if these are not tracked on sharkscope etc how do we know they are paying out what they say there are in jackpots? who audits stars? seems like the perfect way to be skimming $

^

So you're aggrieved that the implementation of Spin & Go is impacting on your games (or buy in to be even more specific) but would be fine if the "problem" was instead only dumped at lower stakes for now?

Don't you see how insular and flawed that line of thought is?

I've found this : rake taken from prize pool according to buy in. Is there the normal rake, also, of 3 + .30 , etc...

http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/spin...nternal&utm_so

The player pool for most games is substantially larger at those stakes. Not many players that are trying to complete SNE are playing those stakes. It was suggested as an alternative that could have been taken to lessen the immediate impact.

the rake is whatever they want. these games are not tracked and it would take a **** load of players monumental samples to investigate for anything untoward so stars can skim whatever they want

To lessen the immediate impact on a certain segment of players who play above certain stakes, sure.

Larger player pools granted, but there are doubtless a lot of players living in countries of much lower living costs that are playing those lower stakes yet are just as tied into the VIP program and achieving Supernova or multiples of 100k VPP by end of year as those playing higher.

It's the same all the way down the scale, either you disagree with adding them now or you don't. Saying "well if you leave my games alone and just dump it on these other guys for now that'd be fine I guess" is insular, flawed and selfish thinking.

In short, the VIP program isn't solely about SNE's.

The set of people who win the lottery make much more than the company running the lottery. This doesn't mean they are running the company wrong. It's actually totally fine. If you think of online poker as a tool that poker players use it makes it easier to understand.

Winning consistently and withdrawing consistently shouldn't be seen as killing the poker economy. There is nothing wrong with winning big. Players are only trying to do what PokerStars is doing - profit from poker players.

Maximizing profits is what any reasonable poker company would do. The Poker economy is extremely complex. Understanding how VIP changes would affect profits is no simple task. Because if VIP programs are lowered significantly it would become more profitable for a number of players to stop playing poker and have another career outside of poker instead. But I'm not here to speculate on how VIP changes affect things, I can't do that because I don't have any statistics to work with (I don't know how much PokerStars pays out etc).

If Spin N' Go's do bring in more players into the site then that's great. But if all they do is split up regs from recs, the economy is much the same.

Below are the simulated results of a player grinding $7 Spin and Gos with 5% ROI. (Win 36.67%, I don't know if this is a realistic number.) The player's EV is shown in red. Each plot is 100k games.

The first plots show results for the format shown on the Pokerstars site. The second set of graphs show what results might look like if Pokerstars removed the 200x and 1000x multipliers (while keeping the rake 4%).

Though quite infrequent, the occasional 200x and 1000x multipliers do add a lot of variance to a player's long term winnings. On other other hand, I imagine this format is quite appealing to the recreational player. Is it worth it?

The ideal situation for PokerStars is having one losing player at each table with the rest of the players being regulars. This maximizes the number of tables running, whereas if you have 2 or more recreational players at a table, it is suboptimal because they could be the mark at two different tables. Without winning players there would be far fewer games running and less rake generated.

The VIP system encourages regulars to play as high volume as possible, so the site has as high of a regular:recreational player ratio at each table as possible.

Daniel Negreanu, before posting you should try to at least backup your words with some data. What you're saying here is a complete lie and it's totally disproportionate. It's a shame a person like you make these kind of ****ty posts.

For your information the poker companies make MUCH MORE MONEY THAN THE WINNING PLAYERS.

There are clowns everywhere.

Wow true, never thought of this

Next year all supernova elites will be making it through this game, hitting sick jackpots and all will be good !

In 2016 people will making supernova\ supernova elite playing blackjack \ darts\ bingo\ roulette, and it will be all good.

It´s called evolution.

YES! extremely well put. such an important point that's often over-looked because it's a bit on the theoretical/intangible side

You don't seem to understand that what is raked is depositors' money. The amount of available money to rake is always and only the amount deposited by fish.

I deposited $20 many moons ago. I've never put in more than that. Once Stars had raked away $20 from me, I contributed nothing at all to the poker economy however you look at it.

For your argument to win, you need to show that having a bunch of sharks who bleed fish dry actually encourages fish to play. At high stakes, possibly you can argue that -- no regs means no games for whales to piss their money away in. Down at the lower levels, no way.

did you put in any hours?

generate any ev?

have it diverted to rake?

if you happen to be a 9% roi tournament grinder, you have cashed out the same amount off your effort that you paid stars for the privilege of playing there

.

This is obviously why Stars has lucrative VIP programs: regs increase the velocity of money in the system.

