I'll take that bet lol

LOL, that's hilarious.

Excellent. Contact my so that we can arrange an end date, exact details, and arrange for someone to escrow.


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Kahn

Tell Santa Clause hi for me, and also ask for p2p, bitcoin, rakeback levels at 27%+, 25,50,75,and 100k weekenders, and lots of other stocking stuffers.

Im pulling for ya TechG. Merry Christmas.

When is a good time to just bail from merge? after 2013 i'd hate to see what is in store for 2014....

A month ago. I begrudgingly give them some action still, but it's very little. If I ever lose my roll I'll never deposit again.

this last update on carbon, the filters are even more screwed up now, can't sort games by how many player registered anymore, nor other ways to see what games I only want to see. Can't believe how bad their programmers are there, but I guess it just correctly reflects the decision makers, what a joke, on us.
I guess it shouldn't really matter though, when you only have like two or three people registered for sng's. It is just amazing to witness the cause and the apparent death of this site.

I stopped giving action around september been cashing out parts of my roll monthly, may as well cash out the rest of what is left while i can........

No need to worry about cashing out imo. They pay and always have. There isn't much need to continue playing here either though. It would take me like 4 months to cash out at this point so I play the 3-4 worthwhile MTTs a night while I wait 3 weeks for each check to process.

Best of luck to you, things are a far cry from when i signed up with RPM over a year ago.The change to Carbon has been just too much of a downhill slide for me.

I have been one of Merge's strongest supporters since Black Friday, even referring to them as the US version of Stars (lol) and giving them 100% of my action. However, last month I finally decided to cashout my roll to play on other sites. This says a lot considering I was invited to the Elite VIP program as a SNG grinder and moved to a site where RB is non-existant but 35% rb is pointless when games don't load.

Fair enough if Merge wants to cater to casual players/casino players - thats their decision to make, but its sickening what a great opportunity they've wasted to be the #1 poker site in the US. They clearly have the best software in the US, reasonable cashout times, and until they started booting winning players they were regarded as trustworthy for the most part.

I think it's obvious things will continue to get worse as far as their poker offerings are concerned. Nearly 3 years after BF I can't imagine many new players are signing up, but there are plenty leaving for other sites. Unless they adopt a new poker-friendly mindset and start offering things like P2P, a reasonable MTT schedule, and give everyone a fair shot at the VIP program (lol invite only) things will continue to go downhill. If they don't make some changes a year from now their poker tables will be a ghost town. It's already tough to get a SNG above $10 going which is just embarrassing considering their potential.

Again, it seems like this is what Merge wants so good for them, but I can't bring myself to support them anymore. Maybe one day that will change but for now i'm done.

It was explained by a super affiliate kid in the Jazette Merge thread that they no longer want poker players because of the extremely low profit margins when compared to games like video poker, slots, or other casino games. I guess they figure if you stay long enough for poker and don't see games when you want to play you'll go to the casino games for action. I just don't get how they can give these affiliate kids 40% of our rake and yet complain about their low profit margins for poker. Maybe if they lowered the affiliate side things could improve for them? God knows they took away all the player promotions they could. I guess that didn't help their profit margins enough.

Yeah, time to leave.

Yeah, it's a joke affiliates get such a huge %. I don't get why you wouldn't want poker players. The tournaments barely ever used to have overlay and cash games are just free money right? Until they decimated the player pool and made it 4 hour late reg w/ unlimited reentries the prize pools were bigger, and overlay free. How can that not be profitable? Not to mention the more poker players you have the more likely they are to go make sports bets and donk in the casino.

I guess they think the sports bet/ casino donks were losing too much money to us?

Do us all a favor, if you don't want poker sell your software to someone that does.

click "status" in the sng lobby, this will filter the sngs by current entrants

I play on both Sportsbook and Carbon. I'm on Sportsbook right now, which I realize is discussed in a different thread, but I just noticed something (from last update??) which I "assume" came from Merge and so theoretically would affect the whole network. Therefore, I'm wondering if it's affecting the tournys on Carbon since I haven't played much there lately.

