party rep posted this in a sub forum

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...postcount=2848

Yep, looks like it's happening in part, for cashgames at least. http://www.partypoker.com/blog/cash-game-changes.html

Wait, so the changes described in OP a year ago were never implemented until now?

thread was the kind of 'boy, that escalated quickly' situation with more speculations than facts ... i guess it took a bit longer at PP, b/c of the GVC takeover

Last year's changes made it so that you can't see players' screen names before you were dealt cards. Table specific waitlists were removed as well.

These new changes would anonymise all opponents' screen names in the hand history files.

I’m sure PartyPoker administrators are not stupid and they know what they are doing. In fact I only saw improvements on the past few years and I have to congratulate them. Only time will tell us if they are making a good decision here. Like in poker, business decisions are always a bet.

My thoughts about their decision below are more for the poker community, as I am sure PP thought about all that and even more.

1- Inconsistency: Only regular cash games, not FF or Tournaments. That's a very inconsistent policy across the platform, either you “technically” allow HUDs or you don’t. I don’t believe the reason is more predatory behaviour on cash games. What I believe is that this might be a test before rolling out to all games.
2- Security: We will no longer be able to identify “suspicious behaviour”, “bots”, “collusion” and “super users” without HH. It happened many times before, and it was the poker community that was able to identify these players based on HH.
3- Field difficult: Game will become softer.
4- Profitability for Regs: Only time will tell if softer games will compensate not using HUDs. It will be harder to multitable, but games will be easier.
5- Profitability for Recreative players: also unknown. Many recreative players also use HUDs, and they will struggle. For the ones that don’t, game can be more profitable (or lower losses) but if Regs play less tables they will crush Recs anyway.
6- Business decision: I agree that any business should try to maximize profits. And sometimes, maximize profits means reduce margins to increase number of clients. Without HUDs, Regs will probably have to play less table reducing the rake paid, and some will just move to another website. PartyPoker is hoping that making the game softer they will attract more Rec players to compensate it. Again, that’s unknown. If they manage to increase the number of Recs, they might attract Regs as well. If they don’t, the field will decrease and more people will leave the site. Let’s see what time will bring for us.
7- Poker Economy: That’s basic macro economy class: You want to boost economy, you reduce tax. You want to redistribute wealth: you tax profits instead of consumption. Same for poker, they could reduce rake and/or they could charge it on the top of your monthly profits instead of charging you everytime you play. But again, that would reduce their margin hoping to increase number of players to compensate it.
8- Arbitrage: Another lesson of economy: supply and demand will balance profitability across all websites. Profitable games will attract players >> Games will become tougher >> Profitability will be reduced.
9- Success only comes after hard work: Regs will always crush Recs.

My official thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/17...monds-1622428/

Well, most Regs wont be able to use a HUD anymore but just like with Pokerstars changes they are not enforcable and while games might get a bit softer overall the playing field just got much more unfair, since you can be sure some talented Russian programmer is already programming a Party Poker Card Catcher which writes HH to HM2/PT4 format.

Party is pretty rife with bots, and to be fair many of them seem to disappear when reported. However there will be no way for the players to detect them now. Also, given they are already cheating by using bots those same players are also likely to invest in software that will be able to convert hand histories to include player names. It's a cheats charter.

Yeah, sounds like you don't even need super optical card recognition software. You just record your screen so you know the player names and do find/replace on the HH file which party sends you and run notecaddy, upload it to a datamining site or whatever. So you won't have hands from the current session but you'll have all the exploitable stuff laid out for you.

Screen name changes at reasonable intervals are the only thing that works against HUDs.

It would be really great if there was no more 3rd party software, unfortunately Party's measures will give the people who break the rules, and that won't be hard, a significant advantage, effectively penalizing players who follow the rules. This does make the assumption that party won't be able to improve their ability to detect bots and TOS breaking software, but that is not a hard assumption to make.

Worse than that. They are not saying HUDs are against rules. They are only making it technically difficult to accomplish. It is still possible to screen scrap to log games and use a HUD. And that is not against their policies.

They can't ban HUDs as they can't see if a player uses one. Similarly they can't monitor if someone creates a program to write HHs even after the proposed changes.

Of course thay can.

Poker operators can sniff all processes on your computer (and they do that!). Bots have a hard time working on stealth solutions.

So yes, PartyPoker is able to officially ban HUDs and try to control if you are using it or not. But they won't do it, at least for now.

Well I've heard/read the opposite but I don't know enough to debate you any more about this

i think it would hurt nobody, that we simple agree, that for every security measure, there will be always some solution. you just need more work, money and time.

if you implement A, you might get rid of 99%, if you take some more time and implement B, you might get rid of additional 0.9% and so on.

last but not least, the 'easiest' solution for any sort of bad boy, is to have a 2 computer system. and even then, providers could get alerted, just b/c a player might be a statistical outliner and if they have a good security team, they might find that this player plays way to perfect (in terms of reacting to stats he normally couldn't have) or whatever

anyway, there will be never 100% safety/enforcement, but the argument "we can't stop all, so we shouldn't change anything", seems a bit weak in most cases ... just my 2cts

You didn't get my point. I'm not saying "we can't stop all, so we shouldn't change anything".

I am saying the didn't ban HUDs, they will only anonymize the HH. They could have easily done that on their ToS, but they didn't.

I'm totally against banning HUDs, but if PP decided that they don't want HUDs they should change their policy making them not allowed. So if some IT guy build a screenscrap HUD, PP can't ban him. This is just not consistent.

sry, was a bit misleading on my part, i didn't see your posting as for a 'i'm against bans, b/c they don't work' - i took your post as the 'operators can' and lessu's post for the 'it's not 100% safe' side. neither of you said, that's the reason, why we shouldn't do anything ... but some posts itt take this as a reason

now it is becoming too complicated.
I fold!

EMH is kinda silly in financial markets and certainly doesn't apply in poker.

They cant seem to stop bots let them run free!!

Think it's also worth mentioning itt that Party's standard rb % is 23.5. They've run the Gladiator promo twice in the last 12 months that sees the potential to earn up to 50%.

They've rolled out the Gladiator promo again with a max rb % of 28ish, and the majority of prizes being < 23.5%...

Seems it is just a test or the first step if i read the header correctly. The Hud can work but probably needs support to track session stats, that is allowed. Maybe hem and co isnt up to it but h.i. might.

This became effective today but I see people still using scripts. I guess they didn't build any workaround to prevent it; only relying on other players busting each other I guess?

As far as the anonymizing HHs goes... I don't mind it but again, the solution is dire and I fear that within a week there's some black market tools within the eastern European vodkaruskibear poker community that transform new HH's back to the old syntax. And THAT would give other guys seriously unfair advantage.

I hope vpip win rate aggression factor and seat left is a preference option.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk