its not just this thread, they have been avoiding talking about this issue for months,
in the 40bb thread (which is over a 50 pages long!) stars didnt take the time to write a proper response, and im sure he had some normal working hours in those months.
even emails about this issue arent answered by pokerstars.
and then it struck me the wrong way that they are quick to step in a volume pool thread and comment there :s

slugant, i'd actually take that as a good sign. if they were planning no changes, they could just as easily announce it there and stop talk. now they probably work on the things and don't want to give info about it, which i admit is annoying since they consult 2p2 but don't keep up the convo.

+∞ to plo min buy-in+rake

Hi folks -

Q: "What are you going to do about short-stacking?"

A:Your concerns about short-stacking are not falling on deaf ears, and to be brutally honest, you know that. We had multiple hours of discussion about that topic during the last round of player meetings. In fact, during those meetings, Alex Wice framed the problem quite eloquently, showing that the issue shoves up against some fundamental precepts about how poker is played (e.g. "You can sit down whenever you want to", "You can stand up whenever you want to").

The point is that we had a lot of very smart, very experienced poker people in the room but even after hours of discussion, nobody could come up with a solution that didn't have major (or fatal) flaws.

We are still discussing it and understand that it's a very high priority for a segment of the community. And I promise you that if somebody out there comes up with an elegant bulletproof solution, we will snap-call it (and maybe hire you).

-------------

Unrelated: there were some delays in getting the new client out so we don't have RiT in Zoom yet. The current target is early next week.

Regards, Lee

Really hoping to see some change for the best of the games, the poll from the 2p2 community shows that 50-100bb was prefered by a longshoot and I 100% believe thats best for the games. Really hope Stars listen to the community at this one. Its damn telling that lots of the pro shorties want the min buyinn up.

Ive played all stacksizes and buyinnstructures thats been offered in online PLO all the way back to the fullring PLO tables on party in 2004, and we have to get rid of the structural advantages shorting give. Otherwise we will see that everyone start to short at every limit not only highstakes.

Problem with to much short poker (if everyone short, like its more and more common these days) besides it turn into a two street game (against the fun and spirit of the game in my opinion) is the rake eat up all the profit with the edges that is possible in these games if everyone is shorting, cause how close PLO equities run.


Pokerstars obviously need to take some time before making the decision but the logical step is changing it before next year to make the PLO games more sustainable longterm.

Im thankfull we can take these discussions with Steve, Baard and Lee.
They are all reasonable and logical people that deserve to be threated with respect.

How about another pointless player meeting?

fack we are doomed.



Ok, I'll bite, even though I'm 99.9% positive my request will, indeed, fall on deaf ears, i'll be happy to be proven wrong:

I've read the reps' reports from the meetings. Nowhere did I see anything about what the fatal flaws might be for each of the solutions proposed.

You say if we find a solution without major flaws you'll snap take it, so then help us help you. There have been a few solutions posted and discussed ad nauseaum by the regulars of some subforums here, with no input whatsoever from any of the PokerStars staff.

A solution that comes to mind is a stake-wide rathole timer as opposed to the current by-table timer. A different one I recall was leaving the rathole timer as is but adding a max number of times you can rathole a stake, per day.

Now, to my untrained eye both these solutions seem like they could be viable options, maybe with some tweaking and creativity. The problem, however, is that we, as a community, cannot work on optimizing these -or other, more or less viable- solutions if PokerStars does not let us know what's wrong with them!

How can we help improve on the suggestions we've put forward (or indeed come up with different ones) if we don't know what the major flaws of these suggestions are?


Help us help you.
Help us help you.
Help us help you.

.

Just remember NLHE and PLO is different.

~88% of the PLO community including lots of pro shorties including a team online shortie, wants the min buyinn raised. The overwhelming majority (60.5% of total votes) wanted it to be 50bb-100bb. 17.5% wanted it 65%+, 12% unchanged and 9% 40bb.

I personally think 65 seems unreasonable to do right now, but its interesting to see how many actually want it. I think no change at all is a lot more unreasonable then changing to 65bb. when we see the results of the poll. There is actually also a 5th option that Napsus suggested, 45bb-100bb, that will be a compromise between the 50bb and 65bb+ lair (totally ~78% of votes) and the 30 and 40bb votes (totally ~22% of votes).

