Yes I understand that. But its not the HUDs that make the game unbeatable for these guys. That's what you seem to not be able to comprehend. Its also not the multi tabling.

You cannot simply destroy what makes online poker great for a very few players that might enjoy it.

The biggest part of online poker players will be young players and you can't just make them play 1 table or take their data away from them so they cannot study the game.

You also cannot take away training sites or change the fact that older people wont be able to compete against the young.

If you are looking for a new poker boom we will need to address the young players as well as existing poker players.

The sad part is i actually want to work with you, but unless I totally submit to your "ban everything that makes online poker great idea" i seem to not be able to have a discussion with you.

Maybe we could actually talk about the content without an emotional explosion after each post that could make things a little more productive.

Does Richas work for the UK regulator or just act as its Propagandist? You seem to have a lot to say for them and no criticisms. IMHO all they are offering is tax on untaxed play, where are the customer cases they have stood up for?

No and I am critical of them. I am especially critical that they do not insist upon player fund segregation, do not require remote gambling software supplied to participants to be licenced and regulated and do not use their powers to prosecute cheaters anywhere near enough.

I am a fan of the 2005 Gambling Act that regulates remote gambling in the UK because it does give the regulator these powers and it is the only country that actively supports multi country player pools and is willing to licence all operators that meet the rules wherever they are in the world.

It is also the only regime that licences the real provider of most casino games - the big software suppliers - rather than just their marketing fronts the skins.

Now if you want to take the Pepsi challenge with the UK vs any other legal setup for online gambling feel free. The UK model is better by some distance IMHO. It is far from perfect which is why when they have a consultation it is important - it is especially important as within mere months every poker provider of any size will be getting a UKGC licence.

As for a customer case where they stood up for players and made the operators pay for a mistake, this is the best recent example, which stand in stark contrast to how the GRA dealt with a false RTP (return to player) figure in the Finsoft/GTech scandal:

http://www.gamblingcommission.gov.uk...on_behalf.aspx

I am not insulting you or talking nonsense. Putting "perfume on a pig" does not refer to you or your wife, it refers to the sites themselves. They are not REC friendly and your changes are too little too late. This is what you are not getting. They have lost the REC player. They need a complete overhaul of the rules and their operating model if they have a chance to get them back. You are discussing modest tweaks here and there to benefit all players and the ecosystem.

The sites who "get it" understand that they must create a game expereince as close to a B&M and what the REC sees on TV. No HUDs, no HHs, No datamining, No advice giving software. None of it. Just a bunch of players sitting around a table using their skills, instincts, and MEMORY to play poker. No software, no calculators, no advisors. Take all the garbage and software out of it and make it a game of skill again, where you have to think and use your mind and memory. Not a game where Note Caddy tells you how likely your opponent is going to perform a certain action and what your response should be.

I really don't think recreational players give .02 about all the software etc. If they did and it was better for poker a site like bovada would be a lot more popular then it is.

What has and always will bring in recreational players is advertising and good advertising. The reason there is or seems to be fewer recreational players is 50% the market is gone, and Poker stars and FTP paid out or lost somewhere in the area of 500M that coupled with the loss of half there market has put a big dent in there advertising budgets I would assume.

Your true recreational players like to win a little but know long term they will lose and just want the excitement and enjoyment of playing HUD's don't bug them. some how sites have to make it more enjoyable.

Yes it is a very large reason why the games are unbeatable. Go to the 2+2 software forum and see all the comments about the edge these programs give the REG over the unsuspecting REC. You just dont want to listen.The REGS themselves will attribute 2-3B/100. I think its higher. And yes 6BB/100 are probably rake. The result is that the REC will lose more money much faster. Multitabling compounds the disparity between the REC and REG.

It may make the game great for a few players, but it destroys it for a far larger audience. So yes, I advise destroying the current online game for a few players to improve it for the vast majority of REC players who will return and deposit.

