A lot of people would sell their mother for way less money to be honest.

I'm guessing they've realized the current implementation of Seat Me is not working as probably intended.

It does not favor starting tables cause there's no must-move type of feature.

E.g. if you have been trying to start a table with 5 regs for a while, and there's a another table running with 3 regs. I'm not 100% if the system puts next new entry to the table of 5, but often times it happens so that table of 5 gets full, rec joins smaller table and people monitoring pool size manage to snatch seats in the rec table, even if they weren't originally starting the game.

Add to that your aprox 5% rakeback and you easily see why cash game traffic on .FRESH is a mere shadow of what it used to be on .FR when it was normal lobby with RB, but without Spain/Portugal.

I'm not sure if Stars & other operators are still required to pay tax on preflop betting (even though preflop is not raked) with the new regulation. If so, it explains why there's little concern for cash game ecosystem.

You often see people just checking tables and instantly leaving without playing a hand if there's not rec around.

EDIT: It's the same reason Zoom is not running on regular Stars past 500z both on PLO/NL. Basically no incentive to start games in Zoom.

i feel so dumb reading stuff like this lol...about to start my legitimate grind in ecuador and apparently theres a lot of reading i need to catch up on..always wondered why once i sat down in an empty sng lobby on a US site it would almost immediately be full...very interesting

Great news, but far too late. It's astonishing that you didn't do this before given what an obviously good move it is for everyone.

Next step is to ban all major stables - all of them are cheating or facilitating cheating in one way or another.

Ban most of the eastern euro full time grinders (a huge percentage are cheating whether softly or harder), and have a harder stance on anyone caught bending or breaking the rules - they need to be banned for life after one proven offence.

Also, there are constantly new accounts popping up at mid to high stakes mtts (maybe its the same with cash games too... im not sure?) with very little history and winning. These guys need to be viewed on 360 camera while playing and the owners of the accounts need to be interviewed by some really smart people about general strategy - on camera.

Do all of this and you might be forgiven for screwing the players over with the VIP changes a few years ago.

About time, hopefully they ban HUDs and/or have the option to play anonymous tables soon.

I don't know what most people are so excited about.
888 banned scripts and people are still using some. Search for "crazyfisher" in the 888 thread on internet poker, people have been complaining about him using a seating script for 3 years now (and its really obvious.)
Meanwhile I have gotten multiple false warnings, people like scarface even got banned afaik.
Party banned scripts too and everyone is using them. Party also banned HUDs and I am sure that 90% of people on midstakes use some illegal converters. It just gives a huge advantate to people who are willing to break the rules.

I would be much more excited about something like "Seat Me", but I guess that did not work out well.

This is so true of banning 3rd party software at most sites. Most of them are too incompetent or just unable to properly enforce these software restrictions. I have a little more faith in Stars's security. I would assume part of the reason it may not have been implemented sooner is because they knew they couldn't enforce it. Perhaps they are now more confident in their ability to do so.

Now we will have a stars thread that is full of scripting accusations (true and false) and people will just put a 3-5s random delay on their joining a table.

Atleast the R blocking tables will cease.

Even if the sites can't properly force these rules, it's still better that they put it to the TOS and say that breaking that rule may give you a long ban. Almost all of the regs are not willing to risk getting banned from stars/party by using a illegal product.

those ****ing R's everywhere with no possibility to sit down (fish included) cannot end soon enough..
they should make it impossible to reserve 5 seats or more and decline every minute or so

And giving an advantage to people who have no problem with breaking rules is good how?

The R thing is not a problem since they limited it to 2 reservations years ago, are we playing on the same site?
Also dont forget, even if they should actually manage to successfully ban ALL seating scripts, it will not make a difference, tables are still going to fill within 2 seconds as soon as a rec joins the table. This is the case on all sites that banned scripts and it even way the case years ago on PKR and no seating script ever exiszed for the site, bumhunters were just monitoring the tables themselves.
The only difference is that a few regs who follow the rules and dont want to manually monitor the tables (which probably wont even be possible because of people still using scripts) will be forced to battle in some high rake/no RB games.

Tell me if Im wrong.

The R thing is still a huge problem. Are you on the same site?

Be aware that this might not even be real.

There's still no mention of it on PokerStars' website with rules for this area: https://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/prohibited/

In addition, on the PokerStars blog where they previously said things about scripts they appear to have made no mention about this sort of thing since January 2017 - more than two years ago.

It seems unlikely to me that a company as professional and as committed to clear public communication would announce such important changes via unattributed statements to PokerFuse (or emails reported second-hand in Russian-language pages, which is where this first arose). Of course, it's certainly possible that it is real, I don't know.