Honestly it should be 50bb and its bulletproof for PLO. Rec's that like to play short can still play short. Short just equal 50bb not 30bb. Their money will very likely last more hands at lower stakes as well, giving them more playing time and playing experience for their bucks (50bb should last longer then 30bb always, esp the way 30bb games plays).

I don't want to be hired by Stars atm, but if Ive time I might very well be a candidate to go on the next meeting if 2p2ers wants me there. Its at least time we always send a PLO rep.

On last meeting there was not anyone really understanding the PLO games trough years of experience right Lee? The community including lots of SNE's and pro shorties have spoken after the meeting, and its easy to see what we prefer.


Thanks

Andreas

PS and for god sake dont make PLO fast as discussed in the PLO community. I kinda support Urubu that like in mtts higher buyinns should get more timebank even it sounds self serving. But easiest solution is cap the slowest player to less tables. Take away 1/3 of the tables of bottom 5% slowest of population and see what happens.

+1

I really hope Stars will give this serious consideration. We want games that are sustainable, beatable, and fun to play. So should Stars.

These meetings are just so bad for players. There have been thousands of posts written on the topic of short stacking with dozens if not hundreds of reasonable solutions proposed. Stars has provided just about 0 input since the meetings started. I mean come on. You spent a few hours in a room with mostly high stakes MTT players trying to come up with an elegant solution to an esoteric ring game problem. And all their solutions had major/fatal flaws. This is surprising?

If you're actually serious then why not actually start providing input in a medium where thousands of players can put their minds to the task rather than ignoring the issue except for a few hours every few months where you deal with only a few players, of which only a fraction are going to have any interest in the issue - let alone comprehensive knowledge!

I am still heavily in favor for PLO to get its own rake schedule and for min buyin raised to 50bb.

I'm gonna have to call bull **** on this one. I've never seen or heard PS acknowledge that their online poker min. buy-in doesn'ts even come up to the level of regular min. buy-ins at almost every live casino in Vegas. Plus what makes it worse is that PS poker player pool got split creating a short buy-in game (CAP) but they still haven't fixed it so that the regular game isn't getting short stacked. Weak response from PS but they will pat themselves on the back and call themselves a industry leader at every chance they get unless it requires a backbone.

Lee, really interested in knowing what the major/fatal flaws are with a stake wide rathole timer. As far as I, and this community can tell its a pretty much bullet proof solution that Stars has not given any feedback on either way.

Stake wide rathole timer can be tweaked in many different ways to prevent professional ratholing while still allowing recreational players to rathole since they are not doing it to abuse the system, and would clean up the games a lot.

A 24 hour timer that limits players to ratholing at any stake up to X amount of times with X being some number that allows the average recreational player to keep doing what they're doing while at the same time preventing professionals from ratholing HUNDREDS of times a day.

Edit: Stars has already acknowledged that ratholing is a problem in the past. That is why they changed the timer to 2 hours instead of 30 minutes. Stars needs to also acknowledge that this didn't fix the problem even though that was the intent. One short stack leaves after doubling up, another off of the 10 deep wait list insta sits in, and when that guy doubles he is replaced by another.

I think we should at least give Stars and Lee credit for acknowledging that it's a problem. But I am pretty disappointed that all of the decent, simple solutions offered have been rejected without explanation.

Like McNitt said, if you're going to publicly say you want to fix this problem and will snap implement a bulletproof solution, you need to publicly state what's wrong with the solutions offered.

Even just the general gist of why it wouldn't work: We would have too many rec players restricted from buying in with what they want using x solution. Too many SSers would still make it through more lenient system y. We're not finding enough players that do _____ to justify solution z.

If you're not willing to provide a response along those lines at the very least, we're all taking shots in the dark here and hoping something sticks.

+1 to this.


Right, but acknowledging it's a problem is just saying some words. I'd like to see less of the acknowledging and more of the working with the community to help fix the problem. No-one said "your site so go fix it yourselves and, hey, chop-chop yeah?" We want to help, we'd be happy to. So work with us on it.

