Always wanted to believe DN was a lot smarter and more in touch than all the evidence suggested. This is probably the straw that finally breaks that camel's back.

Right now, it seems that everyone has become divisive on what is and isn't good for poker. Players play with different motivations whether fun or fun and profit. The goal IMO is to find a way to keep everyone happy as we are all customers. It is a big mistake to think that just because someone is a pro player that they are not a customer in the same way that a recreational is.

Pokerstars could do some things to improve the ecosystem by stopping the pro players who are highly predatory within the system using seating scripts, etc. There are things to improve on both sides.

It is pretty obvious that this new game type is here to stay so I think the argument needs to go from banning it to reducing variance so that everybody wins. This would help the players playing for fun and profit and the ones playing just for fun. Telling the recreational players that the game they currently find fun and think they have a huge chance at winning huge prizes should be banned will only create a big pushback because it creates a division between customers and their motivations. Telling them that this new game can be improved so that they don't get stuck with 2x prize pools all the time will help the argument and all players involved. Showing some variance calcs of recreational player graphs where they play like 200 of these in comparison to 200 of them in 6 max hypers may help the argument towards reducing variance. Recreational players aren't thinking about the fact that a higher % of them will wind up worse off with spin & go than in other game types. They are only thinking of that 30k and how fun this game is. This type of thinking is also highly profitable for Pokerstars which is a company trying to make a profit. The game is too new to get people pissed off at how they only ever got that 2x multiplier. The only way to get through the divide is to try and show how it helps everyone to reduce variance in the game. After all, poker is a game of skill with variance and rake added in but if those last factors are too high then you get gambling and that is what has happened here.

I get that players who make a living off of poker are pissed off but by wanting to outright ban this it will only create divisions between pros and recs. When has banning things outright ever worked in the world? Why not focus the effort on improving the new format for everyone which IMO is reducing variance, while at the same time keeping the jackpot essence that recreationals(and regs may) find so fun.

I like how all the winning players claim they "contribute" a lot to stars in terms of rake. In the most simple form: Stars profit = deposits - withdraws. If you don't deposit, you don't make them money, simple as that, the money has to come from somewhere.

The only way this ecosystem would start changing a bit would be if all of a sudden fish wouldn't have anyone to play against. Whether there are 10, 100 or even 1000 regs waiting on 3/6 hu cash tables is irrelevant. Even if 90+% of all winning players would leave, the only thing that would happen would be fish playing fish more, which would even be a good situation for stars given that it's better to have 2 people close in terms of skills battling one another, than 1 fish donking all his money away in 20 hands which would be barely raked. So yes, winning players aren't really great for poker sites. They just offer action at any time for bigger format structures but that's about it.

There are already games for crazy people.

They are called MTTs.

If I were still a hyper/super turbo reg I wouldn't like this much either. Don't know they can do anything about it though.

Not sure how this shakes out on pokerstars end though. I'd imagine people who hit the jackpot will withdraw a high percentage of the time.

Again it is zero sum which so many people are failing to get. Boot the regs that you call non important and all of a sudden some of the better fish become winners taking money out of the ecosystem. So all you have done is kept the status quo while shrinking the number of players paying rake. So much stupidity itt it makes my head hurt. The only upside is that the quality of play will be such that people have more hope of making miracle runs and breaking into poker like the old days.

I didn't hear much outrage when stars introduced these formats:

6 max sngs
Turbos (although tbf, they were always there)
Hypers,
HUSNGS
DoN (until the large cheating scandals)
18 man, 27 man, 45 man, 180 mans

All of these take away the donks/fish from the "real" 9 max reg speed SNGs not to mention increased rake % and increased variance.


Also, DNEGZ coming in and introducing the worst post of all time. How about you give your millions you are "earning" to the new players of the game. What a complete sellout.

These are all grindable formats. I don't care if fish migrate to another for of poker, I can learn any form of poker and follow as I have done several times already. When they move to a game that isn't grindable long term it creates a whole different problem.

Nobody was suggesting to boot the regs, just exlaining why the 85 % losing players are way more important than the winning players, and in particular way more important than the large volume players. You said it yourself, its a zero sum game.

Serious question: Why are they not grindable? I did not see any calculations yet, but I doubt variance is going to be larger than in MTTs.

really wish someone would embed this, v much enjoyed rewatching the clip

There are several simulations done in the stt forum that show exactly. Basically the 2x games aren't beatable for obvious reasons, most of your profit relies on how well you run in the top 3 payout games, which you will only have about 80 per year. So you could play perfectly, run bad in those 80 games and 10 years could go by before you reach your expectation. The sim showed that after 500k games (like 4 years of grinding) you could be as much as 10k buy ins under ev which is absolutely absurd.

This.

As I said in the OP, no one doubts that Spin & Gos are in the long run as profitable or maybe even more profitable than any other format - the problem lies within the fact that in Spin & Gos you could easily be unbelievably more off the expected winrate than in any other previous poker format, to the extent that one can't simply playing those for a living.

With regards to variance, think MTT-style variance but much lower attainable ROIs. For a given amount of variance in a game, a lower ROI equates to more frequent and severe downswings.

So.. like hyper SNG and Hyper HUs where you can go on 3-700 buy-in downswings and have a 1-3% ROI?

No, much, much worse than that.

PokerStars have to cheat with this format, no one knows how much money they make!!!

grindable...

this is exactly the player i dont want to play with.

i would rather play with others..just for the fun of it.

i'd rather donate my Money to an amateur having a good time, than give it to some grinder with 24 tables and HUD'S and what ever they use to "cheat " us fish.



and must say..tha attitude of the "grinders"towards this spinngo..makes me feel it even stronger.

If you're going on 700 bi downswings at husngs you probably have a leak or two to plug.

What about in hyper 6-9max?

(Forgive me, I don't play Hypers, Just going off reports on what I read here, where 300 buy-in downswings at 180s happen to regs)..

This is why I think the ecosystem needs to be cleaned up of predatory players with seating scripts, etc. Nobody can fault a recreational player from feeling overwhelmed by all the predatory ways some players choose to squeeze every cent out of the ecosystem and I can see how it can look and feel as though it isn't fair.

When you donate the money to an "amateur" that means you are donating it to a player better than you but in your mind the "amateur" is a player that plays without the use of "cheating" tools and so you do not feel you were treated unfairly?

Reduce the variance in this game and clean up the ecosystem of predatory strategies and the whole customer base wins. Poker needs to remain a skill game where players can win if they are good enough because that is the main draw in the first place.

When it comes to being able to play these games for a living I can only imagine the book needed to mentally handle that the majority of your winnings will come from 80 tournaments out of 100,000 you played in the year. Jared Tendler might have to write a new book called "Mental Game of Impossible".

Not sure about 6 max, would imagine variance is a lot fiercer than heads up. 700 bi seems high but I wouldn't know.

ban the huds, seat scripting/all software and block the stat tracking sites and the lesser players will still lose but they wont be swallowed whole instantly and might actually enjoy playing again even though theyre losing players. dnegs whatdya think would happen if stars did this, would the online poker eco system improve?

If they wouldve made they prizepooldistrubtion a bit different, they would`ve been grinderfriendly. Now unless you don`t mind losing or playing break even over a long period of time you shouldn`t be grinding these. An other possibilty would be to have a group of people sharing winnings. But you can`t trust gamblers so that`s kinda stupid as well.

So basically you hate anyone who plays poker for a living, which makes you just as biased as the players you're attacking if not more so.

in 6 max hypers 1k BI under EV is possible. In Spins 10k BI under ev is possible. It's no comparison.