You're

idiotic

They appear to be looking for that kind of people among the current real money players so this trial seems to involve cannibalising the existing product rather than getting new players.

Would someone currently earning 5K euros a month and blowing 500 euros a month in the evenings with a few glasses of wine and some questionable moves in the $20 SNGs complain if they could get the same entertainment from play money? Of course not, they'd love it if it were possible to do that and just whack the 500 per month into a savings account.

I don't get how it's in Amaya's interest to teach someone like that it's about the fun not the money though.

Reality seems to be that people only spend significant money on games when there is a potential upside (i.e. losing gamblers). I'd say you should guess again.

I don't totally agree with Amaya about how similar the profile of a losing poker player is to the profile of a losing general gambler, but they're a lot closer to the mark than you are.

and withdrawing players/regs have the largest deposits aka rolls on the site therefore contributing most to the liquidity. Take away all the reg balances and see how much liquidity u have left.

I don't see how it is fairer to try to protect players who are too lazy to bother with learning to use a hud and a database. It is obviously better for those players but I question the notion that this is somehow fair.

In the sense of traditional poker skill there are some things that just aren't fair imo. Downloading and installing tracking software and huds isn't traditional poker skill. Nor is learning how to configure them/use the data, etc. Anyone can do it but many just wont and are therefore at a huge disadvantage during the game. Why not just disallow them to make the game of poker more fair?

Also, I'd get rid of "progressive" rewards programs. Why should someone get a bigger return on his play(as a percentage) just because he plays more hands. This affects ones success but doesn't have to do with skill. A rewards program should give 1x/100 if you play 10,000 hands, and 1x/100 if you play 100,000 hands and 1x/100 if you play 1,000,000 hands imo.

"players who are too lazy to bother with learning to use a hud and a database."

You know, some of your opponents are 85 years old and know almost nothing about computers but how to turn them on and start a program(only after his kid or grand kid set it up for him). He would just like to pass some time and play a "fair" game of poker but his disadvantage isn't just from being old or even from being a worse player, it's because you have tons more data because of another program you installed.

Maybe because it's naive to believe that disallowing/limiting HUDs will make the games fairer. The opposite is true as it gives the ones willing to cheat an even bigger edge. And yes, banning HUDs is not enforceable....just in case you want to come up with this. Same applies for limiting them. Look at Stars with their changes to their ToS in regards to 3rd party software. Do you really believe that this made the games fairer?! People are using hand-converters and god knows what tricks to get around and use whatever banned features without getting caught. The bigger the edge, the more likely people will search/find a way to get around it and profit.

I'm certainly no expert on software and such but just because a rule isn't 100% effective doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't be a rule. Should bots be allowed if they can't be totally eliminated? I guess with regards to rules and cheating there is an eternal struggle. I guess they could get rid of easily convertible hand histories. I think that would go a long way to stopping tracking software and huds and if that happens development and continuance of those programs may end because programming costs money and the pool of people who manage to figure out a way to surreptitiously compile hand histories might be too small to support the programs, and so on.

You draw the line for traditional poker skill pretty arbitary at live skill. Huds have been around for several years, so you can argue that they are part of traditional online poker skill.

Debatable how huge the disadvantage is, but however big it is they do deserve to be at a disadvantage. It is easily fixable, but they won't So they deserve to be at a disadvantage.

Because then only honest players would stop using them, making the games unfair. It would probably also lead to a decline in the number of tables played, affectin the companys bottom line A better solution is to integrate huds into the software itself.

Agree



It doesen't matter if they are too old, too stupid, or too lazy to use a hud. It is easy for a normal human being, if they can't or won't they deserve to be at a disadvantage.

@all those ppl saying they know what amaya wants, here some things we do definitely know:

- Amaya wants $
- Publicly traded companies happen to overvalue short term earnings and quarterly financials, esp. when to a large extent financed on debt
- Amaya is both publicly traded and financed the ~5bn $ stars deal on debt
- Increasing prices (= increasing rake = cutting rewards) increases short term earnings --> They apparently like that.

This is all for now. No one knows yet how the changes will influence liquidity at different game types and stakes, how the real money sector will develop in relation to play money, casino/sportsbets, if/how much party and other providers can drag away etc.
It's IMHO fair to assume traffic will decrease overall and negative mid/longterm effects follow if they don't adapt the system.

