Right, if there would be two users anyway at higher stakes then yes I see the advantage of them sitting together.

I haven't been following the thread, but in light that Steve says that PS want even stricter rules in the future...

How has the discussions been regarding HM and PokerTracker itt?
Perhaps those software and others will be banned around this time next year (WCOOP 2016)?
Thoughts..?

I think an outright ban is unlikely in the extreme, the approach being taken is to get the main suppliers to cooperate in liiting the capabilities of the s/w. This might though lead to two further (welcome steps) - the s/w declaring itself so that HUD free tables could be made available as an option and the s/w allowing the data to be checked to see if it is consistent with the player's history on the site.

Better the quasi regulated main product than shifting to an attempt to ban outright that would likely fail as so many already use the s/w and are in part reliant upon it.

Because of the huge fluctuations in soon & gos, you need 36%+ EV in the money (ITM) to avoid having a horrible existence


So there are 2 options to achieve this:
Option 1: Sit weak regs and recreational players where we can achieve 36% ITM while our opponents share the rest and average 32% ITM.

Option 2: collude with one strong reg and a weak reg/recreational player. For this approach, the strong reg and I need to share 72% (36+36) while the weak rec/reg needs to earn 28%.

Considering:
- 2/3 of the game is heads up where there's no collusion advantage
- to achieve 36% ITM we are likely to be an experience reg with years of experience and not to keen to be caught by Pokerstars for colluding and banned from earning a nice income
- how impossibly bad it is to achieve a 28% ITM as there are just too many situations where you have to get stacks in at 25bb effective stacks and less
- the difficulty I have in setting up games with my fellow colluder through spinwiz

I'll stick with option 1.


Can you pour your energy into the completely unenforceable 1 A4 piece of paper rule? If there was any rule out there to provide an advantage to the cheaters, it's that one

Well said Pies

I'm currently putting my 36 pre-flop charts on to a microfiche slide about the size of a fingernail.

This approach based solely on how a reg can make most is precisely why we have software that is essentially wrong and exploitative. Buying software advantage vs the weakest and newest is not good for the game and is basically not "fair".

Buying an advantage to make a low skill high varience game marketed to casual players grindable is not a good thing.

As for discussing three way collusion possibilities, the theory thread is better placed for that but again your view that much of the play being heads up misses a bit. You get heads up as a colluder eithr by already having beaten your mark and won for you both already or because one of you got beaten but still has a fighting chance, either with their colluder fighting from the small stack or having got your chips, which is less good for collusion but still gives your partner a better chance.

Try looking at 2vs1 collusion as potentially advantageous in some games. Now to push your mark down from their usual win rate to 28% obviously depends on what their win rate would be anyway. Let us assume they are pretty good for a non SpinWiz subscriber and they hold their owm, winning 33% - to get
them down to your 28% all that is needed is for the collusion to alter the outcome 5 times per 100 - I don't think that is a big ask for even soft collusion between 2 against 1. Do you think it is an unrealistic target? I don't. Just the ability to alter your aggression by not having to worry about 1 of your opponents likely does this.

You also leave out that the collusion itself reduces your variance hugely and variance is one of the big problems with grinding this game.

As for energy on an unenforceable single A4 - I doubt you'd like my position on it. Ending popups, restricting the HUD to just fixed HUD stats the same for all opponents and unalterable during the game. - If people use paper for charts or another PC to help open pages in a folder then that is pretty unenforceable but also tough to do with many tables. It is about limiting the power, the impact not the best ad hoc definition of what is "OK" but yes accepting a single A4 page is a strange line, the data complexity within that is likely more significant but again that is in HUD not outside.

If like me you want a compromise where some s/w is allowed, where HUDs to multi table are treated as legit then yes we get in to problems in defining what is too powerful. Opposing restrictions on the power of in game data and advice retrieval systems is difficult stuff, I doubt Stars have got it right on this first occassion they have tried to clip teir power but the approach is in line with my view that s/w needs to be restricted to limit the advantage gained but not so much as to make multi table grinding impossible.

