Uh yea. Look at what online poker is. We had seat scripts what 10-15 years ago? RTA bots etc get better and better with time. Software gets more sophisticated. Online has always been more predatory than live just bc of online itself. You can sit on your ass and bum hunt. You can snap leave games the second a fish leaves and jump in another game. You can rat hole chips easily. You can buy data bases.Things that are just logistically more time consuming and not worth it live or not possible to do live.

Are you seriously pretending online games aren't super predatory? Online parasites make the live parasite look like enjoyable people to spend time with.

GG isn't killing the high stakes poker dream- that **** has been dead for a very long time.


Seriously we're basically 15 years removed from people playing small stakes poker and within a couple of years working their way from poker winnings to high stakes games. That's not bc of GG.

GG has been catering to recs for a long time. Maybe since they started out even. And that seems to be going pretty well for them. They're a business not a charity. At least they know how to cater to their valuable customers.

Yes. And it's not only fun players also regs have problems making significant deposits from certain countries, while others may be better.

Games aren't filled with collusion and rta. At least in GG and pokerstars that's not the case, and probably not even on smaller sites.

You assume big companies don't make mistakes that hurt their bottom line, it seems you just ignore two of the biggest: FTP and Pokerstars.

But I don't think these restrictions to VIP and HS games will be it, if they can invite some random known players.

Though online is a very different environment to live, don't think they can reproduce the live cash streams that you see on youtube, people won't have the same interest in avatars. Ask meta and zuckerberg.

And personally I much prefer to watch the Triton poker series than those american cash streams, but folks have different tastes.

Anyway these changes won't be what would undo ggpoker.

Borg, since you don't actually even play any online poker don't you think its fair to say you don't really know what you're talking about?

Every player that actually plays that pool, me included, has observed that cheating/rta/collusion is very rare. Its a very competative environment, its high level poker, its really fun, and the HS dream is very much alive and this move from GG hurts that a lot.

Given you're playing this pool, does that mean you think you will be excluded/has it happened already? If so, why do you think that's the case?

-Seating scripts: do these exist on GG?
-RTA/bots: do these exist at GG high stakes?
-Software gets more sophisticated: pls elaborate
-Snap leave the second a fish does: some do some don't, same as live
-Rat hole easily: surely this is much easier live, does not happen online
-Buy databases: sure, this is an online specific problem

I play midstakes on 3 sites (zero volume on GG) and while there is predatory behavior, I've also played 10k+ hands hu vs regs trying to start tables this year.

Would be curious to hear from those that split their time between live and online. Every time I play live, the quality of human I have to deal with makes me never want to return, but maybe that's specific to my area.

I've played highstakes on every public site for the last years and there is a very low amount of suspicious activity. In the two or three cases I have reported over the last years all of the accounts were removed within a week. In my opinion game integrity is a way bigger issue on low and mistakes with massive player pools. At highstakes everyone knows everyone and the regs are good enough to spot suspicious accounts and reported them quickly.

In my opinion the arguments of RTA and other forms of cheating are often made by regs who were simply not good enough to beat the games anymore and are bitter, as proven by this thread in particular.

I don't play online much anymore because it's full of collusion and RTA. I do play on GG occasionally, but only when I'm both out of the country and GG also has a tournament series going.

As a primary live player though, I enjoy the private/semi-private/public game dynamic. I've been a winner in every game I've played regularly in and I've never gotten removed from the invite list for winning. It comes down to understanding what your rake is being used for. In every private game I play, the hosts comp the whales far better than any casino will comp them. They keep the action players in the game, they make playing on credit easy for them, they provide car service to get players to the game and back home. At a casino I pay $50k rake a year and for what, for nothing, for getting the poker room treated as the least valuable real estate in the casino, for a floor manager that doesn't care at all whether I'm in his casino or not.

The factors that create the public/semi-private/private game environment are unavoidable too. If you have a public game, people are going to come in to that game and try to poach the most valuable rake generators to private games. Eventually you run into a situation where all the high stakes players get poached and the casino creates a semi-private game in response. The operating costs are totally skewed in the favor of the private game operator. With $1000, you can poach 2 whales, buy a table, chips and chairs, rent a uhaul truck, make an agreement with someone to run a game out of a back room and have a $25/$50 or higher stakes game running that will bring in several thousand dollars of rake a night. Maybe your whales like your game and have bankrolls that mean they're never going to go broke and now you're running a game multiple nights a week that rakes in over $500,000 a year.