So sad that their amazing software is gonna be used less and less :/ But I get it from their point of view. Buy something -> squeeze the **** out of it -> profit -> repeat.

I personally dropped from stars couple of years ago when they announced SNE drop + SN rb cuts. It's not even difficult to calculate how much I didn't earn them in these years:
100k vpp ~= 18k $ in rake paid, couple of SNs per year - rb they gave back = 2 years * 18k * 3 SNs * (100% - 35%rb) ~= 70k$

Hard to say if fun players (which they claim they're getting with all these promos/changes) bring more money to them than regs who are moving out. Looking at trends it seems stars will fade to be 'just any other poker site'.

I'm sorry for Scheinbergs seeing their baby being abused as a hoe

So no limits on the number of chests one can open in 1 day?

No if they won the money from other players they have contributed nothing to the liquidity pool they only reduce liquidity when they withdraw.

Player A deposits money, liquidity increases.

Player B wins money from Player A, liquidity does not change.

Player B withdraws money, liquidity is reduced.

Player B has contributed nothing. They are a beneficiary of the system that is reducing liquidity. If they stop playing then they just stop being a negative draw on the system and it only hurts themselves. If Player A stops playing/depositing the system loses.

Winning/withdrawing players need to understand they are in no way a benefit to the system. They are a fortunate beneficiary of the system, the system does not need them. It is the depositing/loosing players that allow the system to operate, if they leave the system will collapse.

Making your own dull definition of liquidity s.t. it suits your point doesn't make sense. The amount of money in the pool doesn't matter for Amaya, just the rake generated from it.

When ppl talk about regs providing liquidity, they're obv not talking about them depositing money into the pool but keeping the games running. Games at non-micro stakes don't just magically pop up, some ppl have to start them and wait for other players. By providing this liquidity, regs ensure that recs actually can play the games they want to play without spending their time waiting. Heck u even see ppl leaving a registering sng when they have to wait longer than half a minute for it to start cause they get annoyed. How do u think games with more entrants than hu/spins will run if regs aren't willing to opensit them? I can tell you: They just won't (nearly as much as pre changes).
I can tell you a bunch of games that don't have enough regs at certain times of the day don't even pop up right now and they used to run just fine when ppl opensat them more. Just e.g. look at KO games which even have their own tab in the software. Reg a 50$ or 25$ 9m outside peak hours and u'll see dozens of ppl regging and unregging again simply because their is no liquid market for the games they are willing to pay rake for.

What you're saying is right, a winning player has almost zero benefits to the site. The only problem here is that winning players are the cake, and pokerstars wants to eat it and keep it at the same time. Basically the only reason 99% of people ever played poker or why poker got big is because there was a thing called "winning player and "beating the games" which can't be said for other gambling games.


Some misinformed people think that most poker players are gamblers, while some are, most are not, this probably comes from the fact that alot of gamblers play poker, but not alot of poker players play slot machines.
Buut.. people still win at poker so basically we have no real argument against pokerstars anymore. They win, we keep playing. The day there is no more winners is the day pokerstars will start dying, but that day is not here yet.

What Pokerstars wants to do is balance between creating the mirage that you can be any sort of casual player and win through Jaime Staples, who is a horrific player, and gobble up all the profits of winning and losing players. The only people who win these days consistently are using advance software that should be banned. Recreational and new players don't stand a chance in this environment, and Pokerstars realizes they can;t do anything to stop it consistently which would create an even more gap between good and great, so they choose to try and create dumb casino games to disparage recreational from losing to players using software Pokerstars refuses to ban, in hopes the new players choose there casino style games.

Jamie Stapler is gonna win $300k which is more than most poker players ever gonna win.

Liquidity is not total amount of money on the site. It's the amount of action at the tables and therefore rake created.

Without any regs, no games will be running and people could have $100trillion on the site, Pokerstars would make absolutely no money.

Regs are important to start and maintain games. Look at who sits SNGs first (regs) and last (fish).

There are few exceptions (predatory environments and player pools like ZOOM/Spins) but even they run less frequently without regs.

