I think the people organizing the first strike(s) not only brought up reasonable issues but also tried to discuss them in a proper way. That just didn't get them anywhere because PokerStars didn't care. Those groups also included a lot of very successful players and at least the ones I know personally all are very smart individuals.

I still remember discussing options with others and to this day have a hard time understanding how so many really good players failed to understand how the poker economy works. People who made millions playing online were steadfast in thinking they had power over PokerStars if they just got enough other regulars to join forces. But that feels like ages ago. Today, you either have to be pretty delusional to think that or you have ulterior motives. If someone like Patrick Leonard brings up that topic, we can be pretty certain it's the latter.

His business practices are well known, as is his extreme wealth. Not sure what speculation there is on the internet, but that's not what I'm referring to.

It's really odd how many people can't, or don't want to differentiate in between running a business in a certain way, and being a good or bad person.

If I am a soldier and have to kill people, does that mean that I am a bad father/husband/friend?
If I decide to do my best to get my business ahead of my competitors, while not breaking any laws, does that mean I am a bad person?

If a person acts in an immoral way it makes me think he is an immoral person. That includes business men and soldiers. Does that make them bad fathers etc.? Not necessarily, but that's a different matter.

> If I decide to do my best to get my business ahead of my competitors, while not breaking any laws, does that mean I am a bad person?

Certainly, if that involves doing immoral things. The law isn't immediately relevant. Actions are often legal yet immoral, and sometimes illegal yet moral.

People who are willing to do immoral things in order to get themselves ahead are exactly the people I have in mind when I think about bad people. Corrupted by greed, putting the good of oneself above the good of the many.

^^I fully agree with that, except the last paragraph.

What I wanted to point out is that each individuale has different thresholds, regarding who he really cares for intensly, and what he is willing to do for that (moral/ethics), and these thresholds can change at any time. One could initially be just caring for himself (or in most case including at least family and friends). But to be able to have a big influence for the masses, it really helps to first of all do a good job for yourself (and your inner circle), to get into the position to become a positive influence for the masses. And since money runs this world, that often results in initially egoistic people gaining wealth for themselves, before they start caring about strangers. And to solely blame these people for their egoistic and/or immoral approach to get wealthy in the first place is not a balanced judgement, imo.

But of course, you can also be a big benefit - even for many people outside of your inner circle - by simply being a kind, helpfull and respectfull person, too. And there are many social jobs where a good person can have a meaningfull positive influence on a lot of people outside of their inner circle, without the need of having wealth to invest into something.

That's not how "caring about others" works.
When you really "care about others", you don't try to be in a more advantageous position than them and ONLY AFTER that you decide to help them, that's called condescension and pity and has nothing to do with good intentions, more like perverted mind.

The concept seems good but the issue is the man who is spearheading it.

Pads championing this cause to many will come across as self serving. The facts are Party was one of the first if not the first to extend late registration to the extreme and I could be wrong but I believed they pushed re-entries as well. They have adjusted the rb to serve the highest of volume players, give nothing to the true rec, and give tickets short lifespans which hurts the naïve players, aka recs. Their history doesn't jive with what they are now asking.

They are asking for cooperation from other companies because unlike Pokerstars they are further stretched to make big guarantees as their prizepools are nearly on par but their player base is much less and they could be facing a real collapse whereas Pokerstars will just take a hit.

I do agree with what he is saying about the direction the industry should take to protect itself from short term greed but this will be a tough nut to crack. Best of luck to him.

Haven't listened to the podcast but in the past anything to do with this Patrick Leonard guy has been pure and utter self-interest surrounded by a mountain of bullshit.

Anything different this time?

It's hard to feel a massive amount of sympathy for the tourney grinders when they've been the absolute last format negatively affected, while every other format has been gutted for the last few years.

this. Stopped in between, couldnt handle listening to him anymore tbh.

Guy is good with talking, so some people might fall for his absolute bs. Stables have a huge impact in the mtt envirement, so i really cant take anything he says seriously, when he is part of the problem...

As of 2018 Bill Gates has donated over 36 billion to charities, how much has Pads donated ?

Pads directly improved the profits of his horses by staking them for bigger games, while also helping them to enhance their skills. That's not charity at all, but a benefit for all parties involved.

Stating the obvious, I know...

Though, Win-Win-Situations come somewhat close to charity donations, imo. Even if it results in slightly tougher games for all other competitors, like in Pads' case.

Bill Gates is surely still monopoly'ing with some of his businesses to the detriment of other "players in the game(s)", but that's often what it takes to get something done properly. But let's end the Bill Gates derail now. I already admitted that my analogy to Pads was a subpar choice (at least at this point in time).

What would have been the answers in this thread, if Pads had chosen a straw man with a less predatory image to get his points through?
What has to be done, to get Pads ideas (regarding structures etc) from theory into practise?

Since it is all about MTT's what he said, I think that it will take a very long time, if PokerStars stays at the top of traffic (number of players).

State/country-owned gambling sites don't get big field sizes, and the step from a seperated market in one country to getting licenses in other countries is extremely difficult. Otherwise, Sweden's Svenska-Spel would already have done that.

