Are there any plans to promote the more obscure games like nlo8 and mixed games?

Or are Pokerstars happy to watch them wither away.

will pokerstars ever be a publicly traded company?

has that ever been in the discussion of the board?

Is USD currency going to remain the main currency used on Stars for the foreseeable future?

Are there any plans to offer Zoom in multiple currencies?

+1 on rake and rewards. Steve said that he isn't following, so this seems to most appropriate place for rake and vip increase discussion.

I don't agree Stars has gone to extraordinary levels since we have no significant changes to show for it. So far the meetings have just been for show and to deflect criticism of stars onto the reps. Clever marketing by the way!

We saw your dodge of Do It Right, Lee. But it's still nice to have you back.

How many hands would nanonoko play an hour at 24 tbling of zoom? Insaane!!

^ This.
Why not include LHE in the initial release?

Yet another +1 to addressing this. Please and thanks.

I'd like to point out that not everyone is timing out all the time. Also Pokerstars as far as i know started to take action on it by reducing the table limit of players who are too slow.
Also why dont u just open up a second table :|?

Question: How many players % of the playerpool are spanish players?

Is there anything that pokerstars is trying to do to get the playerpools together again? (France; Italy; Spain and another one that i forgot)?

Yo Lee,

What are your player caps per zoom pool? Is it limited or unlimited?
I remember that Tilt had a 1000 player cap per rush-pool will we expect something similar?

Poker Stars recently admitted they never had any analysts to do rake studies, etc. all these yrs..they basically winged it.

Do you plan on incorporating this type of work soon?

For example it would be interesting to try to figure out why there hasn't been much growth in limit games since early 2000s..(Except maybe hu holdem....ahemmm...."bots")

Comparing win rates across games/game types limits, where can rake be reduced when theres a bottleneck at a certain limit (nearly unbeatable limits), making limit vs no/pot limit comparisons, hi-lo vs other game comparisons.

Obviously theres a ton of issues here and i didnt get too specific, but until some detailed studies are done there's going to problems, and you shouldnt have to rely on 2+2 reps to suggest rake changes.

Concerning recreational players, Stars should really consider a major overhaul on their VIP system. Stars was always considered the toughest site to play on amongst the top 3: VIP rewards volume players, no affiliate RB which gives recreational signups decent RB, poor/hard to clear rebuy bonuses.

Seems Lee is dodging the hard bullets but we are used to that after the past 3 months and I agree with you completely.

In some ways I would agree with the extraordinary level part, increasing the rake at low limit holdem on the back of WC was extraordinary and still silence on the subject from Stars.

Anyways I'll ask my question again, Lee do you think it was fair on some low limit and micro holdem community to be increasing the rake after many regs lost at the very least 25% of their VPP's on average since the changes to WC?

Well, one thing you could do is go try it for yourself; it's aliiiiiiiiive!

Regards, Lee

Hi all -
Last batch of Q/A's for a while. Thank you so much for the questions and your patience and understanding when I can't (or won't) answer something. It really is good to be back.

I don't think PLO will ever surpass hold'em in popularity. One of the beauties of hold'em is its structural simplicity. You watch the game for 30 minutes and you understand "how" to play. Omaha doesn't have that feature - I mean, how can it be bad to have three aces in your hand?

On the other hand, hold'em's simplicity has led to it being all but "solved" (though it took 50 years to get there). PLO isn't solved yet and may not be for a while. That means more variance, less edge for the winning players, and more fun poker (IMHO).

And yes, I think the skill level of the average player will increase dramatically over the new few years, just as we saw with hold'em. Only the increase may be more drastic because we're starting with all the analysis tools and poker theory that people used to crack hold'em.

Personally speaking, I won't be particularly delighted if and when PLO gets solved. When I sit down in an NLH game with even moderately competent players, I generally feel like I'm playing against a bunch of clones of Commander Data. In a PLO game, even against players better than I, I get a sense that they're often on shaky ground (just not as often as I am). That makes it more fun for me.

50-100 BB.

No idea One of the great things about online poker is that we can decide pretty much overnight to release (e.g.) $1.67/$3.34 Zoom tables. We'll see how the games go, how they affect the trad games, etc.

Very possibly. Again, it's a function of demand, its anticipated effect on the traditional games, and so on. We don't want Zoom to cannibalize the "main lobby" games to a degree that it damages them.

