Yeah just throwing out what I'd like to see from a new poker site.

I get that some people will have experience on other sites. What about the people trying to move up solely through this site? If I'm a novice who starts at 2nl here I'll have to spend significant time playing elsewhere with software before playing in high stakes games here.

I mean as a poker experience anonymous poker sucks. I like seeing and having a chat with regulars between hands every now and then. It also lacks the long-term strategy adjustments I enjoy.

I totally understand your point about some players being more willing to donk it up in anonymous games. I really think Ignition/Bovada seemed better than it really would have been if there were other good options in the US. Global Poker has people playing just as bad and it's not anonymous.

There is a consensus on some issues ITT and differing opinions and theories on some other issues, but overriding all of this is that RIO Poker and Phil are looking and listening to all input from players, which is a great thing for a company to do. Making RIO poker progressive, innovative, communicative, adaptable, broadminded, flexible, humble and therefore ultimately successful.

1) a novice starting out will learn the most by seperating play and software aided review as both playing and improving via software have a pretty steep learning curve. If I got this correctly from the papi podcast with galfond, hand histories will be available for players 24h after play so improving via software away from the tables is perfectly doable and once you have a solid grasp of both playing and analyzing, the step to implement hud stats in real time gameplay is a small one imo.

2) I also prefer non-anon poker, especially in the reg infested games of 2018. However, I highly doubt this decision was a shot in the dark; it much rather seems to me that there's a solid statistical analysis that lead to this decision.

Are the high stakes games anonymous too? I was under the impression they wouldn't be. If they're not anonymous then I definitely disagree that going from no software to software is a small step. I know people who have struggled a lot moving from live to online or from anonymous to real online poker. Tailoring strategies and adjusting to regs with whom you have history with is much different than using strategies against general player types with whom you've seen for a few dozen hands. Analyzing anonymous hand histories only helps show you how you should tailor your strategy to the population and general player types of that population.

I think anonymous poker is just a cheaper solution to minimize the edges the players have nowadays due to better software and the ability for players to use stealth measures to keep it undetected. It is also used to minimize the ease of bumhunting. Instead of fighting that battle by developing detection methods and other deterrents sites offer a bastardized version of poker that is the equivalent of playing teeball or bumper bowling.

A site like Ignition/Bovada allows players to easily bot in anonymity. Why would they stop it? People are able to run bots all day generating them rake without other players complaining about them because there's no way to prove which accounts are bots with small sample sizes.

I don't doubt that they've done extensive research into a lot of their decisions. Maybe a new ROW site needs to do this, but a nonanonymous site can have soft games. Just look at Global Poker.

couple things:

1) global is soft because of the lol rake which shys away many regs.
2) I worded my take on things rather poorly by calling it a small step, I agree with you. On the other hand, it's not like non-anon poker forces you into the lab for half a day every day from the get go. you need to amass a substantial amount of hands in order to increase your EV by maximally exploiting other regs' leaks, which also leads to the discussion of gto vs. max exploit strategies with gto oriented players being more ok with anon poker me thinks.
3) we need to find a sweetspot it seems; a poker environment a la 2003 where most of the cash game action is focussed on one game in one specific format is not gonna work today. same goes for the opposite extreme, we really don't need a gazillion separated player pools spread across dozens of games in countless formats. With this in mind I'm ok with anon poker being a thing, though as stated earlier I'd prefer non-anon myself.

4) the bot problem is where RIO has disappointed me the most; it seems kinda silly to spend a lot of ressources into silly animated avatars because the oh-so-bad huds might shy away a fish or two, when there's a much more pressing issue at hand and I also think that bots are the main reason why anon-tables might just be the worst decision so far.

Anon tables are so ******ed with what we know about online poker these days. Might as well have a sign that says "ALL CHEATERS WELCOME!!"

I got some bad taste of being colluded against when I played at microgaming anontables in the past. But who knows sometimes a person gets paranoid.

It would be harder to implement the noHUD rule with real screennames of course, but it could be easy to be creative to prevent bumhunting or predatory behaviour, with random seating or rush/zoom like games for example.

Also got the impression the games at Bovada/Ignition were soft because it was mostly american players, without regs from rest of the world for the most part, (not counting VPNing etc) not because it was anon poker but maybe I'm wrong and there's a better dynamic.

Pg is lighting money on fire. Realistically there's no ****ing way to eliminate bots, colluders, tracking software, dream machines etc from infiltrating the games and grinding them to dust.

People with money to burn gambling might be fish on the tables, but they're not stupid. Everyone knows about bots and software and all that ****. There's no way a rec will repeat deposit.

Anon tables is like a beta version of poker. Phil Beta.

I think unibet is doing that just fine eliminating those. So why not rio? Don't think rio is gonna be like party and 888 where they are just looking into it etc and nothing happens.

Anonymous poker is failure. Poker gets personal from the second dealt hand.
Or make free built-in simple hud: hands/vpip/pfr

Take it easy guys lol..the site don't even run yet..

Besides, nothing is permanent,if the Anonymous table didn't work out,I am sure they will change or make some adjustments..(that's what PG said)

Love the NO HUD feat 👍👍

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i love ignition and it's anonymous.

Does anyone have any images of the table layouts and user interface that they are starting the site with?

Interested as this is a big +/- for me with poker sites.

