For what it's worth...

I've spent a LOT of time talking about this with other high stakes regulars, and there are plenty of decent solutions.

iPoker a few months ago used to be, and to some extent still is a site where tables only run with 1 fish and 5 regulars. The person who is better at table selecting, and faster at joining a table as soon as a fish joins does better. This is of course terrible for the site. In a similar way, punishing players who start tables, and play a lot on a site is obviously bad news. The only players that REALLY are a problem, are the ones that are not willing to play with other players, and SOLELY hunt the fish.

Banning all heads up games for winners is POSSIBLY a good idea, but one that wouldn't go down very well... Banning bumhunters playing with fish, would be incredible. But how can you find out who the bumhunters are? Small numbers of hands, and high winrates are generally the key. You don't see that many bumhunters with huge volume and high winrates.

I believe that perhaps banning winning players that have small volume from playing the fish would be a FAR better option than just outright banning winning players. Instead of offering incentives such as high rakeback, offering the opportunity to play in the larger pool with fish would be a much greater incentive.

This would encourage people to play with other regs, and run more games for the site, in exchange for allowing them to play with the entire pool. I am pretty sure it's just the bumhunters who INSTA-sit out when a fish busts would be the only people hurt. I know a lot of regulars that start games would be more than happy to play with other regs if they had the added incentive of reaching the fish.

Probably a pretty convoluted post, but I've written it now.

tl:dr, impose a volume target to allow players back in the pool with fish.

This is the state of online poker everywhere under the sun and higher stakes live games. Which is w/e, never gunna change.

Why not just eliminate screen names?

I agree 100% with this.

I would also add, the ability to change your screen name weekly (like cake used to have). And aggressively shutting down sites like PTR (like how stars scared them away).

eliminating HUDs doesn't really work. It just stops people that follow the rules from using them while everyone willing to break them keeps using them.

You can't stop progress, you can only keep a level playing field. You can improve the situation by limiting the number of tables a person can play, only allowing someone to sit at 2 open tables at a time, and punishing players that bumhunt or sitout with bans that increase with infractions.

Also you could just make all cash games a zoom/fast forward format, which eliminates a lot of your problems.

FWIW a lot of Party's changes in the recent past have been pro fish, or at least anti bumhunter/RB grinder. But many of the changes haven't been thoroughly implemented, or are (like this example) a poor understanding of what players want out of a poker site.

Except breakeven regs become losing regs now and it's difficult to make a living off 30% rakeback

There is absolutely no reason for anyone who plays for a living to play on a site with a tougher player pool and less rakeback than any other site.

lol, why would winning players go to such lengths like buying accounts from fish or whatever so they can play vs other fish? There's a much easier way to play vs fish - leave PartyPoker and play on a site that isn't segragating the player pools. Vote with your feet.

Guys its pretty obvious what is happening here. Party Poker may have started out as a poker site but it has now transitioned into a gambling site. They cater more to sports bettors and casino players than they do to poker players. Sounds like the definition of a "gambling site" to me.

This will undoubtedly result in way more rake for Party, and way less cashouts as a result; it's certainly good for Party in the short term. It may or may not be bad for them in the long term. "The poker community" being what it is (an organised entity in name only), I can't see much being done about it besides complaining on 2p2. Some players in the winning pool will stop playing, thus decreasing the overall toughness of the games as the winners from the losing pool move into the winning pool. The softer games will then attract the winning players to the site again. The cycle will continue, but bumhunting could become even worse and games might run less (in the winners pool). Luckily for Party (although of course it's not really luck, since this is a direct result of the high rake), the vast majority of players are not winners, and they'll be happier that the games are softer and they have more of a chance to run up their money. Party gets more money, recreational players (as a whole) lose money more slowly, winning players (as a whole) win less money. Whether this results in a "boom-bust" cycle of games running in the winners' pool or simply extreme bumhunting, remains to be seen.

The most +EV decision for winning players, I think, would be to bumhunt to the extreme; playing with only weak players on heaters that have recently been bumped into the winners' pool.

Seems like a pretty good Guesstimate of future outcomes.
Good work bud

LOLPARTY worst site ever

All the major sites, including Stars, are under what many see to be a misguided belief. Ultimately it comes down to giving regulars close to 0% value and fish 100% value. Their logic may be fairly superficial but it's certainly easy to understand and undoubtedly give those lovely powerpoint presentations about.

1. The sites makes their money from rake.
2. Rake is taken from deposits.
3. Players who do not deposit do not directly contributed to the rake taken.
4. If the non-depositing players actually withdraw then they not only don't contributed but negatively impact the rake taken.

