Oh... I don't see why that matters to me haha. Unless it's to motivate me to click start on my own card or something.

Did anything really get added though apart from fancy new pictures? I didn't click around much so I might have missed something.

Why would people pay for porn when it's available free ?
Hey, funny enough, porn's industry still make huge profits

I've always theorized that the dark secret of the gaming industry is that the reason that damn near everyone plays is to win. Take the money out of slots and you might still have some kind of sparse, fickle market. But you wouldn't have enough to pay one day of the yearly electric bill at 10% of America's casinos. Easily, 99 percent of people aren't naturally inclined to the cold rationalism necessary to properly chart out and wade through the sensory-overload swamp that is casino gambling. To them, being that way is as unnatural as jumping out of a plane. To the average person, Crude stereotyping, not actuarial mathematics, are the basis of their decisions, gambling included. Scale naturally confounds probability. That BIG cat is REALLY dangerous. That BIG jackpot will make someone REALLY rich. People win at Foxwoods ALL THE TIME. I see it with my own eyes. I can win too.

You could win the $4,000,000 progressive jackpot. That's a lot of money. That's exciting. And you can't win if you don't play. That kind of money will change your life. Your problems, to the one, will evaporate. The motivation of gamblers is directly proportional not to the EV or the utility of gambling-as-entertainment, but to the payoff, and the perceived frequency of wins. Everyone plays to win.

To some this may seem mildly controversial, to others obvious or even boring. But the point is to acknowledge it as a dirty secret, as opposed to a white lie, because it follows that the business of a casino is, fundamentally, to facilitate the gambler's self-destructive delusion - that they can win in any meaningful way. Most gamblers simply do not or cannot grasp the statistical nature of what they're doing or that, even if they were to get rich, the bad bet was still a bad bet. They're still a sucker, even though they may have happened to win.

None of this is the slightest bit new. But the point is that they all want to win. A gambler's motivation, i.e. demand for the product, is directly proportional to the payoff + the perceived frequency of wins + the credibility of the casino. That's why casinos make such a big deal of advertising big slot winners - it increases the perceived frequency of wins. It also enhances the casino's credibility. Most casinos in the United States enjoy almost perfect credibility with their clientele. The players believe, with near certainty, that they won't be cheated and that they'lll be paid should they win. Online casinos have struggled with that term in the equation.

What does this mean for Amaya? Again, look at the equation. Motivation = payoff + perception of frequent winners + house credibility. What's the payoff for the bulk of Stars' cash games? What's the credibility of a company that takes two weeks to answer emails, because they had to cut into operating expenses to service debts, and allows Russian gangsters to more or less openly run $5m bot rings?

I haven't said anything new here that wasn't said by October 2014. TL;DR Stars had the global rights to Coke and tried to turn it into a motel chain.



They bought a company for $5B because they're a hammer getting paid by the nail.

The money in porn right now is funneling people to sites like ImLive, ********** and dating sites. Basically, the pay sites are promising them some version of the "real thing". What's the "real thing" in a poker universe where no one can win? The analogy is not really helpful.

LOL @ thinking that this reward-system will make anyone happy but Amaya (in the short term obv as in the long run i'm very sure they will lose big on this). The idea isn't that bad, but implementation a desaster due to Amaya being incredible greedy. Amaya is giving out daily pennies and once every 10yrs you might hit something big. Do you seriously believe that this very group of players will hang around that long before moving on elsewhere?!

https://www.uspoker.com/blog/pokerst...rewards/17621/

amaya is going to be fine

i paid about 1000$ of rake in 2 years at nl2-nl5-nl10. so they need about 70 micro players per supernova leaving. atm the ratio must be 140 micro players/ 1 sne

imo, VHS rental doesnt exist anymore because of technology not because of the model in itself. without Netflix and torrents we would see GameCube type of disc rental or something.

its true that the pool is over fished. maybe prohibit multitabling for micro stakes but im a micro multitabler myself so i will hate it.

It's not as simple as this. If you're a net withdrawer, you didn't provide any of the money that has been raked, only acted as a vehicle through which it was able to pass to the site, while simultaneously reducing the amount of rakeable money in the system via your withdrawals.

Yes, thats true.

I was a net withdrawer too. Now that me and the guy i quoted are out, what will happen next ? The game will be easier and two players will take our places at the winning players but without the nice rakeback.

Less traffic too, because the guy and me leaving. So, i guess they need about 40 new players to vehiculate the money because i was playing 26 tables and the SNE guy too, I imagine.

I'm not sure how this will end up... seems like a risky strategy. The only way to get rid of winning players is to put the rake really high and if this point come, poker will not be poker anymore and will be just another 'burn your money' casino game.

Ok, i'll stop correcting trololol posts after this.

Porn industry got into HUGE trouble by the availability of free amateur and professional porn thru ad-financed websites within the last 20 years. This is despite porn is accepted by a way bigger percentage of society today as something not-shady in relation to 20 years ago and customers being as easily reachable as never before directly at their homes instead of having to walk into a shop, watching no one sees em etc. pre internet. That comparison is just awkward.

I don't know why people are still answering to ShowMeUrAce, he is clearly not the smarket cookie in the basket.

I am more interested in how big the differences in "personalized RB" will be for players with similar volume and the factors that go into this.

If I play the same volume and stake as player 2 but I am a larger winning player pre-RB, will my RB be worse @Stars?

In my opinion, this is a borderline scam. An industry like online poker should try to be as transparent as possible in their communication with regards to money, rewards and benefits. I would argue that if it isn't clear how these rewards are calculated, it's a case for the gaming regulation.

this...

