pretty sure this is why no plo zoom hu player has won the Nobel peace prize yet

I can't believe this has to be repeated, but it's 2016 guys. The gap between the strongest regs and the bumhunters who haven't worked on their game in 2 years is enormous, and that ALSO APPLIES WHEN PLAYING FISH. Fish lose at a vastly higher rate vs me than vs some random bumhunter (mainly because I can exploit them with a bunch of lines that bumhunters rarely take).

Zoom is in effect a very strict KotH, and fish lossrate will get even higher, making poker even less fun.

I hadn't even though about people forming a cartel and settle wins/losses after so they get to be in the pool with 0 variance, that makes this significantly worse than a strict KotH would be.

Need to just get rid of hu, when FTP and stars started that **** it gutted their high stakes and medium stakes lobbies. They're ****ing idiots for no getting rid of that **** sooner and completely imo especially after black friday.

This is truly a dumb post. If you cut the number of regs in half, you effectively double the number of fish relative to regs. If tables go from 4 regs and 2 fish to 2 regs and 4 fish, the fish will last much longer even if those regs start playing a slightly more exploitative style against the fish.

If you want to see what happens to the "poker ecosystem" when you limit winning players to 4 tables, look at Bovada.

Pretty funny that stars choose to tackle this before seating scripts which attack fish way worse.

I don't understand why the above is true. Why would a fish lose FASTER when he's playing a rotation of expert regs + middling regs (what happens in Zoom) than he would when he's playing ONLY against the expert regs who dominate all the HU tables in a KOTH format? What am I missing?

Probably because the bumhunters wouldn't be good enough to play in the zoom pool.

These won't exist in a zoom format. They do in KOTH.

Pretty much. Stars wants fewer pros and more recs. And it's their site.

If a fish sits 2kNL now he has a choice of 15 tables so lets just say its #1 to #15 at the stake (although at some times of day tables can be held by more bumhuntery players still giving him a better chance)

At Zoom the pool will consist of 4 tables from #1 reg, 4tables from #2 reg and possibly 4 tables from #3 reg. This making the game tougher than when he could sit the #15 reg or whatever

That's the worst part about this all. I don't know if you're a top 3 player, but if you're not then the first 3 people teaming up could even prevent a clear worldclass player like yourself from ever being able to play a +ev game @ Pokerstars.

Result: Even all worldclass but non elite regs can't play/practise anymore and will be forced to quit the game rather quickly. God a very small group of people must be celebrating right now.

Too bad Stars couldn't care less.

(and people please don't be naive, stuff like this is going to happen for sure)

So the guy who's made a career of buying and destroying companies with money from vulture capitalists has declared a "commitment to reducing predatory behaviour". No irony to see here, please move along.

Shout out to the short stacking shot takers

Albeit it is true, fish loserate is still waaaay above threshold that would make game playable and interesting for them. I mean -30bb vs "a reg" and -70bb vs you. So what's the difference? Money gone in 30 minutes (+/-5) anyway.

OK, maybe I understood how KOTH worked in practice; it was described above as a limiting of the # of tables that could spawn in the lobby...which I presumed meant that the ONLY players sitting alone at HU tables would be the upper echelon of HU players...but I suppose you're saying that even when the # of HU tables at a stake-level is capped, some of those sitting alone are still middling regs who haven't been unseated by crushers?

over a 300 hand sample, a -30bb winrate has 32% chance to win and a -70bb has 13%

what's the difference? ;-)

Does the mean the end of HU4rolz?

What's the difference between slot with payout of 32% and payout of 13%? No difference - slot with payout of 98% will get all customers.

Fish play for a good feeling of being able to win. Playing with a reg (any reg) he is deprived of it. Because if you run your sim for even 600 hands you will see it.

Just imo if we want to have some kind of poker in 3-4 years we should get rid of all cash games altogether, it's cancer.

its funny to me how bumhunters are considered to be bad players. a weak bumhunter reg on pl100 has lets say 8bb winrate. that means he beats the game by 25bb. is it his fault that rake is 17bb? what if stars increases the rake by 100% and noone wins anymore, does that mean we are all bad players?

I believe that instead of sitting here complainging to eachother, or organizing strikes to try to revert the changes, we should accept that Heads Up No Limit, from now on, will be zoom only. Pokerstars aren`t going to back down here. We should rather focus on steering Pokerstars in the right direction, and not only have them remove the regular tables, and do nothing else. The main additional change I`m asking for is to cap the max entries a player can have in the pool to 2.