Skier got screwed on this by being open with everyone, his approach was even disclosed by Stars when they should have kept it confidential as it was his IP and that mess up has given us this 1 page thing. Those rules will need to evolve but the balance needs to be how to make multitabling possible whilst also delivering as level a playing field as possible between the software loaded pro and the rec. Hey if we do that then maybe the pros will rely on their edge from their skill, not their s/w package that lays package upon package and for some boosts that with illegal data.

I think that Unibet already has the best solution: no HUDS, no table selection, PT/HEM incompatible, frequent screen name changes.

Richas- please just let the collusion thing go. Most of the edge in spins comes from HU. There isn't much incentive for a good reg to collude and get all this hassle + a chance of being perma-banned just to get 0.5% extra roi in some of his games. I guess the only one it would make sense for are the weak regs who get targeted anyway. If they were able to team up with one of the better regs and collude they can increase their winrate by a lot (but the better reg is doing strictly worse sharing his profits this way than playing on his own). But again- if they wanted to collude they would NOT use spinwiz.

I'm fine with you arguing that spinwiz is lobby altering collusion, or huds should all be banned etc. But the collusion thing has no basis and has nothing to do with spinwiz (spinwiz actually reduces likelihood of in game collusion).

If we had any confidence that such collusion was being policed I might let it go but you are jumping again to the good reg position - think of it from the weak reg position with additional pressure from hunters.

It is a game of fine edges, the weak reg protects themselves from the strong reg as well as getting the collusion edge by doing this. This s/w has taken the HU model and applied it to a three way game - the key and signicant delta is collusion in game as well as pre game.

The case against lobby collusion vs 1 non user is greater than the same (justified) objection to HU or sanners and seat grabbers at 6 & 9 precisely because it ALSO suports soft (stable) collusion. That is a big difference.

I read one thing interesting. And another thing that I read about Spin & Go's and Sit & Go's in general:

1) It would be cool to poker trackers like HEM2 and PT4 have a hand history check with PS servers. Like: If you have more hands in your history than you have in PS server, it means that you, somehow acquired those hands. So, you made an illegal move and you should be banned. That should prevent automatic and collusion bots, but not players with multiple holdem manager accounts in offline mode.

2) Sit and Go and Spin & Go, the name explains it all: sit, wait and let's play! I don't have any setup in my Pokerstars interface that can "select" with which user I'll play at the Spin and Go lobby. So yeah, SpinWiz, IMO, is a prohibited software, as they benefit from a breach in the 3rd party software rules and ToS. If I can sit with auto seat with "marked" people, why can't I have an auto-folder? For me, it's the same thing, thinking about minimizing risks and user configuration that could be done only with a third party software.

The option to do this is not available to recreational players, most of whom are totally unaware of the software that seats you with players you choose.

The software should be banned.

Before making any statements about SpinWiz please first educate yourself on how it works.

SpinWiz doesn't "pick players". All SpinWiz does is register you at the same time as another SPINWIZ USER so anyone not using SpinWiz is safe.

"SpinWiz, IMO, is a prohibited software, as they benefit from a breach in the 3rd party software rules and ToS."

That's just so wrong.

So a recreational non spin wiz user has exactly the same chance as a reg using spin wiz of being seated with rec players?

I think you need to read my entire post instead of getting one phrase and generalize the whole thing.

I don't want to be the one to break it to you but there's not a poker game out there where this is the case

There are 2 issues re: spinwiz
1) collusion risk : hopefully any fair minded person who reads my prior post now realises that this is not practical using this software
2) unfair sitting of recreational players: there has been a lot of debate in this area. Often generated by people blind to the fact that seat scripting is used in all of poker. Pokerstars have made their decision restating that Seat scripting software is legal.

I think with the amount of Spin & Go regulars there would be a reg or two in every game with or without SpinWiz. 3 Rec games would be as rare as they are now anyway.
The current sit list games percent at $100 and $60 is around 50% which means half of the tables should be 2reg,1 rec and the other half 2rec,1reg depending on how many tables non users register at once of course.

