well, if amaya stock price was gona increase from letting us know the confidential data that they presented, they wouldn't have let those guys sign a NDA

negative freeroll imo

Moving forwards, do you still think the changes to the VIP system will have a negative impact on micro and low stakes games? And if so, is there any way you, or anyone not Amaya/Pokerstars can gather data, evidence to support this if it seems to be the case in the future?

The reason I ask is, as you say, you were at a disadvantage being presented with data that Amaya have collected and scrutinzed prior to the meeting. Just wondering if you have any plans/ideas to back up any assertions you may have in the future with data/stats etc. I appreciate that Amaya/Pokerstars have a huge edge in this regard.

I think for a lot of people using just a dash of imagination to read between the lines the op will uniformly confirm pretty much everything surmised to this point about Amaya's direction and the failings of its directors.

+1. A great manager would identify, harness and develop in house talent. But Amaya seems more interested in quelling dissent than attaining excellence. Enough brain drain and any tech company is in bad shape.

Its also troublesome that Baasov seems to have such a persistently weak grasp on the basics of how poker works a year and a half on. He and other top brass have said many things on record which are tantamount to Warren Buffet asking an interviewer what an annuity is. You have to understand your business to make good decisions. Maybe management's lack of knowledge in one minor aspect of a business could be mitigated by total delegation to the point of autonomy to knowledgeable underlings. But when its the core business being managed from a position of profound ignorance and overbearing strong headedness its difficult to remain optimistic about the companies future. And its not that these guys aren't smart and talented, its that they are arrogant. Guys like Haxton could be huge assets but they let them walk while keeping on low octane yes men like DN (I'll grant DN may have marketing power as showman but on the stage of real life he puts on a dull show). It doesn't look like they are fostering the kind of environment a tech company operating in an uber tough sector needs.

What I read between the lines here is that a lot of this stuff was put very diplomatically by the op, with some of it being flat out understatement, an essential confirmation of all the worst fears about this management team's shortcomings.


Thanks for the effort anyway.

Early candidate for 2016 post-of-the-year . . .

It's annoying it mostly turned into a convince them party but that's basically the best we're ever gonna get in the corporate world. No wonder they think we're all dumb when they had to point out the obvious about the ecosystem but perhaps poker is like other professions where some smart people just do that all day every day so they end up not knowing much if anything outside of it.

Certainly CEO is under a lot of pressure to increase profits/stock price and it doesn't matter who it is, that's what their job is and it's been down a bit lately. Things are going to definitely change whether we as players like it or not and no matter who is in charge while it's a publically traded company.

I don't want to minimize any of the efforts that are being put forth by the folks here. It's good to see that there is at least some interest from Amaya on the general poker community.

Having said that, the meta-game question is, why sit through their numbers at all??? If you have to refer to deck slide numbers then you've already lost, right? Were all the icons in cornflower blue?

If you've gotten their attention with information dissemination, boycotts and pros leaving their team, then why not continue down that road?

Well, this is basically unavoidable because it's the objective of the game of poker. People can't or become unwilling to lose $ forever. Your point is fine that we're not sure on the rate of decline to get there but that phrase is very bad for a public stock corp. Everyone wants to hear the growth word.

Do you think that people should have any concerns at all over the safety of player funds given that this company is apparently okay with stealing from its players if they think that it is in their best interest?

I know that they are a publicly traded company, but I'm pretty ignorant as to what they could actually get away with if things got really bad.

It doesn't take insider knowledge to know that new depositors are on the decline, the number of losing players redepositing is on the decline, total deposits per week is on the decline, basically everything that pumps money and people into Pokerstars is on the decline. And probably that there is a small minority that accumulate a large majority of all winnings. That's what happens in a game of skill that you pay to play. Eventually the novelty wears off for the donators, and the death spiral begins.

I applaud you guys for making the effort to go speak to the people at the top, but to me, stuff like this is never about a productive back and forth discussion, it's about Amaya saying "Let's get some influential names in here and throw some (possibly deceptive) numbers at them to convince them that everything we've done is in the best interest of the game, and they can then disseminate it to the hoi polloi."

Nice job guys, hats off to all three of you. Appreciate all the time and hard work you guys have put into this!!!

Did Amaya seem to at all acknowledge that they may have forever lost the trust of a large number of their customers? Or did they still not budge much on this "communications blunder" claim? Did they do or say anything to you to suggest that players should and can trust future words from them?

I'm not a lawyer but I doubt they could get away with outright stealing player balances.

But, in light of how they handled the VIP changes and the currency shenanigans before that, I don't see any reason to rule out a cash-out fee or other sliminess that could be bad news for people with high balances. To be clear, I have no inside information that would suggest that such a thing is coming, I've never heard anyone from Stars talk about it, but I don't see why we as players shouldn't fear it.

I certainly trust them holding my money less than I once did.

Have they showed data about traffic changes after the announcement compared to same period of the previous year or some similar data?
I am pretty sure they calculated they will net more profits even if all breakeven SNEs stop playing on their website.

Any data about traffic that has not yet been published in their earnings reports is the type of stuff that we most strictly cannot talk about for fear of impacting trading.

