I was asked to repost this by one of the new owners, Max. It originally got mixed into another thread by mods but he thinks it should be a thread of it's own so here is the repost.
I am dealing with a lot in RL recently so I will not have time to check it for a few days, just a disclaimer.

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Well hello there.
I am a HS MTT player with some thoughts that could be useless, we'll see.
I tried reaching out to new owners directly but I am sure they are overwhelmed so here goes this attempt.

I spent 10 minutes on the title but honestly, there isn't much thought behind the rest.
Let's call this an annoyed rant disguised as an attempt of trying to do some good.
Here is how this moment started :

I am not blaming my bar or alcohol, it's just that it gives fuel to my opinions. As mentioned, this is an opinion so I could be wrong.


Let us begin.

So i went through the thread where a new management is announced. Like many, I was sort of excited. I mean no insult to the previous owners/management but I simply believe that the times have drastically changed and something had to be adjusted. Mason and his team has done an amazing job growing this community but I personally believe there was a lot more negatives than positives that came out of this community. Simply said, scams/****ed up stories gained more clicks than good deeds.

When I joined 2+2 in ~2009, it was where EVERYTHING poker happened.
Thanks to 2+2, I learned a lot about strategy. I sold some action to investors and made them some money. I met new friends and got to travel with them. Shoutout to Horveech, I miss you, I hope you are enjoying space. RIP.

Then slowly, everything disappeared. The marketplace died, NVG became less relevant and strategy subs just came to a halt. 2+2 did not do anything wrong ,but they did not try to change and do anything right either.
As social media grew and specifically Twitch , 2+2 was no where to be found. No active twitter , no active facebook , and barely any support for twitch channels. This is very important since clearly Twitch became a key introduction point to any form of strategy game to viewers.
This kept 2+2 the same , which was sort of a good thing but only to it's existing members. This is exactly why you do not see new young users in here because no one really goes on a forum anymore. This does not mean 2+2 cannot be changed to appeal to both markets.

If the new owners want to grow this site again, they need to embrace the old and the new. 2+2 has a unique brand opportunity but it is useless if it stays in the stone age. A lot of threads in here are extremely informative and can allow others to change their lives. They just need to know about it.

Now I will get a bit personal. I have always checked NVG, MTT community, InternetPoker at least 3 times a week for the last 12 years. I was just always curious. I always struggled between become a "PRO" and keeping this as a hobby. I like to think that i know my self well so I decided at some point that being a pro is out the question. My addiction of caring for others made it hard for me to be self-centered and grind like crazy for my wellbeing. I do not know how this developed but it was not always like that.
With that being said, I was still a sunday battler in MTT's and occasional random weekday player. I was full time in school, working 10$/hr jobs and I would still load up sunday sessions for 3-5k buyins somehow. Eventually this hobby started paying off in some sorts. I did well for a while and realized I am very fortunate to have developed this talent. Looking back, It was due to 2+2 , CMU , PTP and other poker forums.

This is where my epiphany comes from.
If you want to grow Poker, you need to build a positive community behind it.
Right now , Poker community is plagued with a lot of negative stories but it does not talk about a lot of good things. A lot of streamers/players out there are pledging profits to charity. Shootout to RomeoPro for doing his MTT drive a while ago and inspiring me to the same.
REG charity at some point was doing amazing stuff but sadly seem to have stopped now. However they never got any recognition on here... It was backed by Liv Boeree, Igor Kurganov, Phil Gruissem, Martin Jacobson, Erik Seidel, Bonomo and the list goes on.
I have also personally done my own charity drive and posted on here in some subforums, donating 15000$ so far in a month while live streaming it on Twitch. Mostly I pledged profits but a few times I just gave away % of any cash which is the same as "burning money" as some may say. As a semi-boomer, this was hard for me honestly but I loved every moment of it. I doubt I got even 5 people from 2+2 interested out of it. I did not do it to gain traction but simply to change how things are done in our community.
I do not see why player X cannot use their skill to make money off of a willing opponent who still has a chance to beat you. Then player X does some good in his community in anyway or form.
Poker players are not all scumbags, they are not all thieves and liars. We are just naturally more interested in those stories than the good ones.

A lot of people wonder why our community does not grow. Some say it is because poker players " abuse " fish and take advantage of them. Then you could apply the same exact logic to any tournament format where the top players take advantage of others. Tennis, Golf and chess. They are not identical but somewhat similar.