The dirty thing is just that. Amaya says players will receive 100 points for each euro with this "fantastic" new vip system, but if it does not tell us how many points are needed to reach the chests !!

What?????

Friends this means bad faith!
Amaya thinks all players are stupid but they will pay huge this mistake because u cant treat all your clients like perfect idiots.

Short term: huge better profit margin
Long term: collapse traffic ...the regs that allowed rec to play will change pokeroom/open less less table.

100% agree.

It was already a borderline scam what happened in 2014.
The VIP System was heavily marketed (by Scheinbergs before obv, but also by Amaya when they bought the site) and it was designed very top heavy, s.t. u get >70% eff. rb with SNE but a large chunk of it is earned at the end of the grind, when actually reaching 1 Mio VPP.

Based on this, a lot of ppl planned to reach SNE which is a full-time job for the year, for most ppl with lots more hours invested into studying+playing than at a regular 9-5 job with 15-30 free days / year. This was fairly plannable for several years and seemed to satisfy both the grinders and the site.
Now at 3/4 of the year, Amaya introduced Spin & Gos to the main site which they knew would heavily affect traffic at 6-9m hyper sng, the games where SNE was most "easily" achievable with. They knew that in advance, since they ran a tester in spain which is a huge market as well.
So they effectively robbed players who were at 500-800k VPP a lot of their profits from a VPP System they were heavily advertising and binding customers for at least TWO YEARS (one to reach SNE, one to fully profit from the >70% RB).

This tactics is called bait & switch and is considered illegal in several countries. They could've just launched Spins on main site at 01.01.2015 and it would've been a fair deal.
It's essential for online poker as a whole to have transparency and good public info about any relevant stuff going on, since poker has a shady image for quite a lot of ppl and gambling laws are so different around the world.

lol We just jumped the shark and went into full on consperency theory territory. Spin's were a targeted attack on SNE's? Really?

Most beginning players dont start this low (just think about it).
Most first time players play 25-100, and try to run it up as fast as possible.
And after they get stacked
The week or the day after itself they reload .

So in your opinion this wasn't bait and switch? Explain.

is zynga only play money?
why is zynga mentioned on many places, is there any indication they will start offering real money games?

It sounds like me you describing 😂👍

lol yeah
my first every game of poker i got suckered into a £1-£1 PL Holdem cash game.
once you know a flush beats a straight suddenly everyone wants to play £10 buyin games

Bait and switch is when you advertise a product that you do not have available for sale and then try and substitute another product. Spin's were a new product. The old product, hypeturbo S&G's in your example were still available after spin's were introduced. Not to mention Amaya had zero to do with the development and planning of spin's so even if they were an antiSNE plot it was hatched by the previous owners.

Today on canada client looks like vpps changed to redemption points , so the conversion of how much $$$ raked = 1 vpp = 100 redemption points in new system I guess, still doesn't mean much unless we find out how many points per chest it is? Can anyone with access in denmark or other updated areas enlighten us?

That's the crucial point, it was not.

Pre Spins 9m hypers ran fluently at 60s, sometimes even 100s and 200s popped. After spins u were lucky if u could find a couple 15s running and former 60s regs were playing 7s.
If u think that's not essential to reach the goal that system was advertised with (I. E. receive the product), well I'm sure u own a calculator, it took about 180k to rake.

Don't judge other people when you're simply unable to understand another person/entity's point of view.
I simply speculated and tried to understand the motivations of Amaya, I never defended these changes nor said it was a "good thing for poker".
All you do is whining and getting butthurt, but you don't even try to understand WHY these changes happen. You're so emotional about it you make it look like a conspiracy against you, as 'Flying Player' said.

My only motivation is to understand the reasons behind Amaya's changes, because it's obvious that if the poker product was a steady money-printing machine, they youldn't have changed anything as I said previously.
Your only motivation is to express your disagreement about a product that doesn't suit you anymore. You simply forget that this product NEVER was designed to owe you anything.
If tomorrow they decide to close shop, they can do it without notice, it's written in their T&C :

2.3Rational Group reserves the right to suspend, discontinue, modify, remove or add to the Service in its absolute discretion with immediate effect and without an obligation to provide you with notice where we consider it necessary to do so, including (for example) where we receive information that you have entered into any self-exclusion agreement with any gambling provider or where we deem it necessary for the management, maintenance or update of the Software and we shall not be liable in any way whatsoever for any loss suffered as a consequence of any decision made by Rational Group in this regard.

To make it very simple, they offer a service that you're FREE to use, nobody forces you to do it. If you're not happy with that product, then don't use it.
You're free to think they're total idiots and that they will go bankrupt, but you're the real idiot keep using a product that you constantly whine about.

Personally, I don't play on PokerStars anymore because I don't agree with the new direction they took since Amaya's takeover and I think they're destroying all was good for me in poker.
I play on MPN with 30% rakeback and as recreational player, I'm really happy with it + the games are softer with full of clueless donks.
See ? When a product doesn't suit me, I move on, I don't get stuck whining like a whore.

So, if all they offered were hold em cash games, then all of a sudden started offering PLO cash in October and a lot of the action players at the necessary stakes moved to PLO, making the NL games worse and harder to grind the needed hours, maybe not even running enough tables consistently at higher stakes so that some NL specialists needed to move down if they couldn't play PLO, that would be the same thing you are complaining about?

You are basically whining that they created a product that people found more attractive than playing with you.