friend told me he thought phil just made another post. said they would add this avatar to library for all suspect players

I've already mentioned that I am not an on line grinder/pro.

Indeed, I have never used a HUD but I have certainly had them used against me, yet I still think it is right to allow them and to make them available to all players because I think it is better to try to raise everyone's level rather than to dumb down everyone's level by banning them.

Or nits

Amazing that Galfond finally appeared in the thread, and yet he was virtually ignored, as the tards here were too busy bickering with one another to even notice.

Anyway, I noticed, and I'll respond. Phil, in case you're wondering, I am "Dan Druff" (Todd Witteles), and I go back 18 years as an online poker regular.

Here we go...


It's great that you're interested in hearing from the community as you design your site.

However, it's disheartening to read that you will not re-look at "a major re-haul" of your policies as a result of player feedback. I feel that some major areas definitely need revisiting.


In reality, nothing. It just takes longer to get their money, which also results in more rake paid (bad for the pros, good for the site owner).


I get what you're saying, but this is a flawed way of thinking.

Let's look at this a different way.

Say that it's a 6-max game, and I'm worse than all of the other pros at the table, but substantially better than the one fish.

Without the fish there, say I'm -1.5BB/100, but with the fish there, I'm +1.0BB/100. (I'm just making up numbers here, of course.)

Anyway, under these circumstances, I'm able to win. Maybe not win a ton, but I'll be a winner.

Now let's say the fish improves due to various countermeasures you place in the game.

Suddenly the fish isn't nearly as bad, and now my winrate drops to -0.5BB/100, even with the fish in the game!

So the fish taking longer to bust helps two groups of people:

1) The top pros at the table, who are a favorite against the other pros anyway (thus they win more if the game runs longer)

2) The site, as more rake is collected

It hurts the pros who need the fish's presence (and for him to be substantially worse than everyone else) to be +EV in the game after rake.

For some reason you think there's an advantage to the average pro to keeping the fish "active" longer, but that's only true for the top 1-2 pros at the table. For everyone else, the optimal scenario is to have the biggest skill gap possible between them and the fish.



As has already been pointed out, this is a pipe dream.

The fish will be hunted once it's understood that he's substantially worse than everyone else, and yes, the game will break when he sits out.


As you have never been a fish (to my knowledge), I don't think you understand what motivates them to redeposit.

The factors leading to redeposit are degeneracy and delusion.

Just because a fish takes a bit longer to lose doesn't mean he will be itching to redeposit. A fish redeposits either because he can't control himself, or because he experienced some short term winning and thinks he can beat the game if he just runs average or better.

Unfortunately, in 2018 the skill gap between pros and fish is so large that the fish will not be experiencing any kind of real winning streak, thus a slower or faster trudge down to zero will essentially lead to the same hopeless result.

You should stop worrying about this so much. Fish were busting quickly 10 years ago, too, and the poker economy was fine.


Honestly, I believe you're overthinking a lot of this.

You are kind of on the right track, but now you're out in the weeds with terrible ideas such as dynamic avatars.

It's simple. Here's what you need to do:

1) Keep your idea regarding the dynamic names. That will shut out people's ability to use HUDs (other than for data of the current day, which only has limited effectiveness). Ignore the "we need HUDs" whining.

2) Kill the "dynamic avatars" idea. It's terrible, for reasons I have already stated in previous posts.

3) Come up with innovative promotions aimed at the losing players to make them want to deposit and redeposit on your site, compared to the others.

4) Give incentives to pros who start games and keep them going. Other than that, give no rakeback or any other incentive to regulars/pros, as that's a waste of your company's resources. If the games are good, the pros will come without rewards.

5) Concentrate on providing excellent customer service and quality, user-friendly, bug-free software.

6) Do NOT launch with only cash games. That's a horrible idea. Wait until you have the tournament system online, too. Tournament winners often feed cash games (shark tournament players are often cash fish), so you do not want to launch without that. Everyone has been waiting for 2 years, so another year or so to get things right isn't going to hurt much at this point.

7) Work to stop obvious predatory behavior such as seating scripts, people sitting alone at 50 tables in the lobby, etc. It's this type of crap which drives the fish away.