Don't tell us yeah hey, we acknowledge it's a problem, we'll talk to the 3-4 reps that we'll invite to IOM in 3 months. The problem is here, now, and it's been raised for months. Let's deal with it. Tell us the issues, and dozens if not hundreds of us will brainstorm over those 3 months, and by the time the IOM meetings would have happened in 2013 we just might have come up with a solution that doesn't have "fatal flaws".

I'm pretty sure that's a better way of solving things than talking for a few hours with 3-4 people at IOM, at least half of whom aren't cash game players.

The people who have contributed ideas and brainstormed over the past x months and 700 posts in the shortstacking thread I linked to earlier have been players that played for years on pokerstars, some of them have in excess of 10 million cash game hands, some have been SNE for 5 years back to back. Others have mathematical backgrounds, others are more creative, others are better at putting their thoughts into words, but together just the people in that thread alone have the potential to do more brainstorming in a month than if you kept the 4 player reps at IOM for 3 years. And they're perfectly qualified to look at a situation pertaining to cash games.


If you really are honest about considering this a problem and being open to solutions, well you have the resources on this forum to come up with that solution, so put those resources to work. Tell us what the acceptable parameters are, what is unacceptable and let us get to work.

+1

And an easy tweak just to make sure that rec players are not affected is to automatically monitor player activity over a longer time period, kind of like using a short buyin counter based on the FTP rolling point averages.

If you buyin short 100x in 30 days --> Limit short buyins to 2 per day
If you buyin short 30x in 7 days --> Limit short buyins to 3 per day
If you buyin short 15x in 36 hours --> Remove short buyin privilege for 48 hours
Else --> No limits to buy in options

I can't see any rec player being affected even by the most stringent limit (and it can obviously be altered higher if you think they will be), yet it's likely to catch every SSer relatively quickly playing on various schedules whether it be a short session every day or 2 day binges with long breaks in between.

Edit: It seems to me the huge red flag that Stars should be able to easily monitor is the sheer number of short buyins and average tables played by SSers which easily contrasts the few short buyins and few tables played by recs. Even with the most casual SSer, the math based on number of tables makes it more than obvious which one is which:

• SSer playing 8 tables 1 hour every day with 2 ratholes = 10 buyins in 24 hours, 70 buyins in 7 days, 300 buyins in 30 days
• Serious Rec playing 2 tables 1 hour every day with 1 rathole = 3 buyins in 24 hours, 21 buyins in 7 days, 90 buyins in 30 days

So you might not catch the SSer on Day 1, but you are probably going to catch him by Day 7. But even if he adjusts his schedule, his short buyins have to be cut by 67% before the end of the month in order to stay under the radar. Any SSer playing more than that has no chance. Yet the same rules allow rec players to put in some serious hours at the table without being hindered at all.

That's what I'm saying, there's multiple people who see zero issues with this kind of approach. But if there are any, let us know so we can optimize it.

And if you don't want the info that we need public, then fly a bunch of Small stakes and mid-high stakes regs out to IOM (say 5+5), give them the required information pertaining to what fatal flaws might constitute, have them sign NDAs and then let them co-ordinate the brainstorming.

I'm willing to bet at least 5 Small, mid or high stakes regs would go so far as to fly themselves out for this if it meant there'd be some progress.

Please remember NLHE and PLO is two wastly different games. The pot limit structure is great, but different then NL.
Same as fixed is a different beast. Under the current rake structure PLO is raked twice as much as NLHE in BB/100.
The PLO regs find this very unfair. It make it very hard for anyone to move up and its killing SSPLO. I know Pokerstars are loosing regs to other networks with better RB deals (yes the rake is a bit smaller before rakeback but after its not even close that eurosites is best) and loose people that tries to convert into PLO from other games that are dying or they are bored from. They simply also gives up when they realize the rake and how hard it is to get up to midstakes under the current structure. Its in Pokerstars best interest to make the game sustainable longterm and they need to to do two things asap.

