I am here to "battle for GGpoker" (while acknowledging issues that are present at the site be it PVI - as I stated earlier I am heavily affected by it, or that their security ain't perfect - neither is Stars's), because I have experience on both sites, and it's just sickening to see all the negativity regarding GG poker, when they are still the better option between the two operators.

If you can't make money on GG, it's very likely a skill issue, not because you are getting cheated. Pokerstars has a much worse playing environment outside of maybe MTTs (it historically had the nittier/stronger regulars on their site to begin with between all the pokersites), and it just got worse recent years with the constantly declining traffic.

Literally don't get how anyone can defend Pokerstars these days, after all the bullsh.t they pulled in recent years regardless if you are a recreational player or a regular.
Sh.t traffic, unreliable client, and their promotions are generally sugar-coated sh.t as well. They don't have PVI. That is literally the only thing going for them. And even with PVI, GGpoker offers comparable rakeback cause of Leaderboards/GGcare. Stars is simply not good.

Ironically while on social platforms GG gets all the slander, people are still ditching Stars and GG traffic is thriving, so I have to assume it's just a case of loud minority in most cases. The reality clearly doesn't reflect what you would assume from these threads/posts.

If we are talking about cashgames above the smallest stakes then it's a rake issue not skill issue. And don't really get it what you mean by sheet stars has done over the years. Ownership has changed like three times and the current one brought back base rb with the chests and personal challenges. When they noticed that the personal challenges didn't work they changed it again. I agree that aurora was a major fockup but I gues the intentions were good trying to make it more rec friendly like ggs client. Unfortunately the software dudes seem to be bunch of idiots.

Either site is nowhere near perfect but gg having the base rb program that doesn't return even half to majority to players is way bigger issue than any stars one. Yeah you can get more with gg but that doesn't change the fact that its shady as fock.

I also agree that trying to poach hs guys from gg by slashing the smaller stakes players rb is not the way to do it.

I have 9bb/100 at PLO50 R&C while raking above 16bb/100 over 120K hands. As I said, the games are beatable. Rake is high AF and PVI cuts my regular RB more than 50%. Still making more money than I would on Stars, especially with how bad Zoom pools are atm, if they are even running. If it weren't for the Leaderboards, then I would agree that it's not worth playing on GGpoker, but even with like 3 hours of 3 tabling a day, you generally make at least 10-15$/day on LB, which adds up to a pretty significant amount to your net winnings.

I am not exclusively talking about the last 1-2 years, but anything after the initial selling of Stars to Amaya. Obviously the insane 70% RB and the old RB system was unsustainable, no1 denies that as far as I know.
But Amaya and co literally started of their "work" by cutting RB in consecutive years (they also lied to people about SNE originally, and only after the huge backlash by even their own pros, did they partially revert the changes). They raised their rake on multiple occasions as well, and then eventually we got to the infamous Chest rewards, where after a short while you actually gained 1% RB if you were a winning player. Simply because Stars knew we have no better option than their site. At the time regardless of the changes, PS was by far the best, be it with traffic, series, or client.

Yes you could migrate to Partypoker if you were okay with a client full of bugs, uglier UI and the mass account-sharing Eastern-European regs taking most of the leaderboard money. They did not offer real competition to Stars, even with RB figures at Party being 40%+ compared to the 1% of Stars. And Stars ownership was fully aware.

I don't care who actually owns the site, most of the changes they made to their RB system since that time has been because they were reacting to the market, and started to see that they are bleeding customers, not because of their kindness or because they care about their players. Party improved a lot, and then GGpoker also showed up.

Even their current changes are due to the all time low traffic they have on their site, not because they care about you. It's simply PR talk, even you acknowledge that this attempt is simply not it (most players actually get less money).

If they actually cared, they would not offered unbeatable challenges over and over to most players (and we are not talking about stuff like you needed to grind 1.5x-2x your usual amount of hands, we literally talking numbers in 60-70K and above hands for non-professional players). But hey at least they could talk about how they are offering insane rakeback, despite most people not being able to clear their challenges without moving up in stakes or playing 24/7). Their challenges slightly improved when they started to offer weekly instead of monthly, but not by much. And you can be assured that change was also not out of kindness.

Their old client was literally the only thing keeping them above the rest, and they even managed to ruin that despite the mass negative feedback when Aurora was in test phase/non-mandatory. Kinda serves them right IMO.

It's what it is. I was playing on PS even with the 1% RB, because games were soft enough at the time (lot of nitty RB-regs left, and the pools improved a lot because of it), and you could easily get double digit winrates without having to worry about rakeback. There weren't really good alternatives either.

It's the same atm with GGpoker, difference is I am getting a lot more RB despite PVI than I did at Stars then, mainly due to Leaderboards. If a better option shows up, I am happy to jump ships, but current Pokerstars ain't it.
____
Anyway, wanted to say thanks for your post, because you are about the first person here with actual arguments, while acknowledging issues on both ends. We might not agree, but was refreshing to read it compared to the rest.