8) Let the games play out normally. Don't interfere with the ecosystem. Let everyone just play.

I want to tell a little story from 10 years ago which might give some insight into the mind of a recreational online poker player.

This was a middle-high stakes 6-max game, and it consisted of 5 pros and a megafish.

The megafish, who was new to the site, quickly busted, and then all the pros quickly sat out.

The megafish was none too pleased about this, but not for the reasons you'd think.

He wasn't insulted. He thought he was being cheated!


"Exactly what I thought, you f---rs are cheating me!", he wrote in the chat.

Everyone stayed silent.

"I knew the whole time u were all playing as a team. No wonder I lost so fast. And then I bust and everyone sits out right away. So obvious!"

Everyone still stayed silent, afraid to tell the guy the truth that he was simply the worst one at the table by far.

Then the fish sat back in, and predictably, so did everyone else. Before he could post his blind, he sat back out.

"I knew it!", he typed. "The second I'm back in, you all want to play with me. Well screw that. I'm not playing with any of you f***ing cheaters!"

Everyone still stayed silent.

Finally, I spoke up.

"Nobody is cheating you," I explained. "But yes, we are all waiting for you to sit back in to play. And I'll be honest with you as to why..."

I continued, "You are the new guy here, so for that reason, everyone assumes you suck. It's a ritual all new players here have to go through. If you're new, they assume you're the fish, until you show them otherwise. So they don't want to play each other, whose game they all respect. They want to play the new guy who they think must be a fish."

"Thank you for your honesty," he replied. "I guess that makes sense. Okay, I'll sit back in."

And he sat back in and played.

My little speech worked because I told the guy the truth, but framed it that we was just ASSUMED to be a fish because of being new, rather than being observed to be a fish because he simply wasn't good. So this allowed him to rectify in his head why they were bumhunting him, while still maintaining the dignity that he was simply being misjudged due to being an unknown player.

Why am I telling you this story?

Because the guy wasn't so worried about his skill compared to the rest of us.

He was worried that he was being cheated, and probably secondarily worried that he was being exploited as the "spot" of the game.

The last thing you ever want to do as a site owner is actually LABEL fish as such with those dynamic avatars.

And you also don't need to bend over backward to protect fish from busting quickly. They will, and there's little you can do to stop it, so just let it happen.

At the same time, you don't have to allow HUDs or give rewards to pros, just because they grew to expect it from an old-school online poker model which is no longer viable as we near the 2020s.

What you are suggesting is actually anonymous Stars without HUDs and with Seat Me function.

Its most likely a game over.

Hi Jman:

What you're advocating here is very consistent with my view of when poker is successful. That is, put another way, there is a sweet spot, and the best poker games/structures do a good job of hitting this sweet spot.

And exactly what is a sweet pot. In poker terms, it will be for the weak player when the short term luck factor is large enough relative to this player's lost rate that he will have enough winning sessions for him to enjoy the game and to be encouraged to keep playing. And for the strong player, it will be when the short-term luck factor relative to this player's win rate will be small enough so that after a reasonable length of time, even though there may be some fluctuations along the way, it will be almost a sure thing that this player is a winner.

When this is done successfully, a poker site (or room) should have enough regular players to start games and keep them going, and enough recreational players for the strong players to consider them good.

The danger comes when strong players think they deserve to win almost every time. When this happens, while they may win almost every time the game goes, after a while, the game doesn't go as often as it use to.

Best wishes,
Mason

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph

time well invested, let's really talk it through with the cummunity to make sure RIO is the best site the 2020s will have

While in theory this is right, i still think the main issue are the depositors (or to be more precisely, the lack of).

partypoker is pouring in a lot of money and they still aren't getting enough weekend warriors, to fill up the big GTD events. sure. they gain traction (which is good), but GVC already announced, that this focus on poker won't last very long, since sports betting is way more lucrative. so all those efforts might only be temporary.

when RIO poker goes online, there will be a great deal of interest, but most grinders won't play long, if they are the paying customers.

so long story short: i'm pretty sure the product will be decent and fun to play, but so far it seems it will be 'just' another unibet-ish poker room (nothing wrong with that), that will be an alternative, but not the alternative. but let's see, maybe PG's backers have an insane marketing budget ...

and this is a surprise ^^

I'm sure they'll be looking at how well their site is doing and will be making many changes as time goes on.