Really well run semi-private games are great. You get the advantages of a casino + a dedicated host that brings a lot of the advantages of a private game.

With the reality that online is full of collusion/RTA, I wouldn't be surprised actually if going semi-private was the only way to reliably get HS action on the online sites now. I would not play NLHE cash games online right now, but I do play sometimes in one app game. If the same game was hosted on a casino skin I would play in it.

I played recently in a public casino game and it was kind of disgusting to see again all the behavior you take as average in a public casino game that gets filtered out. Miserable regs that snap leave as soon as the whale tilts off their final rebuy, getting angle shot by a miserable reg trying to take back an all-in call after seeing the nuts, blatant hit and runs, dealers who are completely useless and spend more time talking to their coworkers around them than paying attention to the game, waiting a full orbit to get chips bought from a chip runner delivered, even minor stuff like the drinking players having to pay for food and alcohol.

Even as a winning player I value a lot of things about the private/semi-private game environment that are the main reasons losing players prefer them. The games feel more welcoming and inviting, more comfortable, I like going somewhere I've been directly invited to, where everyone knows my name, where I know shitty behavior and etiquette isn't going to be tolerated rather than something that should be expected as the norm. I like that the social environment is way more conducive to networking. I'm very active in business in addition to poker and being able to connect with other business owners and buyers, salespeople, etc is very valuable.

I don't know how you save online poker from RTA but selective invite games where you build a greater social environment around the game isn't a bad place to try to start.

For the record, I don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote this lol.

It sounds like they don't want any regulars in the game? Logistically that sounds very hard to get a game running at 20/40k, and there'd definitely be way less traffic/rake. At this point I'm so disillusioned with GG I wouldn't be shocked to find out in 6 months that an insider's nephew was playing 14/12 on 2 or 3 accounts

I agree with everything you said regarding live games, but none of it really applies to online poker

High stakes games are still extremely safe. It's 50-200nl, anonymous games, and app games which are in a very bad state currently

It sounds like a move to bring more players into/back into the game. I'd imagine there is some kind of host system so the GG hosts probably messaged a bunch of VIP players like hey if we had x invite game with y players in it would you play? and there was enough yes responses that they decided they'd get more action doing this.

don't you see how that is bad for bringing players into those high stakes games in the first place though? a lot of high stakes players aren't going to just snap depost 6 figures+ onto a site because there is a game there. if you go to $200NL and it's all bots and RTA what are you going to think the high stakes tables are like.

Can everyone who has no clue about online please STFU
If you're playing on Stars, 888, Party, Chico, GG, iPoker you will find yourself in a legit game 99.9% of the time. It is not as hard as you think to catch cheaters, especially in the highstakes pool that is very small. And most poker rooms have very decent security teams.

I have no idea where this notion comes from, but everyone who claims it feel free to download some mined hands from the above mentioned sites and point out some cheating.

Ironically the place online right now that's absolutely swamped with all kinds of cheating are private apps.

Please, if you have no clue stop talking. You're just spreading wrong information. You don't see me commenting on the safety of live poker, because I have no clue.

I feel like this thread has potential to get a good discussion going on about this topic because even though I disagree with this decision from GG I can understand people bringing up points like online poker sometimes being too predatory or some regs behaving like rats for a tiny little bit more ev and don't give a **** about the experience of a recreational player etc.

But again like almost any thread on this forum a whole army comes out and start talking about irrelevant points like rta, colluding, bots etc. Yet most of these guys are barely playing online and have no idea what they are talking about. And ofcourse I can understand if you live in an unregulated state in the US you think online poker is ****ed but almost the opposite is true if you avoid sites who don't value their security system and app games and have a bit of healthy skeptisim sometimes. But they rather listen to some twitter donk and instead of saying "online poker is rigged" the next time they lose 3 flips in a row they say everyone is a colluding cheating rta bot and they feel the need to bring that up in any discussion about online poker....

And this is probably true also

Bumhunters are actually necessary for the high stakes ecosystem because the fish wants to play poker on demand. How will GG solve this issue unless they actually invite the current high volume HSNL grinders? Inhouse bots obv an option but not sure they would go down that low

Very funny that once we get the situation where high stakes games get closed down for regs, and people who see it from the rec point of view use the argument "Well, open games are plagued with cheaters, bots and RTA" then the regs who are now being excluded pretend that there is no cheating or predatory behavior going on at all. Lol, look at the front page of this forum for the last few years, literally all the main threads are about cheaters, bot rings, RTA users etc, and in the majority (all) of the threads, regs are complaining that various sites are doing too little and that security departments are ****, on GG very much included.