Cheers mate. Agree to disagree is the polite way to do things.

Can someone explain what made the aurora update so bad / hated? I didn't really play back then

i think for some people aurora had a lot of glitches and players were really fond of the hyper simple theme which was removed on aurora. Some handy options vanished too. There were also lots of cases where cpu under aurora was extremely high while this didnt happen before.

Rip just missed last ~5% of chest and got sent back and reset. Should of checked the timings

Sent from my XQ-AS52 using Tapatalk

yes and thats why regs wins more on every other rooms than GG xD pls just don´t write anymore cuz you have no idea about poker

What a compelling argument Cap. You even dropped an "xD", it's hard to argue with that one.

ya you can your missing the point

Bit of a false promotion really. Stupidly difficult to rake 50k-100k on stars at 1k+ due to table cap and 0 games running. It's effectively just a 3 month promotion until u can't rake enough and move you off it.

Lower stakes people saying they had their rb reduced to improve the rb of highstakes guys which isn't the case due to above.

Some people grinding 500z again but that will die soon once they realised they're not winning, even with this tiny increase in rb.

Removing table cap or increasing it would fix so much for games running etc.

Tonight i rcvd a $20 free sports bet in the time i would have rcvd roughly 3 $1 bets,whatever u did stars.... im good with it glgl

FYP.

You have absolutely no idea how hard top regs are printing in ggpoker post-rb.

"But their PVI crushes them, yadda yadda".

You think every top reg of NLH cash games is doing insane amounts of volume on that site just to get scammed?

plz.

well if you look at the database sites, every top50 regs (with a bit of volume, so gg superusers & chipdumping excluded) from micro to mid stakes, stars regs have way bigger profits and winrates than GG regs

wish I moved to gg after party...
better late than never

500NL and above are quite dead today (till now). Omaha is even worse. Yup, they failed.

Transparency should be obligatory. In the end they just did the most basic thing and expected us to applaud them for that.

Chests should have never existed, they had the chance to kill it for once and for all, but that would be -EV for them.

God i Hate those chests. I would rather have rake decreased and not have any RB at all.
They want to give me 10 dollars like I live on the streets or something.

In that case, wouldn't it be easier to just lower the rake?

Was looking at PLOzoom out of curiosity early afternoon, they finally managed to get PLO100 running at least somewhat stable, but both that and PLO50 was at sub20% VPIP. There isn't really a RB deal that makes me want to play in those games. F*cking nitfest.

Almost 8PM and PLO200 still not running on a weekend. Stars looks finished ngl.

Stars should:

-Remove the table cap
-fix the software ffs
-stop caring about laws like GGpoker
-offer better rakeback

I highly doubt that the owners even care about competing against other sites. They are still living in 2016 where they had the monopoly.

just give everyone 40% rakeback cash paid to a piggy bank that one can click a "REDEEM" button to put the cash into the balance whenever they want. this rakeback paid out every day. no stupid chests having to fill out bars, no stupid levels to move up, no stupid "new and better system" every other year that really just focks things up, just straight up 40% rakeback cash forever. thats my dream

Games are dead because there are not enough fishes to sustain them. There are not enough fishes because it is too hard to deposit reasonable sums in a lot of wealthy countries, and rich VIPs are more likely to come from wealthy countries than poorer ones. Also, too much bad publicity for online poker recently due to cheating, and the way sites (the ones who care) handle this is more or less to wait until other regs discover what is going on and make it public. Which is the worst possible way to do it as it will show up here, in poker news sites, youtube, then on the search engines, and all of this because sites do not want to spend money on proper internal policing.

Thinking those midstakes games would run on 100% regs just because of rakeback, longterm, is absurd.

swedish players can not get rakeback on pokerstars, right?

Nope, because Swedish regulations prohibit it.

We can get RB on GG, though, because GG are smart enough not to care about regulations.

This is what all of us want , fug even 25% with that system would be a quadrillion times better than their stupid chests system

ive been reading their discord promo channel for the past 3 months

My impression is their leadership are the type to sit at a red light in bum**** montana for 5 minutes at 3am knowing there is no camera.

Either this or use the "law" as an excuse to gaslight their players into thinking its bc of the "law" and not an excuse to put more pennies into their piggy jar.

The chances of updating their 10-20 year behind software has a 0% chance of happening.

They just have no vision for innovation. I called them out for this and obviously get those messages deleted and then timed out.

They also like to hire people that spend more time running internal data and theorizing about optimal programs (which so far they have failed miserably cough challenges or cough cutting 60% rb to 25% rb and trying to pass it off as better) rather than just taking the customer service mindset of giving players what they ask for.