Actually, we do pay our chat moderators (with FPPs). And this model is actually quite successful in a number of similar contexts. Many very profitable businesses create a "community" and some members of the community are willing to help protect its interests for no compensation other than the continued health of their community [Hint: Green Name Badge]

Yeah. I went and got myself educated. TableNinja will indeed auto-time-bank for you, and that's permitted by our ToS. After giving it some thought, I don't think it's on a slippery slope to an auto-folder (explicitly prohibited). The auto-folder helps you decide which hands to play; the time bank grabber just gives you more time to make your own decision.

However, we're addressing that problem. We're about to start capping the number of tables a person can play if he takes too long on average to make his decisions. The current default is 24 tables; we're going to (slowly) raise that number for the fastest actors and lower it for those who take too long to make their decisions.

This seems like the most elegant solution to me - rather than prohibit this or that third-party software (which can be beaten by custom hacks) we're going to address the truly meaningful metric: how long it takes you to act.

We listen to all of the issues. But I agree that we can't let the entire conversation get completely hijacked by the (relatively small percentage of) people who make their living playing on PokerStars.

I wish I could tell you. The real measure of the robustness of a piece of software is how long it goes without Something Really Bad happening when its getting heavy usage. So the answer to your question is probably something like "A couple of weeks after the last Gnarly Thing happens."

Well, to a first approximation, there's nothing we can do to "promote" specific games. It would be like Kilwin's in Asheville "promoting" coconut chocolate chip ice cream. I mean, how can anybody not see the obvious fact that coconut chocolate chip ice cream is by far the best ice cream ever? Instead, Kilwin's offers that flavor, along with vanilla, chocolate, and a bunch of others. Then they let the customer decide which flavor to eat. Anything else is kinda pointless.

That said, there's obviously some demand (which I hope is growing) for mixed games and other versions of poker that aren't no-limit hold'em. For instance, check out what we have (among others) in the Micro Millions: NLO8! Man, I'd play $.91 NLO8 tournament in a heartbeat.

I would think so, yes.

One step at a time. Let's see how $Zoom goes. Then we'll consider €Zoom, £Zoom, etc.

The Zoom tables are currently running right at 300 hands/hr. Assuming Randy could quad-table both pools, that's 8 x 300 = 2400 hands/hr. Scale as appropriate until Adderall becomes necessary [And no, PokerStars does not condone the use of prescription meds for poker performance].

Yes, we are running 10p-25p (£25NL, if you will) tables. We don't expect them to affect the main lobby liquidity and they are a convenience for our British players.

We are always working with regulators and legislators in all of our host countries to improve the online poker environemnt. I don't think any of us think that the balkanization of the poker market is good for anybody.



That's the cap right there.

That's no longer true. We have people pretty carefully analyzing the rake, where it comes from, who pays it, etc. Maybe we shoulda looked more closely at the rake sooner, but, well, let me give you a personal perspective...

There's always been a culture here of running a great poker site for poker players (newbies, recreational vets, grinders, the whole gang). And for the longest time, that was enough (and then some). We had our hands full keeping up with the growth, the craze, all of it. Yes, we were making a good profit, but I never heard anybody (including Isai) talk about money. We just talked about running a great poker site.

Then, well, all hell broke loose. Black Friday, followed by the aftershocks (still ongoing) of market after market regulating and taxing. And now we're having to spend more time paying attention to where our revenue comes from and where our costs go.

I know for a fact that all of us (again, including Isai) would rather spend our time concentrating on running a great poker site, but that's not the hand we were dealt, and we're in no mood to fold.

So yes, we have very smart people with sharp cursors going over rake spreadsheets and databases. It may take us a little bit to catch up with the normal accounting-based firm, but I'll finish with two points on this:

• I know the people who are reviewing the spreadsheets and databases. They're silly smart; do not bet against them.
• Not to put too fine a point on it, but when all financial hell, did, in fact, break loose, this company did the Right Thing immediately. I wish I could say I helped, but I wasn't here for it. But the point is that PokerStars and its management deserve massive respect for their fiduciary and financial prowess. If we can handle that nuclear bomb without a hiccup, then sorting out a relatively trivial thing such as rake distribution will be a piece of cake. Any one individual (or group) may not be overly pleased with the way we choose to distribute rake, but please don't suggest we're not capable of doing it; we've solved much tougher problems.