If I actually manage to get this started for Germany, I have a little bit of hope that it could branch out to all european countries combined, at some point. But even just that would reduce the profits for the operator (germany) a lot already, since all EU-countries deserve their share of that. And offering outside of Europe will surely be even more difficult. I'm not sure if it's doable in this decade, considering how slow all political changes happen, and the legal issues that come with it.

If anybody who reads this has a qualification for any profession that is needed to run an online-gambling-site, please contact me by PM.

Pads said why he didn’t like the changes and even gave an example of why which was:

$500 tourney on stars has usually 200 runners

But now will have 50-100 runners with 2.5 buyin on avg to get to same # of players and prize pool

If he had 10 horses before when had 200 runners and still now but his horses are re entering if will raise the stables entries by 100% per tournament (unless doesn’t allow horses to re enter) but his profits will stay the same.

Obviously this is waaaaaay worse for a stable owner then any individual recreational player.

I feel very sad for pads and his stable. Imagine, when the number of players in the hs mtts goes down, but he still has the same amount horses in each mtt, then he most likely will have to spent even more time ghosting his horses caus on average they will final table more often. Can u imagine that amount of stress and work this would mean? Give the guy a break, seriously.

Maybe we should start a go found me page for him. Iam willing to start by giving 1$

^^ Edit: That's what I just thought, roughly

If it's actually close to accurate that his stable pays 2.5x the rake for the same ROI in a re-entry MTT like that 500$ one, it's still worse for recreationals, because the final tables have more good horses than it would without re-entry, since final tables are the spots where most of the EV is gained, right?

My assumption would be that it still hurts recreationals more than stables, while everybody rakes more, right?

Depends what you mean by recreationals

For a lot of them they just want to play some games maybe a day or 2 a week for a chance at a big score, they aren’t trying to make a living. So they might enjoy being able to punt a few times into a “good mtt”

There amount of time to play in general is usually defined.

^^If that's the case, it should be even more -EV for those sort of recreationals to play re-entry, I think. It should improve the stables ROI, like that.
Even if recs just fire one bullet, they have lower EV than in a MTT without re-entry.

In your example above, when you say profits stay the same for the stable (re-entry in smaller fields), that means it's just more hours that horses play, and they pay more rake and enhance variance a little bit. But that's not much worse for Pads, at all. Only really hurts recs.
Only if the total amount of recreational entries in such a 500$ daily drops (which is inevitable), it will hurt Pads and his stable. But that means that his intentions are at least not solely selfish this time, and definintely not short-sighted, right?

What do you mean by worse ? If the rec wants to re enter 10 times in a tourney, why not let him? Aren’t sites trying to cater to what they want to do? Recs don’t care about ROI they want to have fun and a chance at a nice score.....

This thread started because the stable owner doesn’t like the changes because they will drastically hurt his profits. He doesn’t care about recs lol

You said that his stable fires more buy-ins for same profits. Means a bit more work for horses to get the same ROI. That should result in an even lower EV for recs in a re-entry, which gets even worse with each second or third bullet they fire.

The goal for a good site should be to keep every rec in play, as long as possible. The only positive of PS chests system these days. But multiple re-entries are a short-sighted approach, which results in the opposite.

My NLHE MTT skills have always been mediocre, but mediocrity is contextual.

I used to do really well in the Hots up to 22$ on PS, and I still see huge ICM punts and other mistakes in every Hot or xCOOP turbo that I rail these days.

I don't like like PKO, but I think PS was a very smart to offer every second Hot as a PKO, since most recreationals like PKO a lot (I actually know a few recs, and became one myself 3 years ago)

Does PartyPoker still "only" charge 10% rake in smallstakes MTT? (PS takes 12% below 22$ level)

As Rob Young twittered, it would surely be good to have just 1 re-entry max, and stop late-reg before it's below ~20bb stack. He ofc just "bluffed" when saying that he wants to sign a petition for that, since he know it won't happen any time soon (and PS has the bigger traffic, still)

But I think that daily MTT's during the weekdays would benefit from something in between reg-speed and turbo structures with one re-entry max, since that'd likely allow for somewhat big and soft fields, which would make everyone happy (4-6 hours to finish, making recs able to play during the week, without losing too quickly). On Weekends, ~8 min blinds could change to 10-15 minutes.

That's something that PP could profitably do already, I guess, at least if they are still at 10 and not 12% rake, like PS (I can only play PS in my state, means I have no info on PP structures).

^^ The last paragraph was likely dumb... Would have already happened, if the bottom line of PP profits would benefit of it (or at least stay the same as now, with better longevity). I still sometimes underestimate the capability of people who are most likely more skilled/competent than I am.

Gn8

The PokerStars strike back when they cut SNE totally worked.

He makes some good and correct points, but at the same time it is absolutely self serving as always. His motivation for talking about this subject is most likely a combination of concerns for his stables profits, and massaging his own ego.

On this forum, he openly admitted to combining his stables hand histories to plug into solvers and share population exploits amongst them all. This is straight up cheating, against the terms and conditions and its astonishing that he has not been banned from all sites for life.

Something does need to be done, but guys like pads need to be kept as far away from any sort of responsibility as possible.

Well said. You can't be Trump and Castro at the same time. Pads's assessment of the industry is pretty close to right but as a huge source of the problem he should step back and let others fix it.