The negative response to the changes is based on the players' experience of other sites shady operations. Ultimatebet was only exposed by the players highlighting impossibly high success rates, which the site itself would never have revealed as they were profiting from the impossibly high success rates.

Every change Partypoker is making is designed to benefit itself rather than the players. Phil Galfond's site has fallen victim to his totally ignoring players' wishes, and so giving them a product they don't want, and so they avoid it and the site fails, and he is too stubborn to realise the errors he is making. Partypoker is making the same mistake.

I really dont understand where this comes from though, Party Poker is a business and its primary concerns are to itself surely, supermarkets dont have any obligation to act in the customers best interests, it's just generically in a businesses strategy that it's important to keep customers happy to grow and make profits (this isn't always the case)

So Party Poker are doing what they believe will most improve the success of the business - if they make mistakes along the way or fail to deliver what their customers want then of course they will not succeed, given the state of online poker surely it's good right now that there is a company trying something different, if it doesn't work then hey ho no skin of the noses of the customers there is other options, if it does work and they manage to create a better, more liquid online poker ecology (which is the aim) then great - Party Poker will make a lot of money and the customers should benefit also from having a better online poker site than they had before.

You can think what they are doing is a mistake, everyone perfectly entitled to an opinion and you may well be right (I have no real opinion either way) but what I don't understand is the aggressive opposition to 1 company out of fairly busy market trying some new stuff, as a community surely online poker
customers should welcome this, success or not?

Removing hand history option is seen as super shady and only time now before a big scandal breaks from it.

So the closest supermarket near you stops giving out receipts one day, so you can't verify your purchases. Also they require you to wear a name tag to enter half of the store so other customers can facebook stalk you. You'd be happy to try out this fun new stuff?

Sure you could go further to the huge mall, but they have no loyalty program for frequent shoppers and they have hired gypsies as their customer staff who cant comprehend you so they ignore you. Or one of the smaller stores, who don't have everything you need. But it'd make more sense to try and hammer sense into the supermarket you actually liked going to in the first place right?

I also don't trust Party anymore. I don't like their rake back system at all... And what about their fake gambling controls?! You can close it and 3 sec later you can open it again.
Really sneaky things happen at Party!

Well, in these examples there is no obvious upside to the customer experience, but supposing the supermarket had implemented these changes with the promise that it would improve the experience for the customers, then sure I would give it a go and see if it worked. Realistically I would afford them a reasonable amount of time to prove that the changes do in fact improve my experience, if it didn't, then I'd no longer be a customer. In reality there's a decent chance i'd get a bit annoyed if it didnt change quickly, but that wouldn't be "reasonable"

Party have claimed these changes will improve the product overall, so my feelings would be, go on then Party Poker, show us, if it's the right move, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

Also the other distinction between Party Poker and your supermarket example is that online poker is an industry long in decline from every angle, supermarkets are essentially thriving and not really in the need of a shake-up, so any big changes you'd be looking for a very drastic and very quick improvement. Online poker needs the changes a lot more, and therefore should get a bit more patience, theoretically.

Anyway, everyone entitled to their own opinions, and ultimately individuals will decide if they support this business, begrudgingly support the business or leave and go elsewhere. I find it pretty hard to believe that the plan is to remove HHs so they can just allow poor quality bets to rake a ton, so it's way more plausible they (rightly or wrongly) genuinely believe it;s the right thing to do, so I guess time will tell if they're right or wrong.

I think the answer to the question is: YES now so Mods can we please remove the question mark and replace with full stop.

Every other sites should follow.

Explain to me how removing hand histories are protecting the customers? We're 600+ posts into this thread and not one person has been able to give a logical reason to remove hand histories or how that is protecting the players.

-Derek

Honestly its kinda ridiculous,,,, theres obviously a way that they can give hand histories without revealing screen names.... Just to analyze our games..... This isnt 1812!!!!!

Actually I think there is no way.

Similarly like it's impossible to share really anonymized patient data or search engine queries.

while i agree, that the "they don't know what they're doing" argument is thrown around far too much, there are certainly more than valid arguments for being sceptical.

Rob plays on the site and has admitted, that he asked security/support, about personal details of players he played against. this alone is such a massive red flag and violates regulatory laws.
now he is orchestrating nosebleed games, where some sort of committee hand-picks the players allowed to participate.
on top of that we should discuss his background of running the whole pp live show (eg. where he paid players to enter events, just to make the GTD).

so yeah, this is shady, when you're being optimistic and a valid reason, why ppl are sceptical to "just trust pp"

personally i'm not against the HUD ban in general, but even if we forget yong's involvement, there are two major points:

1) that there is a proven record (pp even admitted this), of bots found by players. i know, if a user finds a bot, it might have been found by the room anyway, but it's just "might". pp said, it improved the security around the time, when they announced the changes. personally i would have a better 'feeling' if they improved the security team, got a good track record and then changed the hud policy.

2) it seems the illegal hud biz is going on well, so it seems yong's promise, this won't be possible, was too optimistic.

this is btw another good point, why it's hard to trust pp blindly.

i agree 100% that a company has all the rights to be as greedy/stupid/whatever as they believe, what's best for the company. but here we are back at why i'm sceptical about rob, b/c i believe he is thinking what's best for him, not the company.

when gvc took over bwin, i thought they wouldn't care about the poker vertical, so i was kinda surprised they put money in it. last year they said, poker isn't important anymore [fyi: GVC is massive w/ casino, sportsbetting & bingo] so now rob and his team are making drastic changes.

he said in an interview, that they (rob, tom, john) basically run the show and i think pp live is involved. so either this is some sort of hail mary, or rob tires to maximize his profit (not that of the company). this is something i believe and maybe i'm too sceptical and it's just coincidence that rob is getting so vocal, after gvc announced the poker vertical isn't pushed as hard as before. or maybe rob was running the show all the time and he is just giving more interviews b/c he thinks he is doing great pr work .. IDK!

