Indeed its going only worse and worse, me as a microstakes rec grinder used to beat nl5 zoom no problem 6bb/100 over 150k hands or so even without HUD, now last 60k hands BE (after last rake change) with HUD and everyone in the table is more nittier than ever. Most players 19/16 and 23/18 type. Sometimes even 0 fish in 4 zoom tables, things are the worst ever in online poker. Cashed out my BR and thinking about if I even should play somewhere online, it's not even fun anymore. :P

I don't think you are a rec. Recs don't know what 19/16 mean. Also you refer to yourself as a grinder.

This

The decline since 2009 could be an indication that too high a rake might be A contributor to the decline, since markets contract when prices are too high. Obviously there's other reasons, such as market segregation including Black Friday.

One reason to think that too high a rake might be A factor though is that Pokerstars doesn't seem to agree with the idea though that people play poker to win money, and that if games are unbeatable then people will stop playing, and that if games are beatable then more people will start playing.

People have been complaining for years now that games are getting too hard. So there have been people who have stopped playing - and that's not the type of environment that encourages a lot of fresh interest.

Mods: I think my thread title is bad and too unrelated to the content of the post. Could you change it to something along the lines of "Stars Changes Harmful to Depositing Players" or anything you think is appropriate and more on subject.

It is getting far too derailed by a causation/correlation discussion that is a bit of a sidetrack to the main point that the 'rec friendly' changes are terrible for recreational players and that many of us think Stars is very misguided on the effects these changes will have on future deposits.

OP what do you want stars to change immediately?

Perhaps Stars recognized its best not to have any professional players.

I would identify myself rather as a rec than grinder, played 200k hands maybe with 1 year nl5 and some other donking, point is there is no real "recs" almost left. Even at so low lvl dudes be discussing hud stats in chat vs some hands each other etc, most people playing solid abc preflop. like a year ago there was atleast 1+ fish in a table @ micro zoom pool, now maybe 1 fish in 4 tables tho.

1st why do you play zoom then? There are 116 regular NL5 tables and I'm pretty sure you can find enough fishes to make money in those games.

2nd you know there are other sites with zoom games. Oc if you can't play due to laws etc then I understand. You dont have to quit online poker if you can't beat ps games.

There are recs left. I know a few.

Pretty well anyone who frequents this board doesn't qualify.

Again, a sentiment I don't take issue with. The problem is, for them to create an environment terrible for making money, they are creating an environment that will encourage losing players and depositors from making future donations to their company. Their biggest priority is getting as many future deposits as possible. As I discussed earlier, I do not believe their actions are going to achieve this goal as their changes are extremely detrimental to the recreational player. There is no way to have a thriving site if people can't win. They can make changes to clean up the lobby without just turning into a rec vs king battle everywhere. They can actually give legit rewards to recreational players. They can offer any game a depositor wants to play. Or they can make the games extremely hard, rake the hell out of them with less rewards, and take away games people deposit to play. I believe the latter will path will cost them money.

You know....the MTT schedule has changed drastically since the "decline" began in 2009-2010. New markets of fish have entered the player pool since the exodus of Americans...so Black Friday doesn't explain it.

Micro stakes players have 1/10th of the opportunities in 2016 to bink 5 figures on an MTT costing $10, or less than they had in 2009-2010. Maybe, this factor prevented the common recreational fish player to stop logging on to the site because the tournament directors at Pokerstars screwed up the MTT schedule (the one that appealed to the vast majority of players- $20 depositors) and it's had a negative impact on the cash game poker ecosystem ever since.

You can't go change the MTT schedule as much as Pokerstars has done....acknowledge there is a decline in popularity...and then blatantly ignore the significant changes made at the EXACT time the decline in popularity began. This is what Pokerstars has done.