1) Make the rake the same as in bb/100 as NLHE, we are paying twice for the same serice as NLHE people
2) Raise the min buyinn. The PLO community with only a very small exceptions want the min buyinn raised. There is a whole thread dedicated to the discussion. Short PLO is so different then short NLHE, there is very little folding pre and equities run close. Combine this with absurd low STP ratio and you take away everything from this beatiful game. Including sustainable winrates after rake. It also forces everyone to shortstack to not give others edge.

These days I just avoid most 30bb games cause I hate them. Also as a SNE, I know if there is to many shorties in my games Ive to play quite a few less tables cause Ive to change my whole game plan and openeing ranges (tighten up) on those tables and it takes to much focus so they cant rape the 100bb stacks.

Regards, Odd_Oddsen.

PLO min buy-in will be raised to 40bb, effective early January

1. Please don't mention the name "Alex Wice" during any short-stacking conversation. The guy is ignorant of the current cash game climate. His IOM report on the subject was torn apart by everybody that knows anything about the state of the game:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...eting-1259395/

He is a charlatan, but worryingly his ability to spout nonsense in a convincing manner to anyone half-awake and in the dark on the subject may fool a few people. This is not just my subjective view, it is widely held by the majority- who are also very bitter towards him for forgoing his representative responses in order to satisfy his own personal agenda- and I encourage you to read his OP in the thread above, and the responses.

2. There are many satisfactory and simple solutions that don't have major (or fatal) flaws. That is just absolutely ridiculous. I'm sure we'd be interested in hearing what this so-called fatal flaws are.

3. Thanks for your work Lee. The above criticism isn't aimed at you- your efforts are much appreciated- but obviously you are going to be at the receiving end.

EDIT:

4. This is completely false. You had no experienced players in this particular area during the last meeting, although OMGClayDol took the time and effort to communication with the regs that do know, and brush up on the information. You also had one rep who was detrimental to the topic (mentioned above.)

(I attended the March meeting when it was initially discussed and there were four reps in attendance with sufficient experience in the area- however we didn't go into too much detail at that time.)

Pretty much spot on MeleaB...

Alex Wice... No comment

The community has proposed several solutions that would greatly improve the health of the games. The most fatal option would be to leave things as is, and curious about this topic like MeleaB is.

Thanks for the quick and detailed reply Mr. jones, and the updates/communication in the thread as a whole as well, all much appreciated (even by those who seem pissed).


Lee Jones is to Pokerstars as Steve Jobs was to Apple.

Very cool that they did one big step in the right direction for the PLO games.

And I just want to echo the part about 'Alex Wise', I cant really agree with him on everything.

The Pokerstars Willy Wonka Factory Summits have been a fail. More got done on 2+2 before these meetings. And not only did more get done on 2+2 before meetings, but it got done faster. And most importantly the ENTIRE player community had a chance to contribute. Cough cough Lee is sitting here saying "oh problem so hard, wish we had more smart people working on it". Hmmmm. Well 2+2 is exponentially positioned to offer a large amount of ideas.

But no, instead it is a long drawn out process to pick reps, all the while problems aren't being discussed with PS even though the ENTIRE player community often starts threads. Then reps go to the chocolate factory for a few days while the ENTIRE player community is out in the cold. Then reps come back and write reports but PS stays quiet and the ENTIRE player community is left talking to a few player reps and not PS. And some player reps end up being a total fail (read numerous posts above). Then look at the time line since the chocolate factory meeting, very very little interaction between PS and the ENTIRE player community. Then boom it is end of year and PS is still dragging it feet saying they are looking into that short stacker problem.

Pokerstars has positioned themselves to say and do almost nothing for months leading up to the Willy Wonka Chocolate Factory meetings. And then after the meeting for months they continue doing nothing. Oh yeah except to say..."lets have more meetings."

So how is this IOM meeting thing going for the ENTIRE player community compared to the old way of PS communicating on a daily basis with the ENTIRE player community on 2+2?

Very good post, you hit the point very well. Sad but true!

Here is a simple idea. Dunno if it is good but I can try Lets make excesive bumhunting agains Pokerstars T&C,same for grimming or insta sit outing. If someone break the T&C the punsihment would be cutting the max tables you can play to 8 or 4 (instead of 24+). It wouldn't hurt recreational players and MSS problem would be handled better cause MSS'ing is all about volume and grinding FPPs most of the time.