No. You're assuming that the losing player will lose the exact same amount whether it takes him one week or two weeks. But poker doesn't work that way. When players lose their money too fast, many of them are never seen again. But when the lost rate gets slowed down, and they are able to enjoy the game more, their overall losses can be much higher.

There's a simple analogy. If you want to go to a movie, it's about $10, and at $10, you have probably gone to lots of movies. But suppose a movie was $150. You might go to one or two, but not too many.

I think economists would call what you're describing "a closed system." That is you're assuming that the fish will, in this case, lose a certain amount and then be replaced by another fish who will lose the exact same amount. But the system is more open than that. By coming closer to a "sweet spot" (see my previous post) you should be able to increase the total amount of money the fish will lose even though he may now lose at a slower rate.

Why is this a pipe dream? I've played with the same losing players for years. However, this brings us back to the sweet spot, and no-limit hold 'em as a cash game is not a good form of poker for a sweet spot.

While this statement may be true in some cases, if it was universally true, casinos wouldn't exist and there wouldn't be any poker games. The number one reason that makes long term losing players continue to buy-in is that poker is a form of entertainment, just like casino games are entertainment to the people who pack casinos. And if the losing player can have a few more winning sessions, he's more likely to enjoy playing, and thus the entertainment value is there.

This statement doesn't make sense. If the fish is experiencing short term winning, he'll have no need to redeposit. But what you want to have happen is that when the fish finally needs to redeposit, he'll remember his winning sessions and how much he enjoyed playing. That's what gets him to buy-in again.

As long as the cash game is no-limit hold 'em I agree with this. But there are other forms of poker, and some possible adjustments you can make to no-limit hold 'em, that can help create a more favorable balance of luck and skill which of course produces a better sweet spot. By the way, the very best game of producing a good sweet spot, regardless of the stakes, is seven-card stud.

This is an incredibly stupid statement. If you want to go back 10 to 15 years, and you looked at the publisher that had the most books during that time period in the Amazon Top 100, 2+2 was probably the leading publisher in the world, and this is no exaggeration. What happened was that poker got on TV in 2003 and it created a sensation, and so many people wanted to play poker that it didn't matter how quickly they busted out since there was always someone to take their place. But that's not the case today.

MM

Mason, I'm not going to respond point-by-point to your contrarian rebuttal.

Suffice to say that, yes, it would be great if we could magically waive a wand and make the fish last longer and enjoy the game more, but there's really no way to do that without completely corrupting the game we know.

Furthermore, a fish lasting longer in the game isn't the magic cure-all that some seem to believe it is.

Online poker is a different animal than live poker, because it has no social element to it. Some fish don't mind losing live because they enjoy the game and the banter at the table. That's why you keep seeing them in the live cardroom over and over.

Online tends to be very cold, impersonal, and less social. It becomes more about a combination of enjoyment of the game itself and the quest to win money. When fish lose consistently online, they find they don't enjoy it (and in fact start suspecting it's "rigged" against them). They eventually quit.

There is not much difference between a fish depositing $1,000 five times in two days, and the fish reloading that same $1,000 five times in a month.
In both cases, he lost $5,000 and never really saw himself win much. In both cases, he's often not coming back.

You are correct that the poker economy is far different than it was in 2008. That's why the focus should be placed upon giving the fish reasons to want to continue coming back, rather than trying (in vain) to give him a chance to win in the short term.

There are many ways fish can be rewarded and made to feel like they're still getting "value" despite mounting losses. The same comp concepts used by casinos (for their non-poker games) could be applied here.

It seems that your solution is to emphasize seven card stud over NL holdem, because it allows amateurs to win more easily short term. Huh???

Here's the bottom line.

Run It Once should put out a top-quality product right off the bat, with both tournament and cash offerings.

Run It Once should put out a massive effort to attract and maintain the business of net depositors (fish). The focus should NOT be placed upon artificially making the fish lose at a lesser rate, as that's a pipe dream. They should achieve their goals to find/maintain fish through marketing and incentives.

Run It Once should end predatory behavior which has hurt online poker, such as HUD usage, bumhunting, multiple empty-table-sitting, seat scripting, botting, etc.

Run It Once should provide top-notch customer service for all customers.

Run It Once should provide incentives to pros who actually help the site thrive, such as ones willing to play games with one another while waiting for a fish.

Run It Once should otherwise back off and let the games run normally.

If they do all of that, they have a fair chance at succeeding.

If they get caught up in the endless rabbit hole of trying to make games less advantageous for pros (or, conversely, trying too hard to please/reward pros who don't do their business model much good), they will not succeed.

Right now I am seeing talk of releasing software without tournaments and a plan to shame fish with degrading avatars, and I'm just shaking my head wondering where they went wrong.

I hope they have focus grouped the "anon tables" thing. Because if i were a rec, that sounds boring as all hell. Id want my own name there and maybe recognize some ppl.

main problem for RECs, is that they have like 1% chance to win medium to longterm, and thats not fun. One could win with half a brain in 2006, now its noit really a prospect. if they up their budget on poker from total degeneracy such as lotto and slots, we might get good traffic. as it is, its more money in taking the lotto etc side of it.

The succinct version of Mason's 'sweet spot' point is that the clearing price of buying and selling variance needs to be in balance within a game.

Modern 'pros' expect to be paid too much for the small amounts of variance that they offer when they multi-table at tiny stakes.

Fish clearly (by decline of poker participation) are not getting enough variance per dollar lost.

The sites objectives should be to reduce 'pros' earnings relative to their variance. I think the changes suggested have a reasonable chance of doing that. They do not need to try to reduce 'pros' earnings in total, just make sure they have to gamble a lot if they want to win a lot.

Remember, there was never a glorified pro dream to make 2x minimum wage mass-grinding micro-stakes, the dream was more like having the balls to stake a year's wages on a risky proposition and win a fortune. Your modern HUD using multi-tabler has no balls any more, and they are getting upset if their crutches are at risk.

I like the idea of the dynamic avatars but not a fan of the face expressions. As others said there are a lot of snowflakes who will feel offended seeing their avatar sleeping or looking crazy/mad. It would be better in my opinion to represent the avatars with animals. Something like that :

Nit stats: snail, turtle, koala, etc
Lag stats: dog, cat, wolf
Maniac: shark, lion, crocodile
Whale: T-Rex, alien monster, velociraptor

Like that no one is offended. If someone don't like the face of his avatar you can have your animal changing depending of your stats, more fun to go from turtle to T-Rex than from Johnny the Caucasian sleeping man to Johnny the Caucasian mad man.

What I’m most interested is how Phil intends to combat the inevitable rise of the machines.

In the mid 90s, the top chess engine beat the world’s best player. Now 20 years later and any app on your phone can beat the worlds best player AINEC, and they take less time to think about it.


In December 2017, Libratus crushed the pros in HUNL. It’s inevitable that we will have apps on our phones someday able to play poker at the same level that Libratus did. How will RIO poker be able to deal with that? It seems a bit late to be opening a poker site...

Will all games be 6max and therefore can’t be GTO’d? Will Power Up poker be the new standard format?


The avatars and HUDless anon tables are not big issues at all. It’s a unique offering and even if some people hate it, others won’t.

That there is no GTO for 6max doesn't matter all that much, I think. I am sure there are 6-max bots today that plays better than most regs, and it won't be long before they far exceed any humans' ability.

As for Power up etc, I think a great idea for RIO would be to run monthly promotions for more obscure forms of poker. If they include short videos with Phil Galfond or another instructor explaining 2-7 NL single draw strategy, then more people will dare to try it. Because let's face it, Hold'em is getting pretty stale. Poker should be fun to play for everybody, sharks and marks.

I agree, limited edition variants of poker will keep the cash games alive and safe from bots for possibly indefinitely. I think Stars is doing something right in that respect with the intro of more variants. They are rake traps, but they are fresh.

Beat the clock was an interesting concept that I wanted to try, but edges seemed super thin and when you throw rake into that, it’s not worth.
Split Holdem I also thought was interesting, but when they didn’t adjust rake for the split pots, it’s just too much.