If the schedule in 2016 is unappealing to players like me from 2009...then, why do you think people aren't playing in 2016?

you really try hard, not to understand, what i've written [okay, i'm not a native speaker so maybe it isn't as hard as i think ^^]... i never said, that the changes were good for recs. you're headline is a rambling about the 'numbers decline' and the 'FTP failure' and that's what i've written about

@ PS numbers ... besides the seasonal drop and the decline over the years, i even said, that the changes added an additional drop ... BUT atm we don't know the numbers and we don't know, if PS even wanted this drop ... b/c lowering the volume was basically an announced plan

@ FT 'failure' ... you still bring this 'drop from 4 to 14' as if it would be worse, than the drop from #2 to #4 and this shows you're ignorance imo

FTP 2.0 was an attempt to sell a 'pre BF product' - something that should appeal the mass grinders and high stakes grinders. and this is imo the real 'failure', b/c the market wasn't simply big enough. the result was, that FT dropped from #2 to #4, which is not only a huge drop (in player numbers), it was the point where it was official, that FT wasn't needed any more!

still you claim the real failure was the 'rec model', which caused the drop from #4 to #14. leave aside that number-wise it wasn't worse than the drop from #2 to #4 (which showed that the old model didn't work either) and focus on the 'why'.

i don't have any insights, but i'm pretty sure the rushed change of policy wasn't that voluntary and like i've written before, i think it was a hail mary ... a very risky and very desperate attempt. so it seems to me, that 'not changing anything' wasn't an option at that time and implementing similar changes over a longer period of time either (like other rooms successfully did)

so comparing the FT changes, with the PS changes and thinking PS will make the same 'mistakes' won't work. PS not only has far more time, it also has far more recs.

and since this thread is about your concerns about the 'recs' anyway, here are my two cents ... the main problems with all the theories in NVG and other forums is, that no one has numbers. all the theories about 'oh, the good players drop down the limits' and 'recs also pay more rake' only tell half the story.

we also could discuss hours about what influenced a win- or loss-rate more (HUDs, rake ... et cetera), but bottom line is, when you have less players, who are taking money out of the industry, you can rake the deposits a bit longer.

i think it's pretty simple ... the market is declining and less money is deposited and rooms are facing higher costs. all poker rooms basically tried to get rid of the 'leaks' and headed for the 'rec player model'. and since you can't deny, that the market is shrinking, you shouldn't think about what's wrong with the changes, but what are the alternatives.

tl;dr

- PS #'s drop might be wanted
- FT changes were far from optimal, but it seems w/o options they had to throw a hail mary
- i agree that rec model isn't rec model, but the RPM isn't mainly about levelling winrates, it's about to keep money in the system

last but not least
- just because i think you're wrong (in some parts), i don't say they're (100%) right ... geeeee, i really don't like this attitude in NVG, that when i point out something, which i think is wrong, others always assume i'm totally in favour of the opposite ...

LOL when you look at the graph the traffic is about the same as it was the beginning of last hot season. Now if it keeps on with this downward trend thru the next 6 months, then we have something to talk about.

You probably aren't noticing Pokerscout's automatic scaling because its not even close (the y axis scale changes, sometimes daily). Its down probably around 25% vs last year. The low point for last year was a daily average of I believe 14.7k, but that was the absolute low point. Anyway traffic started in Jan last year at a daily average of 19k dipping to a low of 14.7k. There was an article written about the low point of 14.7k so that may not be representative of the average traffic during the summer trough since it was newsworthy. But assuming it is and assuming a linear seasonal decline which should be close to accurate, with a summer low point date of Aug 1 (seems reasonable given cited article was written on July 22) then daily average traffic last year declined by 690 players per month.

So at the beginning of May we would have expected traffic last year to have declined to about 16.25k daily avg players, representing a 23% yoy decline based on the current daily average of 12.5k.

There are a few fairly strong reasons to believe the decline may actually be quite a bit larger than that, selection bias already mentioned being one. But this post is already too long. And that's a catastrophic decline for anyone wondering. Someone reading this probably has detailed Pokerscout historical data which would be very cool to see and a lot better than guesstimation, if they were kind enough to share.

