99% the fish sat out..

lol nice work noosey

As soon as you posted your GTO challenge to Joey, it was easy to estimate where this thread was gonna go.

For readers that are just being introduced to his mission... he certainly thinks about and comprehends some high level economic & game theory stuff.

To argue against what he wants to describe would be arguing against John Nash. Hard to argue against Nash.

How / if any of that would scale in online poker of today, dunno.

Wake me up when you all learn about how Satoshi was Nash.

"99% the fish sat out.. "

Yeah that would explain it actually, perhaps they were just bum hunting.

Every time you write about CHPs being the equivalent of shares in the site/company a bell goes off at the SEC*.

ANY poker business benefits from players having a good experience and maintaining liquidity. There is nothing new about that. It has never been good business "to rake the hell out of the game", but I don't think that "the rake is too damn high" is the topic of this thread.

A site which provides hand histories already provides tools for players to help police game play and fairness. See, UB/AP detective work on 2+2. What would be helpful in looking into Joey's various horror stories would be the actual screen names he accuses, and some specific examples.

(*As for the SEC position on ICOs, fortunately that will evolve but is a real tangent from this thread ...)

Seems the poker sites no longer want winners. They just want recreational players who pass money back and forth.

Just let people bot already. Make it a bot avatar so the player can decide if they want sit. You're kidding yourself if you think sites haven't deployed bots in the past, but that's a topic for a different thread.

Maybe the sites use bots as table starters, then they leave when table fills up.

Grunching the rest of the posts, but boom.

Perception is reality.

As a player who hasn't been online since BF, but has been considering a new deposit, this is terrible for the player base I might donk my chips to.

So I have the choice of a site with good security and a tough player pool, or sites with possibly beatable players where bots probably operate as low as NL10.

**** it, says I. I'll just continue playing live.

There's a long way to go before online gets back to a shadow of what it was, if my opinion is widespread.

Which sucks for the online games going forward.

aint no maybe baby

Did you watch the video in which Joey looks like he is nearly in tears because the game he loves is torn apart and the players cannot find a proper relationship with the site owners in order to fix it? For all we know the bots and cheaters are the site themselves. And the sites also clear hide how often cheating occurs.

You are thinking about rake as a %, like 7% rake...but what is a site with 7% rake but a large pool of bots and colluders? It has a higher EFFECTIVE RAKE and that is a hidden metric.

To the first bolded it is also not true. It has been great practice to raise the rake, and even have dnegs rub it in the face of the players and tell them its good for the game. They could do it with impunity because they were effectively a monopoly. No poker site competition has been able to grow because the barrier to entry from payment processing restrictions and regulation makes it impossible. Ask Phil Galfond.

To the 2nd bolded its not true. The writings of mine that were previously banned from 2p2 and the thousands of posts include essays on how the players perfectly lack the information to police their own games. And its not coincidence, its an industry practice. This is part of the importance of the decentralization of poker, because it implies a change in power. The players need the information the sites have, this is why poker stars takes players like Ansky and Josem and have them under NDA. (Josem was instrumental in uncover the ub scandal)

It is quite different though if the players hold a stake in the company via the bankroll/chips they own. Because then if a company treats them bad, the players can boycott en massive and tank the "share price".

Why does everyone keep saying this is off topic?

"For all we know the bots and cheaters are the site themselves."

That is what we should all be concerned about.

Reread the portion I bolded. You could NOT be more wrong.

Are you pretending/claiming that neither collusion or bots matter to poker players generally or, because you project a rising value for CHPs they may hold, they are compensated that way in the event they do care, assuming I guess they are not cheated out of their CHPs while playing.

I expect that Josem is quite dedicated to having secure and fair games, and would not share your peculiar attitude toward players generally. You are not doing anyone a favor, especially CoinPoker, by implying that it would not matter to players there were there collusion or bots in play.

Most young players also play video games and are exposed to ai opponents from an early age. Why are bots in general such a big deal to the old fogeys? If bots are deployed transparently as part of the game liquidity is no longer an issue.

1. I know Joey and I know Phil Nagy (not Galfond.)

2. Your ad hominem assertion that "for all we know the bots and cheaters are the site themselves" is contrary to my knowledge re poker operators generally, including Stars and WPN. Sure a site can close down and not pay players, like a failing FTP or failing Lock or failing PokerSpot did.

3. Your beef with the Pokerstars market dominance is way off topic. Your assertion that no poker site can grow is factually incorrect.

4. Your assertion that players "can boycott en mass and tank the "share price" sounds like self-aggrandized nonsense common in overstated blockchain nirvana. Players can always "vote" by boycott, with or without a blockchain element in the mix...Adding a blockchain element does nothing more than ANY proposed consumer boycott to influence provider behavior.

It's so easy for a small unregulated site to deploy bots that if they aren't its bad business.