1) Doubt we can discuss this.

2) I have no more knowledge about this than you do. I really have no idea what Baazov's role is in any of this, other than what is written publicly.

This is exactly they did in the meeting I was in 2,5 years ago (back then we were discussing basically just PLO iirc). They presented the stats in a super absurd way that we were not allowed to describe because of the NDA, and I'm like 99% they did the exact same thing here. We also came underprepared for that exact presentation they offered, and they even fooled half of the representatives (back then half of us were recreationals from other forums) with the way they represented it. People were like, oh cool this proves it, nothing wrong with the amount of rake they take, next subject pls, and I will admit that it took me a while personally too to figure out what they were doing. Then when we asked to see stats in a different (one might say, standard) way, they declined. The only way they allowed us to see anything even under the NDA was this one very strange way of showing the statistics, and they had clearly spent quite a lot of time to figure out how to do the presentation in a way that would make us convinced, and they were hoping we wouldn't realize what they were doing. They are very, very good at that stuff.

Just mainly posting to point out that this happened almost a year before Amaya took over, so I don't think using ridic methods to represent their data to fool the representatives is an Amaya thing.


(For clarity's sake - they are not showing anything that isn't true, and they are not making anything up. They are just showing hand-picked bits and pieces of their data using methods that work strongly in their favour to prove their point.)


Thanks guys for giving it a shot at least. Ansky et al, do you have any plans for the future yet wrt the whole $AYA-gate?

Cash traffic is down about 11% yoy. Some are saying this is offset by gains to Spin n Go traffic but its becoming apparent those numbers are not freely shared with the public.

1. What are the main factors in recent years that have rendered what used to be a sustainable ecosystem no longer sustainable? Just the obvious ones: e.g. Lower overall traffic, a closing skill gap between rec and regs, higher taxes and regulatory costs? (Or might it be the case that their previous rewards system that we'd come to know as the 'status quo' was NEVER going to be sustainable long-term but was perhaps something they instituted when capturing market share was their primary objective?) You say they presented a compelling case that SOMEthing needed to change...just trying to understand how we got here, and why what used to be fine and dandy no longer is?

2. I'm very curious about what kind of modeling they engaged in to determine what effect various proposed changes would have. Let's take them at their word that something needed to change; now you say they didn't make a compelling case that what they ultimately decided on would bring about their desired effect. But overall ecosystem health seems like it would be an exceptionally difficult thing to accurately model. Sure, they've got access to the full range of stats on player deposits/withdrawals, winrates, rake capture, etc. But any proposed change is going to have very difficult-to-project effects in the aggregate. You sound quite unconvinced that their changes will have the desired effect, but were you disappointed in the PROCESS they used to decide on those changes? I'd like to think that they engaged in something more rigorous than a bunch of guys sitting around tossing out ideas and then settling on a few that seemed logical. Do you get the sense that the changes were at least logically thought out and modeled?

Thanks for the effort guys. I can't imagine how frustrating it was going to the table and sitting across from guys, not as smart as y'all, that are running the company we love into the ****ing ground. Also, hope y'all got some kind of reimbursement for your time.

exactly.
Why even invite you guys to have a meeting to discuss what? just ridiculous.

1) how competent would you say the people you met are, for the jobs they are in? like, if you owned stars, would you fire all of them or do they seem solid?
2) can you elaborate at all on what exactly this ecosystem problem is? is it just too many winning players, not enough losing depositors? be as vague as you need to be.
3) all things considered, any prediction on whether this will just keep getting worse, more and more player unfriendly changes?

Thanks for doing all of this. Sincerely.

I don't know if this has anything to do with cash traffic being in a downtrend, but I was really surprised to learn of the change in the way VPP/FPP's are awarded at cash games (limit and no-limit). I realize this change was awhile ago, but I didn't know it!

Before, if you were dealt into a hand, you rec'd the same FPP's as anyone else, because you had paid your blinds like everyone else.

Then it was changed to you only get FPP's based on your contribution to the current hand's pot!

As if there wasn't already enough talk about Stars software juicing the card dealing to create "big" pots lol, now they change the FPP's so you only get them if you keep pounding the pot, nevermind that you paid the big/small blinds like everyone else.

Just a horrible decision if you ask me, I think it helped kill the limit holdem games, I mean I know they were on a downtrend anyway, but now they are dead, and I think the FPP change is one reason why.

Sorry, were you not told about the meeting until the day of? Sitting here and saying you had no time to prepare yourself comes off pretty disingenuous.

The fact of the matter as far as I can tell is, you've offered nothing of substance since day one beyond repeating over and over again about how "unfair" the situation is, did that again in this meeting, and still haven't put two and two together that that approach isn't working.

It's killed the 6-max hyper-turbos $500+ and not sure of lower but certainly it has killed quite a bit of action.

You think any of the three invited were privy to reports prior to the meeting? Are you ******ed? I'm certain you're a complete dick. Let me guess, you never moved past that $50nl in 2007 and are bitter.

+1 to all three of you. The entire poker community owes you a huge debt.