Also I haven't had time to go back but seem to recall tournament revenues being a minor part of total poker revenues, like 30%. Anyone remember that number? On top of that Amaya said the annualized growth rate in the first two months for casino/sports had slowed to just 50%, indicating a sharp decline in not just absolute growth rate but growth per time unit i.e. casino growth has topped out hard with all low hanging fruit in last years punch bowls.

you can set cash game revenue to zero and spin and gos still makes up for it

That's a whopping falsehood. Seriously though, do you know what percentage of total poker revenues are currently from tournaments? Or anyone?

not sure, but i think pokerfuse/Poker Industry PRO and OPR had articles about this topic. the only article i can recall was about the italian market and SaGs definitely took a lot of traffic away from ring games.

but anyway .. let's say PS introduces a stricter table cap (which wouldn't surprise that much), then the traffic would obv drop. but thinking this is a bad result, would be naive ...

Nvg, where 30% of something is a minor percentage

according to spintrackers stars made bout 600k last week w spin rake across 15-100 limits. if u also add the micros it prolly becomes close to a mil per week, cause micro spin volume is very high.

You sound like you only care about stars not going downhill than you actually care about the players. Seriously, all you talking about is how terrible changes are for future deposits as if you are a shareholder or sth.
Why care so much about stars` bottom line bro?

spin&go's are draining all the fish from other formats. Amayastars stated that the avg fish depositing $20 is losing faster than previous years. hmmm i wonder why that is??

lol @ saying you want these changes reversed in order to stop recs losing too much. You're just another selfish, self-entitled reg who only cares about his bottomline. You couldn't give a **** how quickly a rec loses his money - as long as that money goes to you, not Pokerstars.

The difference is that Pokerstars have all the power. They are the ones with the monopoly. They can raise prices pretty much however they want and suckers like you will continue to play there, because you have nowhere else to go and no other qualifications/life experience to get a job in the real world.


In before I get called a shill, even though I'm just telling it how it is.

Shill? Nah, just ignorant. Not worth my breath. Great arguments!

Hmm, you really can't figure it out? My argument is that Stars has one interest in common with most online players. They want to get as many future deposits as possible. If they do, that is good for winning players as well. This is the great failure in their logic. They want to remove peoples ability to make money off of poker but it is that ability that is a key component to why people deposit in the first place. Take away the former, and you risk losing large numbers of the customers you care about most.

My opinion is that their changes are going to cause a shrinking of the online poker market as a whole which is bad for anyone that plays as well as for their bottom line. No amount of 'data' will be able to demonstrate how depositors are going to react to these kinds of changes but it'd be naive as hell to believe there won't be real negative responses from those that called the site home for their many deposits. There are already some huge depositing losing heads up players that have left the site. Yes, it's a cost/benefit analysis when they decide to remove a game like heads up. Will losing x % of players be worth it to herd Y % into the games of our choosing? Their initial guess was obviously yes. But like with their FTP changes, I disagree and believe that decision, along with the others mentioned, are going to do more harm than good for their business and whether you like it or not, players are better off when Stars is doing well. When they aren't, that is when it gets desperate and ugly.

Without info regarding Spin n Go traffic the decline of cash games could be a mute point. From a business standpoint if there's a 10% drop in deposit ($) but 50% more of those deposits are used for Spin n Go's then it's a net positive for Stars as they enjoy higher margins for that game format.

The talk about Full Tilts relevance on Stars' business is a mute point imo. From the day of re-launch Full Tilt was terribly run. Over the first year they changed gears/marketing strategies countless times and only a few ideas actually worked.
Their biggest error was due to delayed disappointment by the customer. For example they'd put an offer out that on paper was confusing but could fool the rec player into a deposit thinking that it's worthwhile. After the promo ended the player was left with the feeling that he was duped and ignored the next offer (which could have actually been good).

From the onset they tried to run their business as is BF didn't occur and the online landscape hadn't changed worldwide. They failed miserably. I agree that the last minute change to encourage a recreational environment was a desperate hail mary and I agreed in principle that it was a good for the simple fact that a bad plan is better then no plan at all. Prior to that change they were sinking and even though the change didn't bring about the result they wanted it at least gave them a chance whereas the former plan was guaranteed to fail.