We are all very aware that funplayers don`t multitable. You might get the occasional odd one out which playes 2 tables upon your request, but the reality is that HUNL funplayers are almost exclusively 1-tablers. So the question to ask is: What is going to happen when each reg can 4-table the pool? Lets say a funplayer sits at 500 zoom (a pool which is usually held by muumipoiss). What does Muumipoiss do? He instantly loads up 4 tables to make everyone aware that if they want in on the action, they better be prepared to 4table him. Any reg who wants to join and be profitable in the game must now have a winrate against the funplayer that is 5x as high as his lossrate vs muumipoiss (because only 20% of your hands will be played vs. the funplayer). And a good amount of people do meet this criteria. So quickly, another top reg, floppynuts09, loads up 4 tables. Now, any reg who wants to join profitably needs to have a winrate vs. the funplayer that is 9 times that of the lossrate vs. muumipoiss and floppynuts09. Suddently, the list of people who meet this criteria is getting quite short. The zoom pool is allready quite bad. And if a third top reg joins with 4 tables, surely the game is getting unplayable for just about anyone.

But wait, what if there are more than 1 funplayer in the pool? That can happen, right? Well, sure, in theory it could. The problem is that the funplayers that play will lose their money at a record speed rate, because they only get to play against the absolute elite players of that limit. Pokerstars are justifying the change by saying they want to eliminate predatory behaviour. Well, this will basicly be the single most predatory Heads Up format that could possibly exist. So the chance of having two funplayers in the pool at the same time seems quite low.

So how does capping the max entries per player at 2 fix this? It doesn`t ultimately fix it. All it does is increase the number of individual regs per funplayer, thus making the game softer and decreasing the "predatory nature of the game". It ensures that the funplayers get to face tier-2 regs. The delusional tier-3 regs, who correctly identified that playing in the "4x-muumipoiss, 4x-floppynuts09, 1xFunplayer" pool was -EV (identifying this is easy, right!), now have a larger chance of missjudging their expectation in the pool. Thus, the pool now stands a much larger chance of running with a bigger amount of entries (this attracts more funplayers btw!), and the funplayers will last longer.

Another potential good change is to add 2/4 and 3/6 zoom pools. This way, people who wish to play >2 tables have the opportunity to do so more often. It will also make it easier for regs who want to move up in stakes.

It`s time that we move the discussion onto something we actually stand a chance of doing something about.

ding ding ding.

And again, Amaya deserves no credibility for doing what's in their best interest because they have repeatedly done things to poker sites in the past that shot themselves in the foot and as a consequence, the players as well. If PokerStars grows, players/regs benefit and Amaya benefits. Their interests aren't always in line but not totally opposing forces either. If Amaya makes decisions that destroy the biggest poker site in the world, Amaya loses and players lose. They've shown enough incompetence in the managing of poker rooms to not deserve some 'smart guys making business decisions so accept it!' line. Obviously they are free to do what they want, but that is why so many people are so loudly opposing it in the possibly futile attempt to get them to see their stupidity and reverse course.

If FTP moved up relative to its competitors after their big software revamp, I'd say "yea, I didn't think it'd be good, I didn't like it, but they did good for themselves there." When FTP goes from 2 or 3 in the rankings to 11 in the span of less than 9 months since the changes were implemented with player numbers dropping dramatically basically overnight and continuing to wither, you should become pretty damn skeptical about their foresight and ability to manage a poker room.

All this talk about "data!" and how they have access to all these magical numbers we don't see which is why they know what's best is utter bull****. A depositing players reasons for depositing, what they enjoy, how much they value the ability to at least win sometimes, cannot be measured by simple numbers. A lot of this stuff is very complex and is basically not measurable with data.

When I first started I was losing for many years so I was a pretty standard recreational fish. You know how I chose which site I wanted to play on? Simple combo of which sites offered heads up as I thought that'd be the most fun (NBC HU for the win!) combined with which site had the best support/reputation. Amaya has destroyed the reasons I deposited on Stars in the first place and those reasons aren't in their data.

Open face NL anyone ?

important questions are getting raised

also this is clearly good for the games /iamverysmart

this. ppl should realize how imperative this change is asap, i don't see a single argmument why a lower table cap wouldn't be better for everyone other than one or two dozen individuals. if all hu cash action is zoom only, it's important to at least give the pools a chance to run on a regular basis!

Hilarious that they use the predatory behaviour line while still allowing scripting.