I disagree, The demographic I would target is the 30-60 year old REC player with lots of disposable income. Not the 20 something college dropout, living in the basement, with a pee bottle by his side, 24 tabling the micros. i dont want the college dropout who deposits $50 and then eats up all my fish. I want the weekend warrior who deposits $5000 and keeps coming back.

You want to multi table. Go to PS and play the .05/.10c tables against the russian bot gangs. Good luck to you. You want to study the game. Okay, try using your memory and powers of recall. You don't need a friggin printout of your sessions against me. I dont want you to have my information. Use your memory!

Train all you want. I dont care, there is nothing wrong with training sites, videos, or buying books.

Most older people I know can run circles around young people both physically and mentally. For example a lot of older guys i know play basketball, baseball, and football. Young people play computer sports with their thumbs. Older guys have sharp memories and powers of recall. Young people suffer from ADD. TLDR. You have to print cliffs for a 3 paragraph post in this forum! lol!

.

Young people are a bad target demographic. The online sites are going to have tie ins with B&M casinos. You want synergy............

You dont need to work with me on anything. You are making your point and I respect and understand it. But I think you are wrong and you will see that the changes I am discussing will come to pass. I dont expect you to like them, but they will happen. The PS model will not translate to the state by state regulated environment we will be operating under. This is the point you are missing. There will be no PS, FTP, or UB in the US for the forseeable future. So the operating model has to change to appeal to the widest possible audience. B&M casinos do not target the 20 year old demographic, and neither will their new online sites. Steve Wynn does not want Juniors birthday money. He wants Mom and Dad and the whole family to come to his resort and drop some money. This is where the discussion point should start from.

Agreed. But you need to get past rake. In all honesty most RECs dont even understand it. But they do understand the things i have mentioned.


Edit: So I agree with your rake of 6bb/100 at the lower stakes needs to change. But current software is worth at least 3bb/100 and probably alot more when you consider how easy it makes it to understand your opponents playing tendencies. And then provides badges to advise how to exploit your opponent.

This is a lot like my experience. Now I'm back to playing live daily but sometimes I come home at night and play on an anonymous site. I do well there.

So if I understand this correctly the only way the figured they could beat the game was to study and get better at the game. Instead of doing that they decided to play against weaker players who knew even less then they do about the game live. They basically said online is tougher game then live and players are better with out having to admit that to themselves and protect their egos.

I would still argue that anonymous sites and or sites like Cake at the beginning are not ever going to be popular.

These are also common things I heard from my rec friends. I would always ask what stakes do you play, and they would say 1-2 just like I do a the casino. To which I would respond 200NL online is full of pro's who play poker for there livening and some of them are very strong players, 200NL live is the lowest game available and has almost no pro's in it.

You can also take the flip side. I played 1-2 live against some 1-2 online players. They were horrible. They were tellboxes, couldnt read other players, and rarely paid attention to the action going on at the table when they werent in a hand. Texting like little High School bitches trying to get a date. Had no feel, read, or dynamics for the table or live game. One idiot couldnt even keep track of the pot. He had to keep asking the dealer so he could size his bets. Without a HUD, he seemed lost and probably couldnt track pot odds in his ADD addled mind. Very impatient too. He lost a few buyins real quick and then went on a rant about how online is much tougher.

Pepsi? Prefer JD! Seen the WillHill case and the Finsoft statements on CM................. Not for here (yawn). Both look like low pay programmer errors, difference is one game played as it should and was taken down when the glitch was spotted (by the 'cheat') the other game did not play as it should, and reading your report it was allowed to run on for a few months in 3000 UK shops despite the company and regulator knowing about it. Which response do we prefer as players? That's rhetoric, a bit like some of the stuff you have been pushing out if i might say so. I think the UK regime will cost us serious money and any history of player privacy will be blown out of the water - Mr Cameron seems very keen to tax information sharing between G8 states. So far as I can see, all historic European online regimes permit pooled players - Malta, Gibraltar, Alderney and IoM, and are 'low tax', not tax free, whatever you read in the UK papers, or someone in the UK regulator is telling you, and with 10 years pretty solid regulation (ok, FT was a disaster). It is the new regimes, except Denmark, who are ring fencing, killing liquidity, and the UK is now encouraging them. The game is in dire straits outside PS. The new rules look to kill it stone dead until the US operators take it all over in a couple of years time and let us play on their sites. How ironic will that be, Adelson and all running UK poker!