I am not wrong.

This is why I asked Joey the special question. It is special because its a thought experiment that makes a point:

It is a special question for joey, because he is a "good player" (not bad), and he wants a profitable game. Because poker isn't fun if everyone loses. But he sees a special problem and the problem has been buggin him: you CAN'T SOLVE BOTS. You cannot stop them, and in fact the more outlandish measures you take the more you encroach on other freedoms the players want and deserve.

So I make a seemingly weak observation, but it turns out to be the crux of the decentralization protocol which is too big to describe in this post. And so I ask "If games were more profitable today in the future than in todays bot infested waters, would that be acceptable from the players view?"

Compared to what we face, its amazing. For joey, who's heart seemed torn out, its a god send question. It doesn't mean the same to someone that is not passionate about the game, but for those that are, its a very special observation. And it leads to a plethora of other insights.
Every important players in this "game" is very familiar with me and my works and josem is one of them. Josem knows he can't solve the problem of bots, because he is smart. And yes I am doing coinpoker a favor, in fact I created their model and they are first to implement it.

They will police their games and josem will work with the players, and because of how free market theory works, they CHPs price on the crypto exchange will be and indicators of the profitability of their site, so that includes the amount of bots. If their site is full of gto bots the market price ill tank. That is the special model that coinpoker is using. And they know this, their token is a very special device for the players because it REVEALS the effective rake, it shows the otherwise hidden profitability of the site.

No legacy site has this special device, they can't...regulation prevents them

And since the players are EFFECTIVELY shareholders, josem WILL let the players in on the necessary detail so they can work in cooperation, NOT like ACR, NOT like poker stars.

I've had a lot of dialogue with Josem let us not pretend I haven't been apart of this community for many years...you all know thats not true. I've just had my identity stripped, you ALL know me.

Personally one of the big draws of poker compared to other gambling games is the opportunity to play against other real human beings instead of the house. I’m well aware there are beatable break-even rakeback bots on WPN but I’m posting on 2+2 instead of playing WPN this week because that fundamentally changes the game in a way I don’t like. Poker is no longer a full-time job for me and I don’t need to play. I’m pretty sure players like Joey need to keep myself and pure recreational players in the game to profit from. How do you attract players who lose to the simpler automated computer programs that fund the poker economy? Now consider more sophisticated programs. You want to publicly promote their existence?? As indicated by the poster above I’m not alone.

No one gives a fk who you are at this point lol

Absolutely not. We, the players, were restricted by payment processing friction and regulation and eventually player pool segregation (and lack of a reasonable alternative). There are and were very few competitors, and to suggest that the reason poker stars had 70% market is because they were a great site while they ripped us off from the supernova promise and made obviously unfair rake changes while claiming to have the lowest rake in the industry is ascine.

Poker stars has been HORRIBLE to its customers and we have watched team pro after team pro give resignation in disgust. Ill cite those letters if you argue.

And there is the problem of boycotting which is game theoretical, because once some top players leave, the games get more profitable, and so no one can leave. We are poker players, we know the game theory, poker stars abused their power. They were NOT serving their customer they were serving their SHAREHOLDERS. And ACR is OBVIOUSLY not protecting its customers.

You know there was a superuser account on UB and you would deny their could be internal bots on sites?

But now the players have options emerging in which they can move their rolls instantly and costlessly, free market poker, and so sites are going to be forced to serve their customers or they will instantly lose them. And the problem of the players boycotts is solved, because if ACR doesn't address the bot problem (which is really an effective rake problem) then they will lose their players en masse to coinpoker...because right now coinpoker is PAYING their customer base (and it has great software ;p). And I guarantee the tokens on that site are at a discount, so those players that leave first win more.

And coinpoker is just the first...

"It's so easy for a small unregulated site to deploy bots that if they aren't its bad business. "

What is happening with these sites that accept USA players? As far as I'm aware online poker is illegal there isn't it?

I should’ve just quoted this. Well said

Its generally only illegal to SERVE the players, it is not very illegal to play. This is why crypto sites are changing the landscape. Because the way to enforce this was payment processing restrictions and regulations. As soon as bitcoin was birthed reasonable options began to emerge that the players could play on.

The onus (apologies if that is not a perfectly correct word here) is on the sites, and so any site located in a jurisdiction the united states doesn't have a legal relationship with, could freely serve the us players. And us players could freely play on it.

It is very hard for the US to just say to their citizens "you can't do something" knowing it is obviously harmless and private.

Why are secure/fair games and bots mutually exclusive? Can't a game be secure, fair, and have bots sitting as long as it is clearly labeled a bot?

So you can only deposit and withdraw on these sites via bitcoin?

There's a wealth of information of the forum about this. Head on over to the internet poker forum.

Is it not possible that the FBI or Department of Justice could go after these sites providing service to US Clients and seize all the money, including player funds?