To the new owners, if you want to revive this site, please focus on the positives and bring a new generation in that will embrace the history of 2+2.
There are many trolls and negative people out there and I hold no judgement against them. I believe everyone has their own ****ed up reason for being the way they are but I also believe everyone is capable of having some good in them.
If you are going to troll this thread , go right ahead but please read it again and re-consider your option. 2+2 and the poker community can be a positive thing even if the majority of people are looking to self-enrich.

Special shoutout to Blakman08 and Slayervfan1 who shared their lives on 2+2 and inspired others to follow the Poker/MTT dream. I thank you and many like you for putting yourselves out there. It truly got me to where I am now in life and convinced me to give back to the community.

My apologies to the regulars of the Live Low Stake No Limit (LLSNL) forum, because they have read this from me many times in the past. It is not surprising that your join date and estimation of when was the peak of 2+2 are about the same time. It has more to do with the life cycle of a poster than anything else. As a moderator of LLSNL, I can tell you that the roster of regular posters has changed multiple times over the years.

From a strategy forum point of view, I see 2+2 like a railroad way station. It isn't a destination, it is a place where people stop along their way on their poker journey. Some are going to go continue on their poker journey to another destination. For most, this is going to be their last poker stop before they connect to the journey for the rest of their life. I view LLSNL as a stop to get refreshment (information) and entertainment (chat thread) before they move on. Some stay, but they recognize the life cycle of a poster.

Most posters come to a strategy forum with a question they want an answer to. They get multiple volunteers who provide advice at no charge about their specific problem. They get pointed to other threads for more information. Some realize that they learn by contributing to other peoples' threads.

The next stage is that they decide to "pay it forward." They aren't learning much from the thread, but they want to help others along the way. This eventually leads to boredom from seeing the 74th thread on "should I fold KK preflop?" Some leave. Others who have developed relationships with other posters retreat to the chat thread. The rest complain to the mods or owners, "the website isn't as good as it once was, do something about it." It isn't that 2+2 changed. They did.

As for growing poker, emphasizing positive stories is nice but not going to grow the audience. Centuries of history shows that the negative reporting pays off. Even Ben Franklin resorted to accusing a competitor of being the devil to drive circulation. What drove poker in the last poker boom was being able to see clearly what what was going on (hole cams) and the emotions of 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars on the line with a flip of one card. I think it is beyond the scope of this website and the owners to be able to recreate that time.

With all due respect, please provide an example of any other industry or forum type of activity that exploded due to a focus on positivity over negativity. I'd argue that the opposite is actually true; even recently on 2p2, which threads are the most active? Sklansky's dirty laundry.

2+2 boomed because a large audience that didn't know poker discovered it and were excited about a new challenge that offered prospects of massive financial success and fame. The ones that couldn't win disappeared or became less engaged. The ones that could win realized it was counterproductive to freely give away the information about how to win. It has nothing to do with how positive or negative the community is.

All I know is looking at that pic in first post on here is making me want to do some shots of Wild Turkey right about now. Thanks a lot!

I miss the FT sweat threads.

I think the "issues" with poker are actually the nature of the information age and the legal status of online poker in the US combined with the economic structure of the game.

For many new players who were willing to study the game, online poker used to be easy to beat and move up in limits, even with online sites charging comparible rake to live games. Although the software became a commodity and there was lower overhead and no need to pay dealers there was plenty of cash for everyone in the beginning so that was no big deal as Party, PS and FT promoted the game like crazy.

Now the game is semi-solved due to the easily shared information on how to play, so in a relative sense there are a LOT of good/competent players making it hard for good new players to beat the game. This is especially true at current costs to play live (rake is rising) as well as online (always has been absurdly high but was sustainable with the affiliate model and massive advertisement budgets used to find new players who had a higher chance to stick with the game back in the day).

So, while I agree with the message of positive messaging from the perspective of being better humans, I don't think it will help to sustainably draw more people into the game because it isn't a +EV destination for very many anymore. I don't think we ever return to the golden age that followed the boom, but in my opinion the only way it gets back to anything similar is legalized interstate play in most/all of US and sharing player pools globally so a couple sites can scale enough to cut rake to a level that allows for a slightly higher percentage of winning and break even players. Those people, especially younger players, are the ones that could become the new community and ambassadors for the game. So if the goal of the new 2+2 is to promote a growing poker community my advice is to encourage low rake poker by promoting low rake sites and live rooms at as much of a discount as the new owners can afford while we all push for true legalized and globally connected play in the US - bonus points for doing it with positivity!

the only thing that 'grows' poker is new money brought to the table. The 'monyemaker effect' inspired dreams among the masses. But today, this ...