But now GG are suddenly very good at stopping cheaters in their games and recs have nothing to fear. Again, lol.

Even if it were true that no actual TOS cheating is happening, theres no way you can argue that every single rec in these games doesnt get bum hunted to oblivion with games filling up instantly when they sit down before breaking within a hand of them leaving. Behavior that will have most aware recs (people arent stupid just because they have a fun player approach to poker) turned off from the games. This wont happen in curated VIP games.

Almost every thread and cheating scandal have been at lower or midstakes. Everyone agrees policing massive playerpools at lower stakes is very difficult and a huge issue, and it has been for over 10 years now.

We had Ali and that other guy who was even using RTA on stream and only got caught cause his roommate outed him.

It is all part of the same ecosystem. Generally regs tend to graduate through the stakes. If this is a major problem at the lower stakes now on sites, its stands to reason that the biggest winners will be cheaters and graduate up the stakes. I am speaking as someone who is now an SWE but played quite a bit poker and from a technical perspective it feels like an impossible task to police even with the best security team in the world. I have seen these custom RTA solutions that are being offered to professionals in exchange for % of profits. Sauce even talked about this being a thing fours years ago where he knew players that had been approached. You don't need to look too hard to find some of the these private groups but I am sure there are plenty that don't even have a trail online.

High stakes games actually feel currently the most open to cheating because if someone is already a skilled player who is well versed in theory then this is going to be when the technology really shines. These private groups actually say they vet players as you need a certain skill level. Setup in the right way you can completely evade any security protocols that a site has in place and really only reference it from time to time when you feel the spot warrants it. You need to be clever in how you use the system but given how long it has been around, I am sure players have become very adept at using it and not getting noticed. The sick thing about all this is that the player using the system they probably become very good over time as it feels like the ultimate training tool.

Yes, two instances and both were caught and banned.

Like someone else mentioned, everyone who says everyone is cheating at highstakes has never played in the games themselves.

Private games are way more open for collusion and cheating. I would rather trust Pokerstars or GGs security than a broke game runner who needs the fish deposit to cover his own losses for the week.

Is part of the change that GG’s security team is going to stop monitoring the 25/50+ games? It sounds like nothing is going to change from a site security stand-point.

How much do sites even want high stakes games outside of the aspirational nature for players at lower stakes? I know GG probably rake them enough to make it profitable but isn't most of the sites revenue coming from other areas? When you take in the cost associated with large deposits, regulations, high security scrutiny needed for the these games and all the other associated costs. I heard a story on a podcast recently where a whale had a deposited a huge amount on a site and had lost it so quickly that all the associated costs with handling the despot versus the rake had meant they has lost money directly. When you considered all the other associated costs and headaches, it starts to make you wonder. Are they even that attractive from a business preceptive for a site to have to deal with at all?

The naivety of believing that double digit players in the "high stakes pool" arent using custom RTA tools to improve their play in difficult spots, when its a known fact that such products exist. Lol.

If you are a great player already, how are you going to be found out? Just using it a few times a session in difficult spots will give you massive +ev. If you are smart enough to become a high stakes reg you will also be smart enough to use tools in a way where you wont get discovered.

Linus lost like 1bb/100 or w/e it was vs Pluribus (6max vs 5 bots), which I believe is the greatest accomplishment in poker AI research to this date. Using RTA few times per session will not have a super significant winrate boost for great players (atleast NLHE 6max), this aint chess. A great NLHE player is really not incentivized to cheat in HSNL because of the assymetrical risk of current EV vs confistication/opportunity cost of getting banned, unless the risk of getting caught is 0% of course.

congrats on the successful hit n run derail. i know your fever dream is to be playing live poker while a bunch of online players argue with each other.

That is nonsense. We have seen massive developments in the field since then. These comments were made around six months ago by Noam.

Q : What do you mean by the latest poker bots, are there any that are multi-player and not limited to fixed starting stack sizes?

Cheating in high level competition is almost always about gaining small edges. Cheating occurs all the time in other competitive arenas with much more at stake.

I don’t have any experience with high stakes GG games, so thanks for those who have shed light on them. It will be interesting to see if GG gives any justification for these changes.