That would be the case if it was the old Stars pureeing the golden goose, but it's not. Amaya, as I understand it, has already essentially soft defaulted on their debts a couple of times - they apparently had to renegotiate the $400 million payment to the Schienbergs, which I imagine the Schienbergs only agreed to because not doing so would have had ominous and immediate consequences for the company.

I haven't followed it closely for over a year, but last time I looked they had only made the tiniest payments on their senior debt - they had paid so little that it would have indicated something like a 100 year loan, which there is no way any lender or bondholder would have agreed to, especially on a high-risk, $5 billion deal. That means they have probably also extensively renegotiated their senior debt payments at least once. A soft default.

If they fade to being just any other poker site, they're gonna hard default.

Right. A better definition of liquidity is something like (total games being played at given time)*(avg pot)*(avg hands per hour). Or you could measure per-minute liquidity, but total money wagered per hour on the site seems like a good way to view liquidity for a poker site. Deposits-on-balance are really an irrelevancy that might have weak primary effects at best.

Someone who has $10k on the site might be more likely to wager more than $x per day, but that's probably mosly a function of his overall skill level and total bankroll, the fact he has $10k on the site is just a reflection of the real underlying causes of that player's increased expected wagering.

Best line ever, moving to Whatever Stan and go chest pro.

It's true that they couldn't stop the best players from using HUDs, even if they banned them. And it would create huge edges for those few players who could muster the tech talent to circumvent the ban. But that's not why they don't ban HUDs.

Most players who use HUDs don't have much of a clue how to maximize the HUD's value. The bottom 50 percentile of HUD users probably lose more than they gain by using the HUD - they would actually be better players without it.

The reason Stars doesn't ban HUDs is that every player that uses one would assume they can no longer beat the games. And since the population of multi-tabling regs is almost exactly the same as the population of HUD users, they can't eliminate them because if they did, they would default on their loans. It's that simple.

Yeah, some people just fail to realize that in many formats reg to rec ratio is heavily on the regs side. For example in higher stakes Sit and Goes you get 1 or 2 rec players at most + regs who are running these games. Without regs these games simply won't run as there are not enough recs to start these games. The view that regs are bad for the poker site is just absurd and without them many formats at higher stakes will simply die.

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I just hope Party and other sites try to fill that gap with attractive rake structures, like Party already does for Cash Games.

Traffic for Zoom already went down significantly according to some guy who tracked (last side i think).

Yeah, regs draw money from the pool, so what? Encouraging high volume grinding with top heavy rewards like SNE has worked perfectly fine for >10 years with all kind of diff games running at all stakes. There's no reason to assume this'd suddenly be a bad business model.
Cutting the rewards increases short-term earnings and no matter what u think about regs, their crying etc., take the rec perspective. They also suffer from dereased rewards and this "top heavy rewards = more attractive to recs" is just a naive assessment of the situation. Everyone can make have more and better shots at the huge money within the old reward system. Just buy tickets, sports bets or w/e gambling thing from the additional bucks. Funny colored chests hurt everyone apart from amaya's short term earnings.

btw, was just watching pokerstars.tv from Sochi and it turns out that after multiple complete failures they decided to roll back 20% field payouts to 15%. This seems insignificant, but actully tells us 2 important things about what's happening at Stars:

1. Many people speculated, that remaking EPT into Pokerstars Championship (along with other changes) was a deliberate attempt to kill the brand - Stars could be shortsited enough to not want their recs spending 5k on one bi, which they only can rake once, instead of 70% effective rake on a 5k deposit.

However, them rolling back on payouts shows that this wasn't delibareted: they are (somehow) incompetent enough to completely kill the biggest non-US live mtt brand. So, when we think about changes like the rakeback, we can safely assume that there is no grand scheme behind it - apparently, Stars are now managed by incompetent people, and when something appears stupid, it probably is. Remember when everybody said that 20% payouts are too much and maks top prizes less attractive? Well, it took Stars a while to figure out.

2. Second thing we can learn from that is: E]even after huge ****-ups, Stars are still willing to rollback on changes. This is actually a good thing. While things like boycotts may not get through to them, the obvious revenue loss that is clearly incoming (clearly to anyone but Stars management, see "incompetence" above) might make them rethink (essentially) removing rb.

So, in conclusion, as many said above, vote with your wallets, take your action elswhere, and that might actually have an effect.