Quote:
Originally Posted by haadgi
Rake backs great and all but I think the legitimacy of the site is more important to many players, I feel pretty confident having my money on stars, I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving anymore than a few quid on GG
I don't think there is a difference between either in this regard. The risk of your money being on either site is,
A: Your account get's breached (which either assumes that GG doesn't secure account details properly - with the amount of people playing on their site, I can assume it's a high priority of them. Or simply your fault for not having proper security measures setup, In which case you are just as safe on either site).
B: Company goes belly up like Full Tilt and funds disappear (very unlikely to happen to the market leading site).
There is one comparison I can give though: Since Aurora update on Stars, I had multiple occasions/days where my hands would simply not load in/display despite being in the hand. I could not choose any action and simply was sit out in the process. This has happened to several regulars in the pool while I was playing (assuming them timing out constantly by them was also from a similar issue). This was occurring with reasonably low active player numbers on the site as well. Or their client/server simply stopping.
I never had anything similar at GG poker in about 6-7 months so far. Few days ago I had a moment where the connection to the server was lost for about 2 minutes. That was the biggest issue I faced with the site. Other than this, only micro freezes for few sec and they aren't that frequent.
You can draw your conclusions from this regarding which site is reliable/safe.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GazzyB123
But how do they do it?! It's mind boggling
I can speak of this regarding Hungary: GGpoker doesn't have a sportsbook. The government went heavy on anything that does betting without an official Hungarian license (the native regulation is BS to begin with, to cater to the oligarchs favoured by them), and basically banned every single site that offers betting.
Atm most of them managed to setup a new alternative link to access them, and the PS client ran even when you could not open their webpages (even allowing updates). Don't know how long they will operate like this, I know they pulled out of a few countries recently because of similar issues, but at the same time Hungary never really enforced regulations against foreign sites beyond the initial website bans, so they probably know that they are fine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Maximus122
If GGPoker was banned in China, Russia or another country it wouldn't be catastrophic for them at all.
Pokerstars segregated Portugal, France and Spain into Pokerstars EU and they created a separate PokerStars Italia site, because there are very high tax rates on online gambling in those countries and they didn't want to increase the rake further on Pokerstars.com.
This right here.