as it has the liquidity, that is what givs the software and its the real edge, a tool to manipulate player registration relies upon the power of them members of that group/network for it to work.

Today we have a monopoly software supplier price gouging seating script addicts. Still don't worry, the endless never ending stream of recs donating will pay for all forever [not].

I agree, I have argued Sharkystrator should be banned since it came about, and indeed expected it would be as soon as it came to light the methodology implanted.

However, the price of purchase is not relevant and should not be used as an argument no matter the effect of a software.

-Skier's mates are now part of the "cartels", and was battling them in order to become members. It was just really alarming how quick they did it- meeting EV requirements etc.

-Yes poker is dying and always has been- this has nothing to do with cartels.

-That the ppl forced to move down do not battle up again is mainly to do with the fact that they were the least hardworking/worst reg. Usually said reg has ego problems post demotion and loses motivation- the system is meritocratic. Poker is not a pretty game.

-The cartel system is as temporary as the opportunity to make money at HUNL.

I also dislike sharky and how it conducts business- but I don't see how it can be banned.

If you look at who gains/loses with cartels:

- the best regs at each stake have gained a lot in this system.
- the worst regs at each stake are better off being the best reg at the stake level beow.
- fish see no difference in their opposition.
- regs willing to sit other regs have gained.

This is another way of looking at it. But bumhunting in poker is really frowned upon- so hence many regs initially preferred a cartel system- no doubt some did it out of selfish reasons as well. As things stands now tho, I don't feel that it's unfair in the same way that i dont feel hunl at highstakes being soft koth is unfair.

Can you not see that the bolded is just patently false? Bumhunting without cartels targetted them, bumhunting via catels targetsr recs but with added steroids!

Your definition of bumhunting seems to revolve around players declining to play those they believe are better, a more sensible definition involves how recs are targetted not how "bumhunting" annoys/annoyed better regs.

I can't believe fish can tell the difference between playing a HU hyper vs a reg and playing a HU hyper vs a bad reg. They're never going to play another fish either way.

.