BUT nevertheless, it is something that just doesn't fit well with the "you just to have trust pp [rob] blindly".

i like to see him in live streams and i don't know him, so maybe i'm wrong and he is the best man for the job and super trustful. but what i've read/heard from him and about him, makes it really hard to believe this.

Ben Sulsky in one of his RIO vids said, that he and other highstakes players dont play online so much (especially NLH) these days, because they dont want to play against anonymous opponents who could potentially use some assistance software and/or have collected lots of HHs on him, while he has none on the opponent. So there is some demand for non-anonymous games at least in the highs stakes community.

Is this considered shady? This happens all the time at various casinos and while a lot of players hate it because they dont get the overlays, its not against any laws or house rules as far as I know. Of course, I am assuming the staked players dont get any unfair advantage in the tourney. GTD means the prizepool will be of some predetermined size, nothing more. If they made some last minute discount on the buyin, would that be ok? Or is it against the laws/rules at some countries to stake players into tourney you organize?

clickbait title.

Use a notepad , lol millennials

There is the concern that the pool of players put in by the owners can collude, and then split their winnings.

They operate fake guarantee tournaments, where their staked players take back large portions of the prizepool.

I was having an online read about Rob Yong, and the Dusk to Dawn casino he runs, to see more about his background, and it is interesting to read the impartial comments by tripadvisor visitors to the casino, as feedback deteriorates under his management, from a glowing start to now being disliked, with complaints of a bad atmosphere from cronies of the owner behaving unsociably, so he has a track record of ignoring the general customers, and favouring his friends, and adversely affecting the business, just as also is happening on the partypoker site and tournaments.

I havent played on party since they no longer allow huds anymore. It was mentioned by someone very reputable on this forum that many players do use huds when playing which are illegal.


Can others here confirm this to be true? For example if im playing lot of tables, i dont like it if some other players has a hud that works where they could see everyones stats. Thus they could play 10 tables or more and just look at the hud. But regular players would have to take notes or observe all the players. Also someone could be lazy and not pay attention and the hud pretty much gives a general description of a player's play style.


Is anyone here not playing on party because of this? I find partypoker okay before but with the no hud policy and the fact that its been said many ppl use illegal huds, that seems to give a huge advantage. I mean unless you are playing a few tables, its hard to see and note take every player. So curious how do ppl even play on party because of this.

If the person is “very reputable” isn’t that enough ?

But otherwise if you want to use a hud don’t play on a site that bans them, regardless of hud, I’m pretty certain there are tons bots on party (no evidence)

I personally don’t play there bc I hate the software

Hypocrisy takes away the trackers. The guy sitting there opens a thousand programs on 3 computers. Online poker has no credibility at all. Fair play my balls.

Is this the idiot who is making all the decisions? If so not wonder party poker is going down the sh itter


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E_ikiQnpYo

Imagine the "brainstorming" with him and LooseLeon

Did we get a little peek inside the personal reasons why he want HH removed... Besides that he can screw people over in all possible ways, however that we already know. I know in some countries you are not legally responsible for your actions if you IQ is below ~50. May this be one of those cases? So after robbing people right and left on PP he can just wave the white flag?

happy he won the pot. Now PP rakeback won't be lowered to 10%

The number of "dodgy" accounts using secret HUDs might be significant/many, but it's not the majority, if that's what you're thinking.
Most players are honest and play by the rules, but it's just a matter of fact that there will always be cheats on every site, and a lot of regs are deeply suspicious of PartyPoker's methods of dealing with them. Imo, the site needs to do a lot more to build the trust of its customers.

All your points are extremely valid and I couldn't disagree with anything you've said.

What I will say though is that whereas we both agree that Party and Rob will likely be acting out of self interest, is there not significant chance that the best interests of Party & Rob+Co is also the best interests of the the customers in the long run? They have set out their stall to be different to pokerstars and they're defo doing it, if they can build a great product and great platform for online poker - then it's a win - win right?

I understand you probably think, well this guy is a bit Naive and probably biased in some way and perhaps I am, but from where I sit Party have said "we're gonna be different and we're gonna try 1) improve ecology, 2) improve the playing conditions for recreational players and 3) reward loyal customers. Seems to me that they are somewhat following through on these claims (and again, they might not work!) but the general points people make against them is just "well we just don't trust party poker" and that's fair enough to not trust if you dont trust them but I don't really see anything they've done specifically to not deserve a go? At the end of the day Party say that they believe REC players would prefer an enviroment with no HUDs and banning HUDs will improve recreational player experience and therefore improve the game ecology - if in 1 years time these things haven't happened then we can all confidently say, Party, you were wrong. Until then, it's just two sides of a speculation right?

1 thing though, if somehow illegal HUDs are being easily used on a site which has banned HUDs, then that would go completely against the apparent intentions of this plan, if they can't be stopping 99.99%+ of illegal bots then its 100% the wrong thing to be doing. I would assume they are condfident they'd be able to stop that or wouldn't have done it.

Making the site intransparent makes Bots undetecetable for User and they therefore dont exist.