Thanks again for your time and attention. See you in two weeks.

Regards,
Lee Jones

What are your views on people who feel stars currently has a monopoly and rake changes etc are as a consequence of much less competition.

when will you release PLO200 and NL400?
is it days, weeks or months?
are you waiting until everything works smooth over the next few days and then insta release all bigger limits at one time? or will there be higher limit each weak? (please don't! xD)
looking forward to it and would like to plan a little ahead. Don't want any date, just some possible estimation.

Hi, while this might be nice I don't think it adresses the original complaint. The MTT-fields are already very huge and I'm sure I'm not the only one not playing the 11$ for example during the week.

Some suggestions:

- make ~8-min-levels and merge turbo/nonturbo
- put up some more deepstacked mtts with long blind levels instead
- add vastly more mtts in the range of 2-20$
- consider creating multiple instances of 500/1000-cap mtts

for example it would be really nice to log in at 10 minutes before any full hour and see to be able to see something like this:

20:00 2$ NL 8min 1000cap [FULL] (late reg 15 mins)
20:00 2$ NL 8min 1000cap [FULL]
20:00 2$ NL 8min 1000cap [FULL]
20:00 2$ NL 8min 1000cap [800/1000] <- you could implement it so you can only register for one of these and even make the winners/top X of the set play some kind of extra promo tourney (rakefree, added, monthly winner-takes-all-promo or something) to fight out the winner

20:00 4$ NL 8min 1000cap [FULL]
20:00 4$ NL 8min 1000cap [700/1000]
20:00 10$ NL 8min 1000cap [FULL]
20:00 10$ NL 8min 1000cap [400/1000]
20:00 10$ NL 15min 1000cap deepstacked [400/1000]
20:00 20$ NL 8min 1000cap [900/1000]
20:00 11$ NL regular guarenteed whatever [no cap] (late reg 30 mins)

and whatever mtts users like

instead of

20:00 4$ NL 1000 CAP [FULL]
20:00 11$ NL regular guarenteed whatever [14000/50000] 90min late reg

Currently you are forced to either play tons of different formats and commit to very long sessions, mix with other sites, or just throw in a few mtts and fill up the session with 180s (which is ok, but not optimal imho).

8 mins 1000 cap would probably last ~6 hours which is ok if one has to work the next day. Busting out 40th for ~20$ in the 11$ deepstack at 4:30pm cet is, well, disappointing.

Just a few thoughts, your mtt schedule just looks so... dated

Lee, will you guys add Deal It Twice (without additional rake) in the near future?

the deal it twice option would be super great, especially for me as an omaha player..
with a rakefree option, would would own your competitors hardly!

After you posted this:
i read your ToS.

this is in the rules:

what about this thread then?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/45...s-thread-1384/

The main content of the thread is pokerstars software modification, which is expressly against the rules.

also this is in the rules:

Having a programme clicking a timebank button must violate this rule.

c'mon.. auto timebank is a nice feature, they could actually integrate it into the software.
please don't prohibit it

Hi Lee I would really like this questioned answered you if you got a second.

One of the main reasons I don't play at stars is the amount of time the vip grinders take to make a decision at the table. I multi table and get frustrated so I can only imagine how pissed off a recreational player must feel taking 60secs between clicks.

I'm worried that a 24x table grinder will load 4x tables of rush and 20 tables of normal NLH and still take forever with their decisions.

Thanks

Lee,

That was a nice post about the atmosphere around pokerstars over the past few years. Would it be safe to say that during the company's infancy and meteoric growth that it was a more of a community minded business where now it's changed to make it more corporate?

Also you said that you have smart people who can analyze rake etc working there... if that's the case why the players meetings? Perhaps I misinterpreted your post. Personally I potentially see a lot of good coming from meetings with players but Pokerstars has to bring something besides explanations and justifications to the table.

As for the whole Black Friday thing... sure Pokerstars paid people back but to expect overwhelming applause for it is a bit much. It reminds me of Jerry Springer where the guy on stage says "I feed my kids! I take care of my kids!" Well you're supposed to do that. Although the audience does applaud that guy to so maybe some credit is deserved.