This is exactly my point. HUDS aren't the problem. I use a HUD on Bovada. Most regs on Bovada use a HUD. Yet it's still a great place to play. Why? Because they take steps to keep the ecosystem balanced. 4 table cap helps the most out of anything imo, but the anonymity and a few other things help as well

Futile attempt by pokerstars to try and make poker look fun again and recreate that excitement and try and get another boom going. Fell way way short and screwed over and lied to long time players in the process. Now sites and cancelling guarantees on a regular bases that arent met by crashing servers, support remains horrible, refunds for cheating more soarce and sparce but the reprted number of advanced software users and bots playing on sites is whats most troubling. Stars waived the white flag on combating against this for the regulars whis os why all the “fun” games exist. But they were way to slow in doing so and now sites like Party Poker are infultrated with bots and cheats and all fun players like myself can see right through the loes. Thats the problem. Nobody wants to play games woth and against cheaters and no the site will never have our back. I tried to have fun and entertainment two weeks ago and party poker pulled the plug on my 215$ mtt because they had an overlay and then refunded me a fraction of it. Thats theft and a controbuting factor of why poker will never be what it was. Too much shady not enough Tom Brady

Ya but anonymity at a random pokersite will allow bots and superusers to run rampant. If you can't break down a players stats and such you are opening up the possibility of cheating. Cheaters from many sites have been caught by analyzing playing patterns. Without that you have no security cuz the sites will not do it themselves and has been shown thru history.

While I do believe that anonymous games and the lack of long-term HUD data are small contributing factors to it's softness I don't believe either of those to be the biggest reasons.

1. Location Restrictions There's like 5 countries that can play there and it has the most traffic from the USA. I'm not sure there is any European countries allowed.
2. Huge Sportsbook brings in many recreational players. It's how I got started there.
3. Table Limits and No Rakeback keeps multitabling nits, pros and bots from overwhelming the games.
4. Brand Recognition They've been around for a long time outlasting Pokerstars and Full Tilt in the US market.
5. Payout Reliability They rarely have reported payout issues when many other offshore US sites have had plenty.
6. Randomized Seating in all game formats makes it much more difficult to collude.
7. Lack of Reported Cheating because you can't identify most cheaters without long-term data. News of cheating may deter some people and there never is any news when you can't prove it. This gives people a false sense of security. If there is cheating taking place nobody knows besides the cheaters and possibly the site. Nobody besides those who work there know what lengths their security team goes to to deter bots, collusion, multiaccounters, etc.

But here is the big difference on bovada the HUD allows you to know about a player from that session only. Which is most typical of low limit poker in cash and tournaments where the player pool any given day is quite different. But because of anonymous on Bovada you don't have a complete history of a player which isnt true in any normal setting. In my ideal there would be no HUDs and have screen names so players can take notes on each other. However given current climate I will take anonymous with only session HUDs over the alternative.

I would agree especially with 1 3 and 5. To make it less profitable for regs in terms of rakeback is good (and I am a reg for 15 years now). Also keeping out eastern europe and Russia probably has limited the amount of bots and low limit grinders. As for 5 obviously important especially in the current environment. Bitcoin has helped tremendously is this and in many ways may save the American online game.

Like I said and your #7 it isn't good for catching cheaters. I wouldnt play normal ring there because of this. But the nature of zone makes colluding almost impossible. Also tournaments are somewhat similar.

They're still as soft as you're going to find. If you can put up with the software(I hate it) you definitely shouldn't avoid them.

Who knows if this was patched? Probably, but I'm not sure they came out and said it.

It's interesting most of the talk itt is about game integrity. Do you think the entertainment value is more likely to come from new games, innovative game formats, or anything other than maintaining the status quo with security patches and incremental updates?

Not surprising, as most of the posters in this thread are not recreational players. The rec player posts were more about how they have soured on the experience. Two Plus Two NVG is never going to be a fount of innovation in any event.

Entertainment value lies in meeting the demand for entertainment, not from anything else. That skilled players can make money is supportive of a good poker environment, but it is not the sole measure.

I suspect that a skilled live player can make money in a single table environment and in MTTs under the rules for the game of poker. It is also beneficial for those games for winning players as a group to make the experience as entertaining as possible for losing players.

Those characteristics of poker and a balance between shearing a sheep and killing a sheep need not disappear because the game is put online. Poker is entertaining to play, playing it in an abattoir is not fun for sheep and makes it tough to get them to come back for more.

So, while new games certainly help, the key may be to re-balance the environment toward better entertainment value for losing players. Just because technology allows for 24 tabling, HUDs, seating scripts, and other tools making killing more efficient does not make them conducive to maximizing the entertainment value afforded players.

Similarly, rewarding player behavior aimed at fostering a good environment makes sense. The intent of rakeback is to reward player behavior, so far measured solely by the amount of hands/rake generated. An entertainment rewards system may serve a similar function with respect to player social interaction during the game..... not tough to design.

* on the subject of rake, DNegs tried to argue that higher rake is better and was rightfully excoriated for what he presented. On the subject of rakeback, the current system skews toward high volume play providing a ready game for all players, rather than rewarding ecosystem-friendly behavior

Rake should NOT be raised to drive out winning players, clearly. That is NOT good and seems a smokescreen for simply sucking in more revenue per deposit.