I'm playing in a badugi tourny right now. The chat descriptions of action in the hand have been totally edited out, so nothing shows but your starting hand and who won. As I'm sure most of you know badugi involves up to three drawing rounds and the action is usually reflected in the chatbox (ie x player draws 3 cards, y player draws 1 card, x player bets etc.)

AFAIK, the description of hand action in the chat box is universal to ALL poker software, at least all that I've ever seen, ie PS, FTP, Bovada, Merge (til now), and Cake.

I like to have the chatbox action descriptions (always maximize chat, and no I'm a rec player, so don't usually multi-table) to use as a tool if I lose track of the action (like say I want to check how the pre-flop raising went down with multiple players involved in NLHE, before betting).

Well here's an example of the new 'improved' chat for a hand which included three rounds of draws. While the hand was checked around, any action check or bet usually shows up and now neither does.

Starting Game #74428399-67
You Were Dealt (Ad,Ac,Jh,7s)
herrmannator9 wins 125 from pot with Three Cards, 7-3-A

You would think since Merge is now catering to the casual player, those players would want this info, but maybe its just TMI for them Or maybe everyone else never gets distracted and is just much better at keeping track of everything that goes on at the table than I am, so no one cares whether the action is described or not. I'd like to know what others think about this. (I imagine pros don't care since they're multi-tabling anyway, but seeing as how Merge claims that's not who they're targeting that shouldn't be a factor.)

Sorry to be going on a bit about this, but it really pisses me off (could ya tell?...lol).

Or perhaps things are now so dire at Merge that they're just trying to some save bandwidth by not describing action in the hand in the chat box???

Just the latest in a long list of player affronts we've had to endure lately to play on Merge, I guess (sigh).

I have a positive Carbon story for a change...

After a recent deposit, I noticed that they have a 75% reload bonus up to $375. I was pissed that I didn't notice it earlier, but I just asked customer support if I could have the bonus activated even without depositing again, and they took care of it very quickly.

Anyone who has deposited in December without doing the reload bonus, you can (probably) still have it activated if you give them the bonus code from the web site.

Sounds like you've disabled "show dealer messages". have a look in the display settings.

Oops

You're absolutely right. I thought I was just getting rid of the annoying new banners that come up in the middle of the table, that others have complained about.

Actually come to think of it, I believe it DID get rid of them or at least I didn't see any more of them....it's just I also got rid of the chat I wanted along with it...lol. (PS I have "Show Promotional Banners" unchecked, so obviously that doesn't work to keep these new ones from showing up.)

Thanks for the help. Sorry for the rant. (slinking off in embarassment)

Positive story on 2+2? Amazing.

This is relatively common behavior btw


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Kahn

Hard to have anything positive to say when they're bleeding players every week. Down to 325 average cash players and on the brink of getting passed by Chico of all sites. That's sad. Not to mention Party Poker.NJ is ONE state and is within 80 players of Merge's cash game traffic. Getting more pathetic by the day..

How was the $11 satellite - 50 seats GTD to the "Sunday Big Ticket"? I was traveling and missed it. Overlay? Time length?

...and to hopefully continue with the good news, did anyone satellite in and cash?

After 3 45 mins of late reg it still had $4K-$5K in overlay. The Big Ticket still had huge overlay(good news for us, bad for them) so not sure what it accomplished. Idk about others, but I'd never buy into such a terrible structured satellite. I cashed pretty easily, so that's good news I guess.

It took about 5 hours.

Yeah that's why I asked lol, the structure looked awful (for a satellite anyway). Congrats on the cash.

U sure bout the overlay? I thought I saw $101,000?

I stand corrected, it surpassed it. Which is great to see. When I busted it still had a lot and it usually never fills much more after that point so assumed.

Havent been able to log in for hours. Tried Uninstall/FixRegistry/Reinstall and have changed IPs, reset modem/router, changed DNS, etc. Just keeps saying "logging in" after I enter my info and it never loads. Have contacted their support but no help really.

Am I only one? Based on no other posts about it my guess is yes.