Party is full of bots. Do not play there man. They are making it easier for the bots not to be detected by taking away HHs. Stay away! Give other sites without Huds a try.

It's not good for you or anyone to not have access to hand histories.

You can multi-table on pppoker. Players use HUDs there and most pros do, and it's booming because of a rising Chinese middle class that loves to gamble and has plenty of money to throw away. It's also very easy to deposit and withdraw as you stated. Nearly all of these chinese poker apps are thriving for the same reason.

Just need the acepokersolutions software in conjunction with PT4.

Except they've just spent the last two years changing both their product and their marketing to cater heavily to high-volume, regular, winning players.

lol, never said the apparent vision was consistent with prior policy or dated back 2 years.

I just suspect where it is headed NOW, "control data, remove outside access except thru our black box, get players used to being ranked, even if involuntarily, create "ranked pools" to protect lesser ranked players ..... extend the churn on lesser ranked players deposits, perhaps force better ranked players to play only in similar structured games, extending the churn on won money as lesser ranked players graduate to better ranking.

You think removing HH does not signal a sea change from what you cite for the last 2 years' policy ?

If they wanted to change their policy over the last 2 years, they could just, you know, change their policies from the last 2 years.

Right now, they've got their foot on the accelerator (giving huge rewards to high-volume players) and now, they seem to try to be putting on the brake (removing HHs). It would make more sense to just remove their foot off the accelerator than to have their foot on both the accelerator and brake at the same time.

Quite a lot of regs really came to play there, so now they need more fishes in the pool

I am not looking at all the things Party COULD have or SHOULD have done, just what they apparently are doing.

Having their feet on both the accelerator (huge rewards program) and on the brake (make it an undesriable environment for those same players) allows then to both eat their cake and shove it in players' faces at the same time, without the nastiness of say, the SNE issues with Stars changing terms.

Hey, this is a classic way to evade an unfortunate, sustainable deal going forward, make it so the other side doesn't want to try and earn deal rewards anymore. High volume players were always free to take their business elsewhere at any point; this seems to be Party's way to ensure that happens soon without Party breaching any deal. Perhaps 70% of rewardsshared revenue may be seen as < 100% of no-HH revenue, especially if there is no rewards share to pay to players. The site makes the same bank, the players who earned that 30% rewards can either move on or suffer along w/o HH.

Talking sbout what they could've, should've done is not worth a lot because they didn't do whatever.

I'm not sure if you intended this but partypoker DID THIS not too many years ago. As soon as it was discovered, they stopped doing it. They wouldn't dare try to do it again, would they?

-Derek

Come on, Derek. Of course they would "dare" and I have a pretty strong hunch they are aiming to do just that as part of their planning. There is no regulatory barrier to them doing it btw. I have no access and zero actual information on what Party has said or discussed in this regard, I just have a hunch where they are headed .... I don't think I am far off base on where this is headed.... Cutting out HH was quite a step away from public accountability, can you think of any point to it ? wtf else can they mean by "protecting players" if not restrictions down the road, once they have a publicly accepted "ranking" system ?

They won't hide it though, The aspirational challenge as a player at Party will become to level up the rankings bestowed by Party's opaque system.. THAT, rather than counting your money, is how they will want their chosen player pool to keep score and "win".. Climbing the rankings becomes the added entertainment value of playing at Party. At Party, you can be your own "hero".

Party will keep a greater % of deposits as their revenue, avoid some "overly" generous player rewards and instead bestow higher "winner" rankings on players who accomplish something, i.e win and compete in protected pools. With the greater rake % held, they also will be able to give awards to players who advance in ranks.

.I am sorry to say this, but it can work, so long as there are "winners" and players are both entertained by playing and get some aspirational goal met..... much like karate schools give some belt to EVERY student.

Would the slogan of this new product be - PartyPoker: Learn, chat and play with the fish?

Its effective. No hud with Hem2

You don't get it. Lots of player planned to do the Diamond Club or Diamond Elite(rake in 12 month: 100k and 200k usd). I bet 80+% of those people used hud, and if you remove hud most of them cant function on the same number of tables. So some money got edge sorted there I think and maybe they dont need that much pros anymore to keep the games running.

Party has been getting worse and worse for a long time now. I guess they have to try something new to attract fish because tournaments were getting worse and worse. Tables filled with regs.

Eventually in present-day realities there will be cheaters with screen grabbers and stats on the one hand, on the other hand fools with no opportunity even spot them. Who cares? Party is the only room where you are cheated everyday with optical nickname recognizer.

Unfortunately I don't think your prediction/speculation is as out there as it might appear to some.

My speculation of why I don't think (hope) it would work follows bellow (for those that care to bother reading it) but first let's stick to the main theme of this thread.

Similar model has been publicly brought up by, ironically, MPN Alex, a representative of a site that also stoped providing downloadable HH's.

It's very "interesting" that the solution to the lack of natural liquidity that this model would face would be the house bots.

https://www.parttimepoker.com/alex-s...ine-poker-bots


(There are a few reasons why I personally don't think this model would appeal to the majority of the current player pool and it would struggle to attract a new one.

I think it would be hard to replace "counting the money" way of keeping the score. Money is the object of this game and is one of the fundamental features of poker that attracted the players up until this point.

