Amaya drops all the tours and changes them to Pokerstars tours. Then they get reduced amount of players since the change. They continue to push their best customers out the door to other sites. I'm from Canada, the Baazov family are a bunch of crooks to begin with. Anytime I mention their name people cringe. Pokerstars just dropped most of their sponsored players except for the ones on twitch. More money for non poker player endorsements.

We're going to have to agree to disagree i guess

Wow this is gonna collapse so hard (hopefully)

It is a free market, players are free to move to other competitors (there are plenty). Pretty normal that they focus on long term profitability (don't know if offering casinogames helps though). I do believe that they are doing good job "protecting" the recs which is definitely important for the game in the long run.

Sure, recs will benefit from the possibility that regs switch sites. Whether or not that gain outweighs the rake changes remains to be seen. As the current regs leave, new winners emerge, and are target to the adverse rake changes (which we still don't know in full detail). It's a vicious cycle of slaughtering whoever happens to be good enough to win in the current climate. GG pokerstars, it was fun playing there.

Protecting the recs as in making sure their money goes directly to amaya instead of being split between amaya + winning players?

Do recs enjoy seeing amaya make money or what is your point here? Also I think encouraging bum hunting by making it impossible for break even regs to make $$$ with rakeback is the opposite, makes recs even more of a target. You see like 30 people wait lists on tables with 1-2 fish at 5/10+

If the players drop dramatically would it change something? Can we do something? Or we just gonna sit and see the rape of poker?

Last attempts to boycott the raping proved that players aren't willing to stand up against Amaya enough. So they'll just get ****ed again for their short-sightedness.

Yep. Sad part about the last boycott was a few euro regs cleaning up the tables in the absence of other strong regs who had participated in the boycott. Needless to say those same euro regs will see their livelihoods crushed just like everyone else thanks to their greed.

That show how small we are as community and how much recs play on stars everyday and they try to milk them

I would suggest another boycott, but in general poker players are selfish and they won't follow a boycott because they only see online poker as a last opportunity meanwhile it lasts to make some extra money that won't change anyone's life. How I wish our community were strong enough to pursue our interests as a whole. Amaya is well aware of this and just capitalizing on it.

It's already dropped significantly, but Pokerstars justify this by saying that there are more players seeing flops

Well RIO poker one time then

Enjoy making a living out of this game while you still can, we're all gonna be ****ed in a few years anyway, Stars is just speeding up the process.

The severity of the cuts wasn't very surprising considering Amaya had liquidity problems earlier this year as they failed to meet their deadline of $220m payment to Scheinbergs. (https://www.gamblinginsider.com/news...erstars-owners - gotta love the random comment at the bottom) I wonder if balances are still segregated

LOL

you already had to go through a daily mental gymnastic session to mentally justify to yourself why playing on pokerstars is a good move. No reasons whatsover to not play on a smaller website now

I got to hand it to stars they got balls it could go very very wrong for them especially if party poker don't **** up their new vip system (im sure they will, wouldnt be impressed if they took a similar path)

It won't be that bad for most players though. If you do your daily/week reward/missions and leave instantly when you get it, you will get far more than 5% (20ish prob). It's just for people who play a ****ton. They will prob get 0% rb for most of their volume. At least it's what I think

They adopted 888 poker system basically. It prob won't be as ****ty it's hard to imagine anything being worse than 888poker '''''vip''''' system

I think the optimal rb strategy in the future lean toward playing on 4-5 different websites

GG all... it's been emotional

Has anyone been following the financials closely to report on how Amaya/Stars is doing overall and the chance of some sort of future Baazofaclypse resulting in a sale?

On the positive side Phil Galfond very much has the attitude/acumen of the Scheinberg's in the early days of PokerStars and has every incentive to keep the dream and poker as a game of skill alive, so let's hope RIO poker is willing to do that and think longterm for the sake of the game.

a 5 year old could have predicted this would happen.

how is this any different from all the things regs have done over the years that made them more money in the short term to destroy the games long term?

amaya and most regs only care about their own bottom lines and are blinded by short term greed.

anyone who thinks they'll be making a good living from online poker in 5-10 years is a complete moron.

Sorry Dave, but as Ponty said your perception is all wrong.

As is this, of course. There is no such thing as "protecting the fish." Losing players are losing players. PERIOD. Any funds that are diverted from winning players to losing players are simply taking a detour on their way to Amaya. (Technically it's not 100%, as some of that money returns to the winning players, but it's not too far off.)

Find stars' accounting and link it here, in one day I can go over it and reply with my analysis of how well the company is going.

When we've found out about the upcoming changes this morning:

You dont get rake back playing in a live casino, so what makes you guys think you should get rakeback playing online?

Just be happy you had it so good for a long time.

Welcome to the real world!

Good thing casinos don't have comps for frequent players....oh wait.

Of course you do if you play table games, im referring to poker though in which you get nothing!