Rather, an optional games experience can be offered, a skilled player can still win from playing, the rake is not jacked up and the recs get a better experience perhaps.

The overall revenue per account and from current volume players will drop, if all play is limited to single tables. Site liquidity likely will be much lower than if volume per account is replaced by quality of participation as a measure for rakeback. It may seem suicide to base an entire business on entertainment as the driver for poker, but at a minimum rec-friendly tables can be launched as a test in a larger environment.

poker is just too slow and boring. it got popular when the internet didn't offer fast paced entertainment like it does today.

and stars fcked it up further by making masstabling difficult

I disagree that poker got popular because in the early 2000s "the internet didn't offer fast paced entertainment like it does today".

1. It got popular because, for most players, it is a gambling game, it was on television with hole card cameras*, and was the first publicized gambling game available in their homes on the internet.

That internet speeds are faster today in my view does not support your implication that "then" it was fast enough, now it is "too slow" by comparison to more content-rich, faster entertainment options.

2. I totally disagree that "making mass tabling difficult" makes a poker game less entertaining for recreational players. I suspect the opposite effect may hold, although an outright ban would cause significant drops in gross revenue to both sites and former -tabling players. Is there is room in the entertainment market for an offering of single table tables; play here, but not concurrently at any other table.

I don't operate a poker site, but I did at the time "mass-tabling" became a factor accelerating the liquidity demands of the reg market. Since then technology has changed and the cost structure for hosting rec players has changed also. I haven't modeled the relative contribution to profits from activity by rec players v grinders in years, but suspect the demand for "entertaining" poker may be relatively under-served in the real money gambling industry.

Just questions, not claims of "fact".

* There is a good reason Henry Orenstein is in the poker hall of fame, aside from his playing. (He also invented Transformers I believe. )

I don’t think you understand what ishipkq’s point was.

The point was there are many more awesome things to do online now compared to 2002 or whenever, so online poker is comparably slow and boring.

Are you trying to say people can digitally murder each other for money now as esport, so poker has become boring?

I agree 100%. When I played on Party and PS I used HUD's. They are helpful, but without data mining the amount of data you have is almost not meaningful unless you play thousands of hands per day. I used the underlying software mostly to track myself and for tax reporting. Now there are so many questions around the honesty of sites, the use of bots, etc that I would never play online for meaningful amounts. That ship has sailed.

One thing that could be done would be to allow players to change their screen names often. It wouldn't hurt anybody except the multi-tabling pros.

There would need to be like a 6 month limit or something. Otherwise it would be easy for bots, collusion and superusers to go unnoticed.

And those of us who wish to identify cheaters. Allowing players to frequently change nicknames leads to insignificant data sample sizes to prove cheating.

I'm pretty sure this is a feature Unibet offers. It probably does contribute to keeping games softer, but I will always advocate for giving players the ability to police the games over anonymity. Given the history of online poker no site can be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to maintaining game integrity on their own.

If you want to ban HUDS and other software and effectively enforce that on every player, that's not a big deal. Just allow players to download their hand histories with opponents identified so that they can analyze game play off of the table. Analyzing play is the best way to ensure game integrity.

Beat you to it!!



Your avatar is soooo creepy dog, I loved that movie! I was thinking about it a weak after I see it in theaters, that's how good it was.

LOL. Just seen your post. I know it wasn't there before I started typing. Also, I'm a slow typer on my phone.

The new IT was so good. I loved the first scene in the original and somehow they made it even creepier. I rarely enjoy remakes of movies I like, but I loved this one. Movie was so good I made Pennywise my new avatar after I got back from the theater.


While I certainly believe that table limits contribute to better games overall I would be surprised if "today's recreational player" wouldn't prefer at least 2, if not 3-4, tables while playing online. Low attention spans. This is why fast fold zoom/zone is so popular.

Maybe allow name changes and once a quarter or so list the user (poker ID not name) with the highest win rate, and list the aliases he/she played under over that period so that people can analyze after the fact for cheating?

The form of cheating I'm most familiar with is micro to mid-stakes botting. Most of them don't have the highest winrates. They are more likely to have decent to good winrates, but most of the highest volume of hands played per month. Even if we only looked at the highest volume players it would be ineffective in rooting out every cheater. Statistical analysis of every player is the only way to ensure there is no cheating.

This is the solution I think. Allows for hand history Abe track people for collusion and cheating. But also gives best opportunity for a rec friendly environment.

It is the best solution I can think of to cover all bases, but it would also require sites to take effective preventative measures against anyone from using software. Many of these sites that say HUDs aren't allowed still have people using them and the evidence is not hard to find.

I understand that poker today faces stiff competition in the realm of entertainment,especially online. What I questioned was his claim that its relative speed, compared to other entertainment back then, what was made it popular.

I welcome your and ishipkq's framing of the issue as one of poker competing against other forms of online entertainment. At least that advances the discussion and gets us past a typical focus on appeal to grinders in NVG.

The popularity of poker as entertainment lies in the game itself, played as gambling. Thinking that poker today cannot compete online for entertainment dollars because other online entertainment is "faster" misses the underlying characteristics of its appeal. Relative speed is an attribute, but I have to question whether it is so paramount to non-grinding rec players as it is to some posters.