Seems like a standard post failing to draw the line between NLHE, which is much like you say, and poker as a whole, which isn't

I think we basically agree regarding the state of poker and not all games are in the same state. We may not agree with my underlying assumption that NLHE is the most likely solution if things are to improve, but if the "new way forward" isn't holdem, there's a whole other set of challenges to reestablish positive momentum.

Nice thinly veiled brag. Pretty easy to be positive when you're winning so much money that you can organize 5 figure cash giveaways.

Despite what people the say, the vast majority of poker players are lifetime losing players. I've heard numbers that suggest that the community as a whole is >90% lifetime losers. I believe that number is probably right. (But of course, all the lifetime winners post on 2+2 exclusively)

Hard for most people to be positive when 9/10 people are losing their hard earned money, or someone elses hard earned money, or who are going into signficant debt to have a hobby where variance swings can be brutal.

Last night, I saw her on a Weather Channel documenatary about volcanoes. Yes, I watch the documentaries on the Weather Channel.

I have been lurking my own thread for a while and did not respond but you got my attention.


Please do not take this the wrong way , but your post is exactly what I think is wrong with the poker industry. This is specifically regarding the bolded part.
You took something positive that I did and tried to make it seem like a negative.

In the last 3 months , I gave away 27,000$ of my own money to charities. I do not want praise, I do not want credit , I do not want glory. I did it because I wanted to and I had other motives but they are not what you think.
I want to motivate others to do the same IF they are capable of doing so. If you watched my stream, you would know that I never asked my viewers to contribute. I have seen many do that before and think it is a good way to raise funds however I do not aim to encourage people to give away disposable income that they may need for other things in their life.
I did however ask them to support my channel so that I can keep doing what I am doing. It really motivates me right now and it is reassuring that viewers are enjoying my content so that I keep improving it.

On top of that, when I first started my charity drive , I was actually giving away money to charities DIRECTLY from my cashes and not profit. Therefore I was literally losing money during my sessions and still giving away money to charity. There was a few sessions where i was -10k but had ~10k in cashes and still gave out 10-20% depending.
So that " thinly veiled " brag part of yours does not apply to this case since most of those streams actually cost me double of what people expected.
I knew this would probably happen and I was okay with it. My goal was to make charitable contributions and I thought it would be cool for it to depends on my poker results so that I can try my best and have people watch meanwhile.


Regarding the rest of your post, I do somewhat agree with it. A lot of players are losers but that shouldn't mean the winners need to be punished.
Losers are not being forced to play and if they are then that's wrong. It is a form of entertainment for many and anyone can improve, it's really up to them.
The predatory practices that are applied by some scumbags should not reflect the ethics of other winning players. You can still be a winner in poker and create a positive effect in the world.

you didnt even address the point you were trying to make in your OP.

lol you took it upon yourself to brag about all the cash you give away and plugged your internet stream.

plenty of ppl give money to charity. barry greenstein did this at the height of the poker boom. just because you do it from your internet chat stream wont change the amount of interest the sport receives.

its your money...keep doing whatever makes you feel good about yourself... but the virteous gambler shtick doesnt provide a new way forward for the industry.

I concur, especially in reference to the bolded part above. But then I got to thinking seriously for a change.
And more to Mr. money's point, I think there are more significant and meaningful ways to "move the poker industry forward" imho.

Purportedly, many of us unlike you, Zebest,who may not have the means but truly want to make a difference would do something else. Maybe instead something like develop a channel around making monetary donations to politicians in Washington for federal U.S. taxation and regulation of online poker. If the donations are material enough, these politicians maybe will meet with you. Then, you can perhaps discuss what occurred on your channel. These are just examples. Point is that assuming you are not disingenuous, why not do something like this? I think that is a much better thing to strive for than what you are doing.

So what exactly is the new way forward for poker? Positivity, rainbows, and flowers? Ngl all I got out of this post was OP humblebragging about giving away some minuscule amount of winnings to charity and one small paragraph about trolls or something.

I completely agree with this. Although there could definitely be more done to give the forum visibility, positivity itself won't help much imo. Examples you give (REG) actually demonstrate that even with significant backing, it just does not get traction. I can't think of a single example where it worked to the benefit of the organization pushing for this either.

If anything, trying to build a positive community, based on people exchanging opinion, seems like going towards some type of hugbox/hivemind which will alienate all posters who actually care about strategy and meaningful exchanges.