Also I never understood why this would even be an issue. With everything people do the ones who are more informed will be better.
If you play online games and google for character guides you will be more informed than the ones who don't. If you research Spin & Go for just one minute you will find out about SpinWiz. If you don't, it means you don't care and should be at a disadvantage. Tbh if you're a bad player SpinWiz wont make your life better; it could actually make it worse. Just because someone wants to do better at something and invests time and money into it doesn't mean others deserve to be carried to success.

Random registration has never been a part of PokerStars Spin & Go advertisement.

There are only 3 possible explanations for Pokerstars continuing to allow this.

1) Insanity.

2) Stupidity

3) They don't care about the longevity of their poker product.

When I emailed stars they said the seating was done totally at random.

Why would they tell a blatant lie to a customer do you think?

They care. They just fail to communicate.

http://pokerfuse.com/news/media-and-...ating-scripts/
http://www.pokernews.com/news/2014/1...ipts-19809.htm

I have a similar opinion Luca Moschitta (never heard of him , but even I mentioned the Google Glass thing...). But I think that's normal to use HUD's and poker trackers.

Can you reproduce the e-mail?

Well SpinWiz is certainly on the Stars approved s/w list which is as far from prohibited as you can get.

SpinWiz does however let you register simultaneously with another player you and or they select - it makes it possible for a stable of soft (or hard) colluders to register together to target the non spinwiz player.

It is not being seated with a random pair of spinwiz users, either one or BOTH are choosing to seat the other/each other.

It also means that it will be rare at the higher levels for a non spin wiz user to be seated with another non spin wiz user. This clearly disadvantages them before the game starts as spin wiz users will be higher volume professional or semi professional players prepared to pay for the s/w subscription from their profits because they consider it gives them value. The alleged high level of hunting at those levels might also reflect a high level of players choosing to be seated together so the rec gets either two pros OR two colluding pros pretty much all the time. Not good, not fair, not right.

If at lower levels the queue is sharing out non spin wiz players at a rate of 1 user vs 2 casuals the impact on the casual is less but still likely to be adverse. If the volume of casuals makes Wiz sharing them out two at a time per player practicable it is still adverse as they would be getting 2 casuals themselves far more often - it also makes the mutual collusion seating easier as most are not attempting to also target weaker regs using spin wiz. If they get targeted by sit listers not only do they lose their expected one other casual they also risk being collded against.

This is what the software does - either with or without collusion it takes ev from non users and gets it to users. That is the whole basis of the software - it is designed to profit the paying reg at the expense of the non paying and likely ignorant rec even before we add in collusion loss of ev.

At all levels it is just not "fair" for recs to have one registration interface and the more skilled a different one that impacts directly upon those recs. This is before collusion in a game format that is as vulnerable to it as double or nothings but because of the way this s/w works that collusion is less visible, indeed better hidden - not least as many of the marks do not know it is possible to choose someone you want to be seated with.

Just words.

Sit & Go's and Spin & Go's have different interfaces. In one you can select where you'll be seating, the other not. So, if you can change something that is not in the interface, IMO, it's illegal. And that's what I meant on my other post.

== other things (explained in details about the other post) ==

As I said on my other post, it's ok to use auto-seat but it's not ok to use an auto-folder. For Pokerstars, they are different. For me, they are equal.

For me, it's the same thing: a script to make things auto. And whatever script that automate your actions in the game, should be prohibited too. Table selection is a skill, as often we see guys that don't have this kind of software bragging at PG&C about it.

If it's a skill, IMO, this type of software SHOULDN'T be used.

Even Pokerstars say: Any tool or service that plays without human intervention (a ‘bot’) or reduces the requirement of a human playing. For instance, an ‘auto-folder’ is prohibited.

So they not consider Table selection as a skill. But that's none of my business

Do you have any evidence that anyone is using SpinWiz in order to sit together and collude?

Thanks ... you saved me a lot of writing here