I think this was one of the most sensible, measured, and well thought our discussions I have listened to recently about online poker, mainly from Pads just speaking for nearly the whole podcast. He seems like a very insightful guy who really understands the online landscape. It is a shame more people weren't around to put forward ideas like this and promote them when poker was in its glory days.

Isn't the problem with the union that it will be composed of all pros, so if the union boycotts a site and goes somewhere else, the game quality will go up and people will be incentivised to play there.

Exactly.
Players are customers, not employees. A 'union' would have absolutely no teeth and if it did, it would only end up biting itself in the ass.
Look at the PPA. Waste of time for everyone apart from those taking a salary.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the same guy who ran a stable that took money out of the poker ecosystem and made the games much worse?

I listened to a bit of it and he said at one point his players had been paying millions in rake. Well it might be cheaper to just start your own poker site at that point. But then you need fish and customer acquisition is expensive.

I feel like if you have that much capital available, there are way better and easier ways to invest it rather than by staking players in poker tournaments.

As soon as I saw the thread title, this was my exact thought, although more succinctly put.

Mine too. Sites want winning players to go away. Boycotting will do nothing but make the games better and the regs who dgaf about the union will swoop in and play there. Another route needs to be found.

Also, will Pads be shutting his stable down for the good of the game? Put your money where your mouth is champ.

Colluders Local 413. You realize unions take monthly dues right (fees) if there's one thing we learned from full tilt it's that poker players can be trusted with other peoples' money. This idea is so dumb on so many levels. If you want to join a union then get a job

+1 pads is just whining because he’s making less money now. He never cared about others.

I say if he hates multi entry then it’s time to make everything multi entry.
If he hates late late reg , then let’s do it.

Whatever it takes to crash the stables.

I stopped reading the thread after this.

Neigh hen.

Can someone please tell me who Pads is, on this site (I forgot his nickname).

If you read this, Pads, please PM me asap.

I just became a member of the german political party in charge, 2 days ago (CDU).
And I already have good connections in local politics, mostly due to my succesfull stepdad, who helps me with my current mails, tactic, and strategy a lot.

It seems like we have a chance to start a site like Svenska-Spel in Sweden, in July 2021 (when we will get new laws for online-gambling in Germany).

My goal will be to serve as many countries as possible, once we reached the break-even point with this state-owned site in Germany (all gambling, but let's focus on poker here)

I already got some positive feedback of a few members of my political party, but I likely need a few big players in this poker-game, like Pads and Joey and others, to get this done properly/asap (for an actually detailed business-plan, with initial software costs, the staff for proramming, customer-service, security, and ofc the marketing / I just have vague marketing plan, political connections, and my poker knowledge, so far).

Half rake for cash and MTT’s (no rake-back) is what I proposed to my associates, to quickly take a huge share of the market in Germany (first of all, ofc just cash), after July 2021.
As well as half vig for sports (casino and slots are not of any interest for us on here, I think).

Like that, we could unite the European market much easier than a shady company like PS is trying for ages. And afterwards, we could likely afford to get licenses in maybe even the UK and Asia, but especially in all the countries that would benefit the most of half the rake at small stakes cash and mtt's outside of Europe, like Russia, India, Africa etc.



Those who hate on Pads likely hate Bill Gates, too… Greedy underachievers (like me) often don’t understand that getting rich is just the first step to a fulfilling life. Once you are robusto, you nearly automatically start caring about other people (aside fo your family/friends/stable, or whatever). If you have no financial worries for yourself and your inner circle, you usually don’t get off on making money anymore. Of course there is Trump and some bankers etc, but I’m fairly sure that +90% of humans who get robusto, mostly/mainly have good intentions for “others”, because they can afford it.



Something I would like to add, to take a stand ITT:
In my opinion, most conspiracy theories just come from people who don't want to understand that there is a good cause behind nearly all of the rich people's actions.
Races, religions and all that ****, are just things that seperate us, and cause conflicts.
If economy doesn't die in the process, I would welcome all refugees in Germany, until we are just one big democratic mixed race without big religious influences anymore (on the whole planet, not just in Germany or Europe... like in +100 years, maybe). No more fake reasons for war, hence nothing to stop us saving the planet, and exploring space. There is way more envy than greed in humans, imho.


My motivation:
Winning at online-poker again...
And, of course, making all poker players in Germany more profitable (or lose less) while supporting my country. But after break-even in germany only, I want this to quickly branch out to as many countries as possible, to have a positive effect for all smart and hard working players in all other countries, too. Not offering heads-up, and using slight modifications to all the games (mostly at cash) every month/year, to discourage GTO-programmers, who could potentionally ruin it. Like new variants to play, or straddles, big antes, or whatever is need to make the games (mostly mean cash-games) fun and profitable again.

My personal goal is to become a part of the site, caring for structures (new variants and rake/antes/blinds in cash, and/or startingstacks and levels in MTT's and SnG's), but if I get left behind at some point, or lose control about the whole thing, I won't care much at all, if I at least get this done, somehow.



I raked $30k on PS this year, means $6k taxes for my state, but I went broke during SCOOP (won slightly at lots of 6+ cash, but down +1K in MTT's this year).
That has to change!

Now please put the carrot in front of my donkey-head, and get my going!
All you need to do is sending me a PM, if you have any skills, connections or ideas that help us to get this going!