I don't have the history OP has with the forum, but I doubt I would ever be interested in participating in a forum specifically geared towards positivity. To me, it's pretty much irrelevant whether the forum is positive or negative as long as it's useful.

I agree with this and unfortunately, the OP is kind of what's wrong with the poker world, even though he presents himself as everything that's right and just.

"Rags to Riches" stories is what gets peoples attention. It's pretty universally agreed upon that the production company that did the ESPN coverage for WSOP pre-2010, alongside the widespread availability of internet poker, made the sport grow exponentially.

Since then, it's been a race to the bottom. The poker world's biggest mistake is forgetting who their core customers are and in any business, this is a recipe for failure.

The poker world seems hell-bent on alienating and running off the recreational player....

Look at YouTube, I see dozens of YouTube people who get 6+ figure views on their... drumroll.. slot machine videos.

I see people routinely torch thousands an hour on slots and I'm sitting there thinking.. how do we put that money into the poker ecosystem?

Do these slot streamers give any of that cash to charity? Probably not LOL... it mostly all goes right back into the Buffalo slot machines (Queue the screeching eagle sound)

But even if they did, would it draw more people to slots? Probably not.

I have some anecdotes I'll post later

The next opportunity for a poker boom might be when a woman wins the WSOP Main Event and poker potentially becomes less of a sausage fest. This forum can ride the wave of that boom if it is perceived as a place that is welcoming towards women.

What guy said above about interstate play and including the US player pool in all states. This is it. Bottom line. Federal government ruined it for a majority of players at the time. Never been the same.

Dude cmon. Congrats you gave money to charity, I'm happy for you. 50% chance that I can't stand the charity you gave money to but good for you. I would be even happier if you didn't start your own thread about congratulating yourself for giving money to charity. You know this is a thinly veiled brag post though, so give us all a break.

Hi i am back to thinly brag and get a lot more attention for my self.

This friday, I am giving away 1000$ as added prizes to anyone who joins the 2.2$ home game tournament on ACR.
I am doing this so i can brag again in my next post!! It was my plan all along because i just want to give money away for no reason!
Or maybe, it's a thank you for what twitch, 2+2 and other poker communities have done for me and many other players.

On a serious note.

I agree with some of you, i was wrong about a couple of things and didnt word my OP very well.
To make it simple, my rant was to simply get the poker community to support each other more. What I didn't know is that the Twitch Poker community is actually very great and supportive. I do not think it will" change" the world or create another boom but it's surely better than the direction old 2+2 was going towards ( mass trolling, mods banning people, scammers/thieves getting all the attention).

A good example to look into is Mr.Beast's youtube channel. He is one of the biggest names in the online world now and all he did was do many positive things towards his community/friends.

Regarding some of the replies, I sady admit I agree with you. I think trying to change everything is very difficult/impossible. But i still think it's worth trying to do some good.
I dont even want to start about slots... ive had a few rants on stream about them and how awful they are for people's lives. We'll just keep it at that.

I am convinced that a lot of slot streamers are paid by the sites to do what they do.
Also , there is 0 skill in it so obviously it is not very comparable but i do see your point.
If they were to donate, it wouldnt make sense. They are technically already donating money to the slot owners.

In poker world however, anyone can develop their game to the point where they are skilled enough to make money when they compete against others.
Then you can use that skill edge that you developped to enrich your self only or do it to help out others. Neither of those are right or wrong. If someone just wants to improve their life, that's okay as long as they do not hurt anyone else.
But if someone is doing it to do giveaways, help out others and make a change. I think it should be highlighted in the poker world so that it gets more exposure. This will encourage others to do the same and then create a positive image of poker players.
This will lead to companies who will want to associate with poker and start giving out sponsorships or contribute to the prizepool.

Of course I am biased when I say this since I am doing giveaways and all that. But i have watched many others try this before and they eventually burn out because it leads to no where.
Who knows, it will possibly be the same thing for me but i am hoping for a change.
The nature of online poker has changed now. Some streamers are making more from ads than poker, so the involvement of other companies has already been integrated. Some companies are more likely to join if they see poker players helping out others so that the company can brighten up their image.
Hopefully these companies start viewing poker more as a skilled game instead of gambling. Then push it towards the mainstream crowds for another boom...

Or this is all a big hopeful dream and we go back to negative bickering and share stories about scammers ��


On a side note , thanks for the replies everyone. I made this OP because I was curious about what others think. I respect your opinions and I enjoy seeing all sides since of course I could be very wrong with my opinions about many topics.
This is why forums are good