Also, there already is a very good way of segregating players based on skill - stakes. Climbing the stakes already provides what you claim to be an "added entertainment" and a challenge that is again tied directly to the main object of the game, the ultimate reward - the money.

The model you discuss would also greatly suppress another aspect of the game that is a major attraction to a lot of players - gambling. Stakes based voluntary segregation allows a player to choose how they want to approach the game. If they wish to challenge themselves or gamble it up they can easily jump into to the games above their skill level. Of course the sites hate that.. But being locked into your designated "safe" player pool would loose interest of another major segment of the current poker population.

When you replace money with achievements, challenges etc the game for those that are in it for the money and gambling (majority of the current pool) becomes too gimmicky. It becomes videogamish, and now you need to attract players from a different market segment with different mentality. I doubt that poker as a game without "counting money" being it's main objet has enough appeal to do so and compete with the likes of Fortnite etc.

So another MAJOR reason why I don't think it would work would be a lack of natural liquidity.

How do you envision this segregation based on skill be implemented? Would each level of skill have a spectrum of all stakes available to them? If so doubt that there's enough liquidity to sustain that. And if higher stakes become available as your skill increases, that poses major problems as well. First, a lot of players wouldn't bother playing stakes that match their skill level. Second, and most importantly, the higher stakes where presumably only the most skilful compete would be a ghost town. No skilful player would waste their time in what would certainly be low at best but most likely negative EV environment. And without any activity at the higher stakes where is the appeal of climbing those skill levels?

Cue the house bots?)

It's a wet dream for superuser accounts. Without HHs and trackers Potripper would have never been exposed, would he?
"Protecting players" from evil Huds after 20 years allowing them they now care about recs? Yea right... business must be ****.

As someone who lost count of the number of people "planning" to do SNE looking for backing in November/December for that adventure the next year (95%+ of them never came close), I would not put so much on how many are in the planning stage.

In 2019, SNE and Diamond Elite type programs are beyond outdated. Will not get into the debate about how the rooms handled their removal at times (safe to say - it was not impressive), but any experienced player should approach programs like this with huge skepticism in terms of how long they will last, and that huge chance of change/removal should be part of the "planning" stage.

Party Poker has always been inconsistent in their promotional area as well for literally over 10 years. This is just the latest iteration of that.

Potripper was quickly exposed because someone got access to the mucked HH's and saw him playing every hand perfectly. No site other than Bovada/Ignition provides these. He was already a huge suspect just from winning 20k pots hero calling rivers with jack high. He would have been caught eventually. For all future cheats who arent so greedy, HH's or not they've been around for a long time so I dont see the community really doing some huge service outing them. Do they help? Sure, but it's like whack-a-mole.

The real question is "is it better than nothing?". I dunno, I've never been able to beat online poker and to this day I choose live over online, not due to fear of bots but due to fear of HUDs. OP states a whole 15 user accounts have been caught cheating recently. Wowie FIFTEEN? I'm pretty sure the last 150 accounts I would have played against would all be using huds, so to me that is the greater risk.

That's not strictly true.

Potripper was identified as cheating before the all-hole-cards hand history file was released publicly. He was identified, as the rest of your post went onto say, by analysis of the hand histories that other players had.
How many cheaters have been identified in live casino poker games in the entire history of the planet? A literally trivial number, because in live games, the honest players have no hand histories and can't analyse or review what happens.

Cheaters are far more likely to get away undetected in live poker games, because there are no hand histories there.

Here is another uncoordinated changes that they are promoting today - it borders on the schizophrenic:



Around 15 years ago, PartyPoker had a maximum buy-in of 50bb in Big Bet games, and they had this maximum buy-in because it protected weaker players from stronger players. Yet now, at the same time these clowns claim to be "protecting weaker players" by making them more vulnerable to cheating, they're now enforcing a higher minimum buy-in!

It's incoherent, they are obviously just floundering around.

I suspect that there are two rival groups trying to change PartyPoker's product offering.

This is what I imagine:

1) On one hand, you've got some guy who listens to his mates in a live poker game moan in his ear about how they can't win online, and they blame all these complicated software tools.

2) On the other hand, you've got a high-volume poker playing professional, who has a deep strategic understanding of the underlying theory of poker.


So, you've got the guy from (1) introducing the flashy stuff like banning hand histories. Then, you've got the guy from (2) slipping in things like higher minimum buy-ins. Because (1) doesn't have a strong grasp of the fundamental theories of poker, he doesn't realise that (2) is slipping in stuff to benefit high-volume, regular, players.

BUAHAHHAHAHA
Wtf is this ? @Partypoker are you kidding ?

higher minimum buyins is to make it harder to solve the game, it should prob be jacked up at 200bb tbh

I don't think #2 is necessarily always slipping in suggestions/stuff just to purely benefit themselves. #2 has a strong understanding of how online poker works and the grimy stuff that many players are capable of doing to bend the rules/exploit the format or structure and while many times their suggestions may benefit their own bottom line indirectly they also often times benefit the enjoyment for all "honest" players playing in that format/structure. There have been many examples throughout the course of online poker's history where these grimy players have exploited something within the rules or structure of online poker. I don't think you can always attribute certain changes to selfish wants of the #2 player type. Many times they also benefit the fun recreational player that is less aware of these grimy player types.