Perhaps Stars feel that the new regs will take less money out overall, I don't know. Possibly they feel that the new winners will cash out less and they will long term rake more? Possibly they feel the fish will deposit more if they feel there's a bit more gamble and they are not just ATMs for the guys who slow down all the games they play in?

I wonder whether you understood what I was saying. Regardless what I won or what rake I paid, both the money I won and the rake I paid was a depositor's money. I didn't contribute it. I took it from other players.

There are two distinct concepts here: Gabe is wrong because regs do not pay anything (relatively) into the system; Thrash is right because they increase the velocity of the money inside the system.

I'm well aware Stars made money from my efforts in the sense you are intending. But it wasn't my money.

The situation is similar to Ongame's Essence (cashback allocation system introduced by the same Amaya). It was officially audited. Of course regs are getting significantly less under this system than under the weighted contributed one, but there's a selection bias - those who're getting more (recreational players) are silent either because they don't post on forums or because they're ashamed to acknowledge that Essense favours them and face a lot of outrage from regs.

So it's up to personal beliefs whether to play on Ongame or not. Some regs do play cash games there and don't complain because the field is softer (due to the shift that Essence has forced operators and affiliates to make towards attracting rec players) and they earn significant amounts even excluding cashback.

Likewise, it's up to every player to decide personally to believe or not in the fairness of prize pool distribution in Spin & Gos. But had it not been audited, it wouldn't have got special (!) approval in regulated countries (Spain, France, Italy) and, I think, wouldn't have got approval in such a rigorous jurisdiction as Isle of Man.

No. If this statement was true, there wouldn't be any casinos.

What kills games are small standard deviations relative to the expectation that top players can achieve. In simple English, bad players need to have enough winning sessions to keep them interested in playing and to make the games more fun for them. When this is not the case, the games tend to die. An example would be deep stacked no-limit hold 'em.

This of course assumes there are plenty of players to start games and keep games going. But this is something that regular players do, and most of them are winning players (though some might not win much). Thus if poker games become structured so that the luck factor is too high relative to the win rate, they can collapse as well.

Many years ago, I once told a well known poker room manager that if he really wanted to have a successful poker room, he should take all his promotion money and give it to the ten worse players he could find, and then the room would fill up.

But what is happening now is not anywhere near as simple as Negreanu describes. My understanding is that there are many players on the Internet who actually win little if any, but put enough time in that the bonuses they earn make it worth their time to play, and thus these people start games and keep them going.

But what this really means is that the games may be structured wrong. That is the bad players lose too often, and thus quit playing. And by the way, this is nothing new to the Internet. Poker rooms in California have had an insane prop system for years where some of their customers pay way too much in rake, and some of their customers, the props, get all their rake back plus a little more.

Many years ago, Donna Harris and I wrote a paper called "Cardroom Theory -- A Two-Way Street --." We certainly didn't see things this way, and once you understand that regular players, which include the pros, are needed to start games and keep games going, this is certainly not the case. (This paper has been run in our Internet Magazine and is also available in my book Poker Essays: Volume II.)

While this is partially right, if the regular players aren't there, the rec players won't have any games to participate in. The idea that it is all pros, or all rec players, is wrong. What's right is that these two groups actually work together (even if most are not aware of this) and that the poker room needs to create an environment for this to happen.

Based on direct conversations that I've had with PokerStars management, they are well aware of the issues which I address above and understand the "two-way street" nature of poker. Perhaps this has something to do with why they have been so successful.

Mason

It's in your account, it is your money.

It could be argued that losing players don't pay the rake at all. Fish deposits $25 and joins a $25NL table, shoves first hand and I call and win the hand, he loses $25 and I win $23ish. Bastard got away withou paying any rake.

Hi bhoylegend:

In higher stakes live games, there's often something called a time pot where the winner of the pot pays the rake for all players for the next half hour. In this case, the fish, on average, will pay more than his share of rake since (the fish) by playing too loose is more likely to win the pot. So it can also work the other way.

Best wishes,
Mason

So all winning players are created equal?

lol@ a bunch of people who do everything possible to ruin poker games as a result of their own greed complaining about a business being greedy.
pokerstars exists to make pokerstars money, the fact we can make money in the process is a happy byproduct. if they could rake more with ****ing tic tac toe they would.

i understand people being upset if something impacts them negatively financially but that doesn't make what's happening in anyway unjust.

and most fish don't play poker bc it's possible to make money at it. if that were true pit games and slots would have as many customers as typical poker rooms and poker rooms would have as money customers as pit games and slots do now.