I want to form a union with my fist and your face.

^^Solid first post. PM me for address

Thing is---this will DEFINITELY drive away/busto the recs, and only weed out the bottom tier regs. The best way to maximize the longevity of the games is to cater to the widest audience. This is why I've never understood why "the best" are so nitpicky about things that, ultimately, don't matter to them. They'll win no matter what. Sure, you want to lower the variance as much as possible, but do you want that at the expense of the longevity of the games? Of course not. Would you rather have x ROI for y time or .75x ROI for 3y? This isn't difficult.

A recreational player doesn't want to play for 8 hours to maybe double his money. A recreational player doesn't give a **** if there are antes from the start, or if there's x late reg length instead of y. If there's a site where they can just, any time they want, go and register and have a chance of winning in a few hours, they will play that. There was a site that was like that for a little while recently, but it ain't anymore. Bc it, shockingly, decided to follow all the other sites and listen to clueless regs who want to feel good about themselves for knowing what makes the "best" tournaments, rather than actually think about what's best for everyone.

So, imo, both you & Pads are sort of right. Pads is right that catering to the small pool of regs wrt tourney structure is dumb and killing the ecosystem, you are right that sites shouldn't care what regs think and be catering to the recreational players. Unfortunately, everyone (the sites & the regs) are far too short-sighted and can't see the forest for the trees.

Ah, a union, I've not heard that one in a while. Let me see how this might work out using a real life analogy...

Ten people walk into Tesco because they have a bunch of coupons they can use and they won't buy food without them, they walk up to the manager and say "Your corn flakes are too expensive, make them cheaper!"

Two months later, the manager replies saying "**** off, the prices are fine", and arbitrarily bans two of the ten from his shop. While those two are wondering what they did wrong, the other eight think of where to do their shopping. Six of them, despite the corn flakes being overpriced and there being no customer service, decide to keep shopping at Tesco anyway, as it's the largest shop. Two of them look around for other places. One guy looks at Sainsbury's, but turns away when their online grocery service won't work with his price comparison site running in the background. The other looks at Asda, but won't shop there because they won't give him enough cashback on his purchases. The first one then looks at his local corner shop, but when he tries to pay for his cornflakes, the shopkeeper says no, you need to send the money to my mate Dave in Shanghai via Bitcoin, and we're also not serving you unless you're wearing a Kim Jong-Il comedy mask. The second guy then looks at another shop, but it's on fire. They both look at Waitrose, but don't even consider it as there's nothing cheap in there at all. They finally look at another local shop, but have heard that every other customer gets their credit card details stolen. All options exhausted, they go back to Tesco.

Maybe try calling your plan something a bit less seventies and communist. How about starting an alliance of poker players instead? That's got to work

I lol'd several times at this, well played. Some of the supermarket references might go over the heads of non-UK people though!

You're probably better off quitting poker than wasting your time with this union sillyness.

You mean a poker player who has spent the past 2 months staking players and printing money in the softest online games ever is now upset they are no longer as soft. Then he concludes that as the sites owe him a living they should build their games in such a way he can continue to maximise profit.

No, you must be wrong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_complex

Well, they could not do any worse than when that group ( I think mainly Russian) tried to organize essentially a union/strike against Pokerstars a few years ago when they did the SNE changes. I remember at the time thinking there were some actual reasonable issues there that could have been discussed if handled properly, but needless to say it was an even less successful version of the Poker Player Alliance, and they never even offered a T-Shirt to join them! Think I liked it best when they demanded a seat on the board of Pokerstars, and were essentially told "who are you? Party Poker is that way." Party Poker basically said "Don't come here!"

As someone here hinted - this is hardly the first time this concept has been proposed, and by now I have to assume anyone who tosses it as a new idea has no history of past attempts, and just has their own personal agenda as the foundation, so it will never go past the podcast/sign a petition nobody cares about phase.

This is all off-topic but you said so many things that just seemed too far out there not to comment on.

(a) Getting rich isn't a necessary step for living a fulfilling life.

(b) Good people care about others regardless of their own financial position.

Bill Gates has done a massive amount of damage. The world would be so much better if good people had been in power rather than corrupt people like Bill Gates, who have done incomprehensible amounts of damage to the development of computer technology. Yes, some good things are being done around the world with Bill Gates's name attached, but whether or not good things are done should not be for greedy business men to decide in the first place - seems like a system with an obvious flaw.

You don't get to "gain wealth forgetting all but self", doing insane amounts of damage, live the luxurious life of a billionaire, then get to call yourself a good person just because you divert a few of your billions to good causes. More when he's dead, but anyone can see why giving up your ill-gotten fortune after you're DEAD doesn't make you a good person.

tl;dr I get mad because someone vaguely implies that Bill Gates might be a good guy

Only true thing you said. Take it elsewhere.

I fully agree with a) and b), and partly with the rest, too.

My post was a bit too long, partly redundant, and inaccurate, I must admit.
The intention of the part you quoted was to put things into perspective. Just blaming Pads for being overly succesfull with his stable is very one-sided and absolutely pointless, imo. Of course his success should not be a reason to discredit what he said in that interview.

I wonder how many haters ITT would not have done the same as Pads did (getting a big stable), if they had the skills, and a chance to do that, at the right point in time...

unless you know bill gates personally I don’t think you can know if he is s good guy or not, everything thats going on about him on the internet is speculation