Oh dear me you are worried about paying the taxes you owe? Well there will be no tax disclosure going on from operators to the regulator never mind foreign governments, not proposed and it would be completely unprecedented. There is no power for it in the Act so it ain't going to happen.

You do bring up another plus point for the UK legal regime though, no tax on winnings - as players we don't even have to declare it to the taxman so quite how you leap from that to a regulator forcing operators to disclose player histories to other tax authorities is laughable.

You seem to assume that I think Gib is tax free when earlier I pointed out that it was a significant proportion of all their tax revenues - well the total revenues from remote gambling is about 5% of their entire tax base and they do it at 1% of revenue.

If you are outside the UK then a site moving to the UK for licencing and operation would eliminate that 1% tax levy as the UK proposal is to only level a tax on UK revenues, the point of consumption.

The tiny regulators - Gib, Alderney, IoM, Malta naturally want tax revenues from foreigners and they have managed to get them by being "cooperative" with the sites, by doing the best by the sites not the players. They lack any power either to prosecute or to punish sites as the sites could just move. The size of the UK market, the criminal prosecution role for the regulator and their powers to inflict real penalties is about to give us the first real regulator of poker ever.

Clearly you are a wild eyed libertarian, unwilling to pay any taxes due and essentially anti any state role. Well apart from that being a complete nonsense it is what has given us scandal after scandal and disaster after disaster. Those wild west days of no regulation or regulation chosen by the operator are over.

Spain, France, Italy, Denmark, Sweden......Nevada, NJ the fragmentation of the player pool is continuing. It is not a product of the UK choosing to only tax sites on players that live in the UK, players who pay no tax on their winnings.

So - the UK legal regime - no income tax, real enforcement powers over the operators, the ability to prosecute cheats, zero tax on non UK player revenues, open player pools from any country*, ability of the operators to be based anywhere in the world and still get a licence.........which of your micro regulators in hock to the sites are you saying gives us a better regime?


*Any country where online gambling is legal

This thread is actually very interesting and has a lot of great sub themes that absolutely need to be meted out, e.g. rake relative to top wr's, what constitutes a "hudbot" and is it cheating, many more. But at the most fundamental level the concept may be flawed, with the title suggesting the act of jumping through a mirror.

There's this guy, we might call him the King***** Bad@ss of professional gambling. His name is James Grosjean. He's heavy into C++ and sht like that. He wrote a book that's 20 times more expensive than Carl Ichan's biography. So this guy makes like 1MM a year gambling in live casinos and has since he said F economics PHD's ima go gamboool and get $$$. So that's what he did. But why doesn't everyone just do that then? I would like to take down a 100k score over a weekend frontloading 1 card poker in Curacao or whatever. Hookers on the beach etc. Fk work, right. Well this guy had this teacher that Mason Malmulth has as an avatar and he might have had something to say about that:

Markets tend toward efficient states.

Sorry to interrupt the shadow chasing.

What people see on TV is exciting hands selected out of the background of boring blind steals and folds to flop c-bets. What's more, the TV shows generally show all participants' hands and their percentage equities as the hand develops.

This post gave me a bingo on my LOLive Players Berate Internet Punks Bingo Card.

Is that what this is about, really? That since you can't beat the Internet punks online and you think you can in a B&M cardroom, making online poker as much like B&M poker as possible will somehow make it more "fair"?

