I didn't think they would succeed because of their poor strategy and the people they turned to for leadership. But that doesn't mean it couldn't have worked.

This. Also, I think people underestimate how much Stars does to maintain their industry stranglehold. They hold far more licenses than any other site, have strong relationships with all regulated jurisdictions, their global marketing budget is more than partypoker's entire revenue (or at least it was a couple years back), and they're not using a 2011 business strategy in 2019.

While their morals and priorities may be completely different to the Stars of old, they know exactly what they're doing, and they do it way better than partypoker.

That is really really tricky. It isn't often I fail to foresee an effective underhanded ploy but I didn't come close to thinking of this one. Hat's off to whoever thought of it. Unfortunately, imo, it amounts to the website cheating because it almost ensures all the money will go to rake.

Basically, it's a fraud. You're under the impression that when you sit down you are playing against random opponents but in fact are playing against a select group and this system is meant to minimize or eliminate your ability to win long term.

I don't think this is true. PartyPoker/GVC have a similar number:

Party claim to have:
Alderney, Austria*, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece (interim), Gibraltar, Italy, Malta, Romania, UK, and USA (New Jersey)

PokerStars claim to have
Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Spain, UK and USA (New Jersey).

(I've bolded the unique licenses that the other one doesn't appear to have)

*It's not clear to me if these are for poker or sports betting, they might also have others that aren't mentioned on their websites that I linked to; I don't follow this with great detail these days.

I don't know what metric you use to compare the two. Neither are doing very well if you judge them by the metric of creating shareholder value, with both having their share collapse by around half from their highs last year.

See here:
GVC: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/quote/GVC.L/
TSG: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSG?ltr=1

To the best of my knowledge, Austria don't issue online poker licenses, but the one's you highlighted for Stars are for poker. 15 licenses vs 12 seems significant, no?

Referring to Stars dominance of the online poker market.

Seems like most of the problems have been solved. Is there still a reason not to play at PP?

Lol check mtt thread ect. Bots at midstakes mtts still. Ff pools seems also a problem for bots. No rsa token still to keep any meaningful money on there.

Client is alot better but still getting something akin to pokerstars fulltilt software seems nigh on impossible for other sites. I like wat party is doing but imo thing are far from "sorted"

They are without a doubt the shadiest ****s on the internet. I mind once when there were a few accounts from Albania or somewhere in the ff pool for literally one entire week without leaving we enquired about them in the PartyPoker thread and Colette said something along the lines of "yes they are in-house bots testing the new rakeback system." The response was naturally one of fury, and a couple of days later the lobby changed so you can no longer see who's in the zoom pools.

Added to the fact that loads of regs have converters*, party can't tell, the bot system is an utter joke and the money grab when they changed the rakeback system and set it so that unused PartyPoints (or whatever they were called) expired and turned to $0 instead of AUTOMATICALLY being converted to cash means they can go and **** themselves.

And don't get me ****in started on the BRS/Pads stable stuff.

*they portray the removal of huds as some noble act to protect recreational players yet MTTs and ff pools still allow them lololol. I remember when they implemented the change they had a picture of an athlete getting ready to sprint off, standing next to a machine in the same pose and the caption "not on our watch." Ironic seeing as the games are bot infested "on their watch".

Yeah I also never understood why they hide one game type and not the others. If they really want to equal the play field they should hide everything below 25/50 and below $150ish buyins for tournaments and sng's. Most people playing 25/50 will be using HUD's anyway, so it's not a particularly uneven of a playing field.

I'd would say they're on par with 888, when it comes to software en game quality tho.

Since when does Party have a license in Romania? I can't even access their website from here, they are blocked. They did some shady stuff although we have one of the best legislations for poker. Stars, Unibet, 888 and others got theirs the next day it was regulated, a few years ago.

Geez, they admitted having house bots to test rakeback for weeks lol is that real ?

The MPN head also said in a interview that bots that increase liquidity may be a positive thing in the future, of course they should be disclosed by the room first!

They may be a good way to play against and for the players to practice like in other games. I guess he just forgot to say that the players who play poker even in micro stakes may pay 100's of euros per month to play, and that other games like Hearthstone is free to play and you may buy several cards with just 10-20 bucks.