I only play MTTs. The amount that I can lose (my buy-in) is fixed during a poker or chess tournament. Again, no practical difference.

Your arguements against anonymous tables are kinda odd. Are you guys serious about that?
You make it sound like ano tables are the downfall of poker. Seems quite ridiculous.

Most colluders and bots aren't fishhed out by the player base but by the security squad of the sites itself. Of course it also happened, that players outed a bot ring, but that's the exception, not the rule.
Galfond said that they figured out ways to detect this kind of criminals. I am willing to give them an advance of trust.

On top of that - you can still check for this stuff yourself. As someone already said: You will get the hand history 24h later, so you can analyse to your hearts content.
Since you will be able to see ALL holecards, you can scan for collusion even better than on other sites.
With regards to tracking of people for several sessions over a longer period of time: We don't know how much info they dish out after 24h.
Could very well be that they do not only provide the screenname people had in that session but also an individual ID so you can check your games with that individual in the past. That way you could in fact check all of this stuff better than on other sites.

anon poker is different but great and actually much simpler to play. You miss the dynamics but you get used to the other advantages if you know how to play anon properly.

I'd think the issue with the analogy is using the experience/advantages of tournaments in a discussion mostly about cash games, for a proposed site that is launching with cash games only.

Yes, players are willing to pay a high rake for low buy-in fixed-rate tournaments with a strong chance of getting some play for their money.

One's takeaway from that could be "Don't worry about the cash games, they'll be fine," or perhaps "Maybe the cash games should try to be a bit more like tournaments."

I've never played anonymous player poker but I guess you just merge your strategy into a one size fits all one, unless the player pool as a whole has a certain and noticeable style of play which is away from the norm.

But I much prefer seeing player names and battling against specific players, even when they are better than me, because my aim is to become as good as them and ultimately overtake them.

I recently encountered one on line PLO cash game player who played a very unusual style that was very difficult to play/win against and appeared at first to be unexploitable. He/she frequently built up some huge stacks against other players but after playing him/her a little bit and railing him/her a lot on some other tables and thinking about counter strategies I worked out how to exploit him/her, take away any advantages they had and to put them into awful spots frequently. I then started playing him/her a lot and did very well.

They now struggle against me and are trying to avoid getting into pots with me.

Working out players, learning from better players in how they play and incorporating it into one's own game is my favourite part of poker. It is one of the main ways of getting better at poker.

Although I can now handle that player easily, the unusual strategy that they use *is* very clever (until opponents work out how to counter it). It is a form of mathematical/psychological lateral thinking and I now occasionally use it myself and can spot it when someone else is doing it.

Without seeing that player's screen name I may never have noticed what was going on nor learned from it.

Poker is about people as much as about cards, so it's a shame when the people aspect is lost.

They are banning Laos? Seems so random. I mean Laos is so chill compared to say Thailand.

I agree with everything you said. Part of the fun is the dynamics when you're against certain players.

I do some of my MTT playing on Juicy Stakes Poker, which has a lot of very weak players. We're talking about 2 or 3 VPIPs over 40 at every table in the first hour of a tournament. In a field that bad, the good players really stick out.

I noticed that one of the regulars plays almost every tournament that I play. When I'm at a final table there's about a 50% chance that he will be there also. His VPIP is 23--a bit loose, but not crazy.

Even though I have had zero communication with this guy, we have both done what good players do in a situation like that. We stay out of each other's way and pick on the weak players. I often check to whether he is registered for any tournaments later in the day.

Situations like that are part of what makes poker interesting. A few hours ago I watched a WPT episode where Phil Hellmuth made the final table. Several of the players at that table were clearly excited to play against him. He has never won a WPT and they were down to 4 players when the episode ended. All of that makes the final table a lot more exciting, to play and to watch.

If poker is anonymous it's just not the same.

fyp

That and being without a HUD. Adapt or die and such. Or just don't play at RIO.

Ffs you can’t always get what you want

I highly doubt that people play online poker and get excited when PotSlay3r-761 joins their table.
Come on. It's online poker. You may have some stars like isildur, red baron etc. there as well but 99.999% of the people here never clashed with one of them at the tables.
Mostly because most people don't play their limits.
So the "battling the stars" arguement doesn't convince me to let go of all the advantages of anonymous poker. It doesn't happen anyway.

It's downright wrong that you would use a "one size fits all (opponents)" approach on ano tables. At least if you don't want to go broke that is.

After observing the table for 10 hands at 6max you have a rough idea on who is very tight and who probably isn't. After 25 hands your picture of the opponents is much more clearer. In online poker this takes probably 12 minutes. As the game goes on, you catch up habits of some of the players.
If you pay attention.

I have a feeling that this is the main problem for you guys: You don't want to pay attention. Because it's kind of work. And it limits the amount of tables you can play simultanously.
But this is part of poker and part of the skillset you need - observation.
It was never intended that players outsource this skill to a computer. This just happened to develop as an exploit.

We need HUDs to be gone. This will make space for a further differentiation in skill between the players.

^^STacking a reg you've played a ton with is one of the most satisfying things in poker. Fish are easy to stack, taking another regs stack is part of that competitive edge. Anon tables is completely against the spirit of competition and it's just lame.
Ya while you're playing against bots and colluders that will never be spotted. Have fun with that.....