Edit/MH: **********

part of e-mail i got from support:

"888poker has made the business decisions to remove the Heads Up cash games."


o_O

Woah!

Rest of the email?

"Dear XXX,

Thank you for contacting us.

My name is YYY and I will be assisting you with your query today.

XXX, I am in receipt of your e-mail and I will like to advise you that 888poker has made the business decisions to remove the Heads Up cash games. At 888poker we strive to maintain a competitive and fun poker atmosphere for our players and as such we continuously review the variety of games we offer, and take the necessary steps to ensure that our players’ experience stays enriched. 888poker continues to increase its players base as we stay focused on meeting our overall player expectations. In keeping with our strategy to make our poker room more competitive and more fun, we have made the decision to remove this type of game.

I do apologize for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience and understanding in this matter.

XXX, I hope that I have successfully answered your query. May I take this chance to wish you the very best of luck. If there is anything that I can do for you then please contact us anytime and we will be more than happy to assist you.


Kind regards,

YYY
Member Support Representative
http://www.888poker.com
"

Hmm, I can see 17 $3/$6 tables at the moment.

yeah i can see them too, no other stakes tho. It started like 8-9h ago, so maybe those regs have those tables opened for so long ;o

And look that there is no empty ( 0/0 ) table to open.

Smart move on their part.

All the NL HU have been removed except the 3/6 tables.

Still plenty of bumhunters waiting on the FL HU tables though ... up to 50/100.

Unusual to see 888 making good poker decisions ahead of the competition.

So 888 removes the one type of table someone can play that is impossible to be colluded against? Womp womp.

Really? Was under the impression that 888 was doing a lot of things before their time and was growing quite massively?

*facepalm*

Well that's my weekend completely ruined.

petition anyone?

I wouldn't go that far ... but they are a hell of a lot better than back in the day when I played on there. I still have the email somewhere that they sent out to "winning" players telling them that since they have won so much, that they no longer qualified for the bonuses.

Getting rid of bumhunting is a good thing for online poker.

Next step ... changeable screen names (maybe 3/4 times per year) to even the playing field as far as multi-accounting is concerned.

I'll be impressed if 888 implement that.

It's a really dumb way for them to handle the problem. They used to have it so that a new table could not generate without any empty tables being occupied and this was a great way to keep it from getting out of hand because it meant there could basically never be more than 5 tables of people alone and rarely was it even that. Then they just started having tables get added infinitely with no restriction on how many of the same table a player could sit at so idiots abused it to hell and the lobby was 100 tables of 20 people sitting alone and no games ran. Rather than just fix it to avoid this, they remove the most fun form of poker there is altogether.

Prolly has something to do with their ~20% drop in traffic and the fact HU tables are the least profitable for the site.

Don't kid yourself this isn't about competive balance and fun for the players. Wouldn't surprise me if the next bright idea they got was to segregate the player base based on who has the most fun...

Good move

Why is it a good move? Seems like all the sites with decent action(microgaming, Ipoker, 888) are changing the rules fr the worse and all the sites with terrible action do nothing.

It's all about RAKE make no mistake....

You know how it works people think "yeah there will be more fish in 6-max fr tables because they will join our tables instead of playing HU" That might not be neccessary true yet 6-max regs hopes that they will get more fish.

Additionally the HU become patological , before the changes on 888 there very hundreds of tables and bumhunters and no one was playing and waiting for fish. Same as on Party it is impossible to get 1 on 1 action if you aren't a fish.

ON 6-max/fr tables there is at least some reg vs reg action. There is a little on HU tables so most of the regs think that "bumhunters got what they diserve".

there isn't that much of a sympathy towards HU regs in poker community.

not sure how back you're going but i remember back in maybe 2005-06 when pacific had the greatest games ever and no rakeback they had some garage rewards program that i got like 4 dollars a month from that they kicked me out of. of course in the email they told me it would go into effect months down the road, probably bc their programmers were so bad.

i'm amazed sites offer hu at all, all it does it get fish fleeced quicker giving the site a smaller piece of the pie in both the short run and long run.

Because the games suck at the moment mainly due to regs leaving Party and realising that ftp is dead too. Hardly anything runs above 400nl any more.

People that say this isn't a good move will be the same short sighted people who think that the six table cap is a terrible move.

They still have a lot to sort out though. They can't complain about bumhunting when they allow this to go on without punishment:



Note the hands per hour on all those tables with 5 players. This is without doubt a much bigger problem than hu tables yet despite it being brought to their attention both in the support thread and via email to support, along with the players names who are the worst offenders, they have allowed this to trickle down as far as 200nl where it's ruining the quality of the games there.

Pisses me off that they seem to have no direction at all but I still think getting rid of hu is a good move for the room.

bum hunting is getting worse and worse
why let regs pick and choose who they play who will only play horror shows hu?
the site makes a lot less money when the horror show gets cleaned out quicky in hu than they do if 6 max/9max games are built around the horror show

What? Hu players didn't leave party and ft to play on 888? I recently started playing there and have found better action than most sites.

It's also about time 6 max players gt off there high horse and realised they are just as bad as hu players now days.

you're probably right that they're just as bad as each other but the site makes more funny when a fix sits at 6 max than they do when a fish sits hu

I wasn't actually commenting on the hu action at ftp or party as I don't have a clue what the hu situation is like there but I think you are living on a different planet if you haven't been watching the mass exodus of regs from party poker especially.

People fail to realize that some recreational players LIKE heads up. So when you make the argument that a recreational player loses faster at HU than 6m, it is missing one giant factor, which is that some recreational players may not choose 888 in the future if they can't play the game they enjoy most. When people first pick which site to deposit on, they usually just scan the lobbies a bit. If they like heads up, they'll want to see it. Now I don't think this applies to the majority of new deposits, but it isn't 0% either. The site is a lot better off with a recreational player losing relatively fast on HU when compared to depositing on another site altogether.


888 has a lot of problems, but those problems are the result of terrible support and handling of those problems. Just making it impossible to play HU cash isn't the answer.