They try to ban pokertrackers and make the games anonymous and in the future they are the same who are going to promote poker bots. In fact with anonymous games the poker bots will be much harder to get caught. Wasn't also ipoker that had bots playing on the network in the past?

The only bots that would be good for liquidity that are “house bots” would be losing/bad ones, which I highly doubt they would use

Havent played pp for about a year , and would still rather play stars with 0 rakeback before I ever played there

It's possible you're referring to a Feb. 15th interview I published with MPN Managing Director of Poker Alex Scott.

https://www.parttimepoker.com/alex-s...ine-poker-bots

In the interview, Alex told me that:

(a) "In some regulated markets, like the UK for example, a site could operate AI opponents in this way as long as they were fully transparent. But the UK is a large enough market to sustain a wide variety of games with human players, so the benefit is less obvious – it’s the smaller markets where this idea has the most potential."

(b) "Poker site-created bots could move at a pace that is geared toward each specific player as well. One of the very difficult things at the moment with creating some type of poker training software is that everybody learns at a different pace."

With that said, the general player attitude is overall negative towards 'bots' currently, and any such software would require regulatory approval in formally licensed markets. So such technology, if/when it develops into a commercially viable product, is still likely a year-plus away from becoming a reality (imo).

Thanks I've seen the translation of some parts here:

https://pokerpt.com/noticias/alex-sc...-bots-no-poker

Quote from your article:
Pretty disingenuous. I don't know how common they are, but any bot that plays on a major site beats the average pool of players in small and midstakes. In fact a few players with big volume have been found to be bots and some of the biggest winners in the past, found by the players that play against them!

The bot doesn't need to have the sophistication of Cepheus or Libratus to beat the field, far from it. But yeah keep making anonymous tables with no hand histories for the common players to see if I believe these operators in combating bots and securing the games.

You literally quoted the link I posted where they claim to have a license in Romania.

It is here again for your reference: https://poker.partypoker.com/en/p/about-us

I can't access that link because it's blocked...If they claim to have a license in Romania either they haven't updated it since 2015 or so or they are just lying

Maybe it is a Bwin license, not Party, as in Bulgaria. They are owned by one parent company - GVC and use one software for poker and sportsbook with different colors. Afaik Bwin poker use older version of the software compared to Party.

Bwin it's also blocked. You can expect anything from Party

So,should i move from stars to party ? based on this thread i'd say no,but i play low stakes cash and the rakeback on party seems really good compared to ~2% from stars,is the fastforward pool really bot infested ? field is tougher than on stars ?

Why don’t you dep a small amount and try it for yourself

But easy answer is no

if they cannot solve an all-in button bug then what can we expect?
That bug is so tilting and can cost you a lot of EV...

Party poker steals... literally. Where else can you pay to play a tournament win a ticket to a generic 55.00 tournament that plays every day and then they tell you it has expired. When I played that tournament the satellite tournament which I paid cash for ….the prize pool information did not mention the tournament ticket was valid for only 1 week..people work and go out of town sometimes they don't play on the site for a week....does not matter to PARTY POKER ...GIVE US YOUR MONEY FOR TOURNAMENTS AND WE WILL STEAL IT LATER BY EXPIRYING YOUR TICKET IN 7 DAYS.


One can understand putting expiry dates on promo tickets that were not paid for....I had to pay money to enter a tournament and then win a $55 dollar ticket they expired 7 days later as I was unable to commit the time to play. This is stealing ...they talk about their policies and that they are on line for everyone to read....this is stealing no where on the prize pool section of the tournament did they mention you prize is good only 7 days....this is stealing no doubt about it ….I am not sure if the new Party Poker pros know about this scam they might feel differently about supporting this site ….

^^)hmm I can see your point

But equally when I took a look at my tickets it clearly said "expires on 31st March 2019" - like they must have an end date at some point, else do they expire in 7 years time?

But equally I agree maybe they could be a bit more clear about it

why?

why programme an end date in whatsoever? when programming the software, they couldve just not programmed in expiry dates. its no a something tangible. its a digital credit.