So their view is that if some fish deposit $100,000 they will eventually rake all that money away assuming none of the fish are much better than one another which they aren't by definition of being fish in the first place - there will be skill differential of course, but in order to come out a winner a player would have to be much better than the mean to beat the rake. Insert a bunch of regs and two things change. They rake faster, but they rake less due to withdrawals. So in the first scenario they may rake close to 100% of that $100,000 in 4 months while with a bunch of regs it may take only 1 month to rake it all away, but they end up only raking $80,000. Given that there is a finite, and shrinking, number of fish the scenario without regs is seen as more desirable.

Ultimately the sites have started to turn they view away from being paid a fee to provide a service and more towards trying to turn online poker into a casino game where only the house wins. You can expect other sites to follow suit with this. It's no coincidence that Stars is trying to get rid of table selection and replace it with a system where they get to decide exactly where and who each player sits with. The only difference is they'll likely be somewhat more subtle about it.

What are you referring to in this part?

I'm aware of Stars cleaning up the sng lobby (specifically, I think it was the 9 man sngs) so that only a few lobbies per limit spawn instead of an unlimited amount.

Stars might also revert back to a limited amount of hu cash tables (that's how it started). So say 20 tables per limit. Would force regs to give action to other regs if they want to defend their table so they might inevitably get to play a fish.

Is that what you were referring to ^^?

lol online poker is dead

Hate to say it but Bovada really has the right idea. Eliminate screen names and have a crack team of anti-colluding watchmen. Everyone's happy... except HUDbots of course.

No. Here is a thread where a Stars rep discusses it: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...06/?highlight=

The thread is a complete mess as Stars decided to bunch this issue in with a bunch of other largely unrelated issues. Presumably they would do this is to mitigate negative feedback while being able to claim they openly discussed the issue with the community before moving forward with it. In any case if you can read between the lines of PR BS and tolerate a signal to noise ratio of close to 0 then it's a very informative, though depressing, thread.

Exactly what I am going to do.
What a shady move by the site... And they thought players would not notice? Who knows what's more going on that we haven't noticed yet...

It sounds like the PS rep is referring to cash tables right? I skimmed it a bit and didn't see any mention of sngs.

Has it actually been proven that they are segregating by winrate, and that there aren't just some tables which are exclusive to bwin players? If so, can somebody point me to the evidence?

In before they rig RNG in favour of recreational/losing players.

@Alex Scott: Bunch of screenshots and live recorded videos in OP link and a video in this thread.

Nice move by Party. Most of the feather-spitting, in this thread, shows that most TwoPlusTwo members can only beat complete fish.

Despite their HUD, NoteCaddy, etc., and hours spent discussing hands in forums every day, beating relatively weak low stakes regs is beyond them.

If Party have prepared themselves to swiftly deal with the expected chip-dumping, etc., this idea is good for the game.*

*What's actually good for the game may not be good for the surly minority of players who are multi-tabling small stakes nits, p***ed off with their lives and inability to make any real money at the game. (I speak as a complete fish and willing donator).

I compared my 100nl lobby to another person who had access to his own and his friend's accounts

we took screenshots at 08.30am server time yesterday

his shots: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=9029

http://i45.tinypic.com/v3d07l.jpg - own account
http://i45.tinypic.com/359mzdh.jpg - his friend's account he claimed was losing money

my shots: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=9030

http://i.imgur.com/eJIdCdl.jpg

his reg account and mine couldn't see 6 tables that the "fish" account could see. there are similar posts in that thread

my conclusion of those shots

so while the tables might not be hidden based on winrates some tables aren't visible to regs. i don't think anyone is sure how it's determined yet though

edit to add: i thought originally as well that there might just be bwin only tables but it's pretty clear now that's not the case

lol this.



petty shocking party. just terrible. wow.

Why do you see the gap between Zynga players and online pros larger than the gap between 1st time depositors and online pros?

Honestly, for ~1 year Party has publicly talked about their "4-step plan" to return their network to growth with recreational-focused policy.

Sure.

Like short-handed LHE? Really, they offer a large number of games of varying skill-gap and many SHFL games encourage loose play. The problem is 90% want to play 6-max NL.

They would have to shut their most popular game for this "different solution" to have an effect.

These are all good, transparent ideas that allows a company to differentiate themselves from PokerStars, and allows regulars to make informed decisions about whether they want to keep playing.

The problem is (from bwin.party's POV) is that they will all immediately effect revenue. They hoped this new policy would not result in an immediate drop in player numbers. I think they're wrong.

Do we know this for sure? The party statement only talked about "new, inexperienced" players. I know there has been some evidence of "losing accounts" but maybe they also were below a threshold for lifetime hands.

Quite possibly the algorithm is, for example, "if 2 or more players at this table have played < 500 hands lifetime, hide table from anyone with > 500 hands lifetime".