AB:

Considerations as to what is "fair" and what is "not fair" (to the players) will not factor in to these decisions. Like everything else in the gaming industry, how these issues are resolved will boil down to what the operators think is the most long term profitable for them. In other words, it will be a business decision. If folks like Gary Loveman "run the numbers" and conclude that allowing HUDs, multi-tabling, datamining, blatant cheating and collusion and all the other "stuff" that is business as usual on other sites ... if they reach the conclusion that this is the most profitable way to run an internet poker site over the long haul; then they'll duplicate the Poker Stars model. OTOH, if they run the numbers and conclude that allowing all these practices turns off their regular brick and mortar patrons, or, worse yet, annoys their really lucrative patrons, (i.e. whales), HUDs and multi-tabling will be banned in a flash. (If they reach the conclusion that the costs of trying to enforce these restrictions outweighs the perceived benefits, then they may default to the Poker Stars model. That's a factor I've considered when thinking about this ... how much will it cost an operator to try and enforce these restrictions?)

LA'sFriendliest has already posted in here predicting how he thinks it's going to play out. He believes the operators are going to come down on the side of making legal and regulated internet poker as "... close to the brick and mortar experience as possible." He also believes whales will be protected as the operators want whales dropping their money [to them] and not to a grinder sitting in his underwear in a basement somewhere.

Fairness is not even a consideration in all this. The operators are going to decide these issues based on what they believe is in their long term best interest. This isn't about "fairness" - it never has been. Sheldon Adelson isn't opposed to legalized internet poker due to a concern for "children" and moral values. Irrespective of his protestations to the contrary, Adelson is opposed because he sees the potential for Caesar's to reap a huge competitve advantage (against his company) by using their web site as a tie-in to their B&M properties. This is how Gary Loveman has envisioned legal and regulated internet poker from day one. His thought process has been roughly as follows: "First we get it legalized - with Poker Stars and all the other overseas operators excluded - then we figure out the best way to use the site as a tie-in to our brick and mortar properties. Think synergy!"

If HUDS, multi-tabling and datamining are banned and/or discouraged, it will be done because the operators believe it is in their long term best interest - they think going down that road is the most profitable business decision. Making business decisions based on what is in "the players best interest" is a joke. When the PPA makes grandiose statements claiming that they are an advocate for the players (and not the sites that fund them) I just laugh.

The way Gary Loveman views the playing field is about 180 degrees separated from the way your typical online grinder views the playing field. Tina Turner says in song "What's Love Got To Do With It?" Gary Loveman says "What's 'Fairness' Got To Do With It?"

All this heavy thinking has made me thirsty. I think I'll have a drink.

They show the audience the percentage equities, not the players at the table.

FYP and Yes. That is what it is about.

^^^^ While you were "fixing" his post I think you either:

1. Mistakenly inserted a comma between the words "can" and "you" and missed inserting the word "and" between the same two words; or

2. Forgot to remove the comma between the words "cardroom" and "making" and insert either the word "and" between the same two words or perhaps insert the words "and, therefore," in the same place.

The sentence doesn't read properly the way you wrote it and doesn't actually make any sense. It is impossible to tell whether you wanted to convey what would be conveyed by #1 or #2, above, and I actually am just assuming you were going for one of those two. Of course, the two are similar and I do see the general idea you wanted to convey.

Definitely #1. Definitely.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh....php?t=1348611

Lol PS is back. How many other things did u nits get wrong...

Can you actually link to where "us nits" said Stars would never get in anywhere in the US?

BTW they don't have a licence yet and when/if granted you have no idea what their policy re rec players will be in this partnership with a B&M casino. Given the limited geography of NJ, its a very different business to the Stars.Com I get to play on whenever I like.

I want Stars to be able to compete, in the US and judging by the Calvin Ayre videos here http://calvinayre.com/2013/07/02/bus...rt-1-bl-video/

and the UKGC chair's shout out to Nevada regulators here
http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/57...s-all-1347304/

It may be that we Brits might get to play some yanks again soon.

This potential good news for Stars in NJ alters nothing at all about the need to make online poker more rec friendly and make it so that those paying for additional software or illegal data do not get an unfair advantage over recs.

Stopping cheating in online poker is a pretty paltry ambition for the new US regulators, I hope they have a good go at it, with or without Stars. One thing is for sure they are likely to do more than Malta, Gib, IoM and Alderney as the cheated punters actually live in their jurisdiction.