99% of people are missing the point here.
I would love to play without HUDs, but it is impossible. It is impossible to enforce this.
Also another thing that is mandatory is to ban datamining.

Any decent site that has good traffic, has 3rd party developed converters. There are softwares that don't need HH, just need to be able to 'read' the screen.

That is my concern. If you can't enforce a rule, don't ban them. Or you can ban them, and have every reg with the 3rd party software.
Name on poker site that has decent traffic (not that ****ty chinese sites that have 10 players) that doesnt have a 3rd party app to track results?

Anon poker is actually ******ed due to collusions/cardsharing/bots etc.

Again, all this stuff about fish behavioural patterns, how long their deposits last before they deposit again, I don't recall being mentioned by anyone before Amaya took over Pokerstars and decided to remove/disincentivise winning poker players from the system and actively lure the customer base they bought towards low skill or no skill gaming products.

The fact that poker operators, not just Stars Group, are incapable of resisting the temptation to leverage profits from their poker customer base in favour of non poker gaming products presents an opportunity for a new poker only web site to grab a big chunk of the on line poker player market.

My fear though is that Pokerstars deliberately destroying the cash game poker eco-system to maximise short term value to share holders has made a lot of people's brains go like scrambled eggs when deciding how a poker site should work.

If you assume that the player has no chance of winning and will keep depositing up to a predetermined amount no matter how short the intervals, then you're correct, pretty much by definition, and they might as well get it over quick. But your first scenario is less likely to happen than the second. How many deposits will somebody make when they never win a hand or got any play for their money, compared to an experience with at least a few periods of enjoyment. Such as what? Buffet comps for the player making his third $1000 deposit in an hour?

Most of the networks with white label operators started changing their revenue models around 2011-2012 in recognition of the fact that a successful poker business is not driven by the rake share attributed to hands played by pros.

They may not have nailed it, but the idea did not start with Amaya.

In fact, as Mason alludes too, the idea is ancient and explains the the original prevalence of limit cash and NL/PL tournments rather than no limit cash games.

kilo seems to be making some interesting points

lets hope you get the balance right phil

but lets go rio

Killowatt is correct that consistently losing low stakes players, in other words the essential money supply at the base of the eco-system pyramid that is the life blood of a successful on line poker site, will keep coming back and depositing more if they are given incentives, free rolls and opportunities and hope to strike it big at some point.

Your buffet comment was clearly facetious, but yes the on line equivalent of a free buffet is the way to keep losing players coming back. So things like free rolls to a WSOP $1K or possible even ME package that looks amazing to a small stakes consistently losing player, but costs ~$2 per player for the house to run due to the fact that there might be 8000 runners in the free roll and it awards 5 x Packages worth $3K each.

Similarly you can have freerolls for a seat into a $10K buy in cash game, to an on line or live cash game.

Basically, any promotion that you can construct that you can fairly accurately forecast will cost you ~$2 per player to run is worth doing to gain a new deposit of $30 or more, and has even more value if it is procuring brand new players to the site.

Fwiw, I think the likes of Unibet and 888 have over complicated rewards and free rolls and daily challenges where there are so many things going on at the same time and to monitor for the player that it becomes a pain in the butt.

I think a more straightforward rewards system that is easier to understand and has far less components to it and includes more headline big potential rewards and less small bitty things, is more likely to encourage players to put in more volume and to gain their player loyalty.

Maybe this is so but it was never discussed on poker forums that I am aware of and if it was happening I would suggest it was done more out of greed than it not being possible to run a sustainable poker only web site.

If it is the case that on line poker has to be artificially slanted away from it being a true players' playing skill meritocracy by having anonymous screen names, banning huds, and taking other measures to protect the weak, then it begs the question of what RIO poker's vision really is.

Are they trying to build the poker dream again, were they ever trying to do this? Or are they simply another gaming operator whose raison d'être is to make as much money as possible but to use poker as the initial route into this.

Perhaps their original intentions were to build the poker dream again but their strategy and ethos has changed along the way when they drilled down into the realities of running the business profitably.

Here is basically this same thread from 2012:
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...ayers-1152601/


Edit - I was in that thread too