Any professional plan to roll-out and communicate such things should properly and comprehensively communicate such changes to players. It would seem unreasonable to expect customers to check third-party news sites for rules changes like this.

I you suggesting we just fabricated quotes? That seems like the only alternative interpretation.

We all know you love Stars but this is a stretch even for you lol

Of course not. But why would a company only leak information like this through unidentified sources? Why wouldn't they properly announce it on their own website?

They obviously can't update legally binding terms of service and enforce it through private messages to third party media outlets, that's just clown town.

Like that person says, it's better to put the rule in the T&C's and try to enforce it as best you can, rather than not bother with the rule at all.

Think about what society would be like if you used your logic. "We can't stop this, this and this crime with absolute 100% certainty, so lets just not bother and create a lawless free-for-all society". I'm sure you realize how utterly silly your logic is.

It's really not "leak information." They emailed 3rd party software developers to let them know about some upcoming changes. A russian poker site picked up on that. We saw that, and reached out to PokerStars through official channels to see if they had a statement.

They then prepared a statement for us. I imagine if anyone else reached out to them, they would thus get the same statement.

Instead of prepare a statement, they could instead stonewall us, and get a public PR together. That has happened to us countless times before (with various companies)! The issue there is you do not foster a good relationship with journalists - next time, maybe they don't give you the heads up you're preparing a story and don't reach out for a statement.

So often they will give a statement exclusively to who asks for it. That is fairly standard practice.

They probably haven't done a blog post because one is not yet prepared, and/or as you say they want to do it in tandem with updating ToS.

We've talked about this "unidentified sources" thing before... it's really not as clandestine as you make out. It is pretty common in my experience that companies (in and outside of gaming) issue statements and request that they be attributed to an unnamed spokesperson or the company as a whole. Because, in reality, that's where the statement came from: Not one person saying a thing, but a department forming an official response t.

Even if they don't, we'll often put it that way, because it's rarely about the person giving the statement - they are words that speak for the company as a whole.

Hood- your comments make it sound like they're responding to events, when they're the ones who are creating and scheduling this whole thing. Of course, if you're responding to some external development, your explanation makes sense... but this isn't an external development. It's an internal thing that they've decided to communicate now, after 4+ years of working on it. It's not a surprise to PokerStars that PokerStars might (or might not!) be changing their rules.

a) The article is now a week old. Obviously, it doesn't take a week to properly make an announcement on their blog. At the very least, they could just republish their statement that they've already sent to you.

b) Quite apart from that, why wouldn't you arrange for public announcements to coincide (or at least immediately follow!) the alleged email to developers? Especially since that alleged email to developers was apparently sent in Russian.

It's not as if this is a new or surprising development, it's an entirely internal thing that they've allegedly been working on this for almost four-and-a-half-years

On a broader issue, it doesn't even make logical sense to communicate with developers first about changes to the PokerStars' terms of service, before communicating properly with players.

After all, developers aren't a party to the TOS, that's an agreement between PokerStars and the players. If you're going to change your enforcement of the TOS, you gotta tell the parties to that agreement, not other third-parties.

If there's an agreement between A and B, and A wants to change how that works, A doesn't need to tell person C about it. A needs to tell B (at least first - tell C as well, or later, if that's important)

Sure I mean you're entitled to your opinion, if you think stuff doesn't make logical sense, fine. But it is still the reality, seemingly logical or not.

You started with "this might not even be real" and that is what I dispute. What I'm saying is what happened The statement from them is real, and I don't see why they would lie about it, or make a mistake and then not retract it.

So - draw your own conclusions about PokerStars' internal processes all you like from that. But it is what it is.

Personally, I think they told 3rd party devs because they wanted to give them good notice, but felt players did not need such advanced knowledge and were working out the public-facing statements. Maybe there was some internal miscommunication, or they just felt coordination on this issue wasn't a problem.

You still havent sold me on an upside
Tables are still going to fill within a few seconds, at least at 1k+, I'd gladly bet on that
The only difference will be a few cheaters will be gaining a huge advantage
for breaking the rules.

And Pinkman, yeah, you maybe have to wait 30seconds somtimes, but its really not that bad
Remember that before the changes every table was reserveblocked for like 15 minutes?

Yeah its better, no one is saying its not. But its still absurd.

difference is regs without scripts will now have a shot at a seat at high stakes by monitoring the table

Just like regs without a script have a shot at at getting a seat on 888 by monitoring the tables?
And even if they did, I dont really see having some regs stare at empty tables for hours as an upside.