they dont care if they kill stars, its a big ****ty business that makes 5 old white people filthy rich then kills the product.

amaya is ****ing garbage and Pokerstars is simply an Abortion of what it used to be.


My guess is pokerstars is raped and destroyed completely by 2018.

are you guys ******ed or just trols ?

its their bussiness, they only make money and get more rich if stars is doing good. if stars die, they lose money.

its so obv, dont know why i even write this .

oh yeah?

check out amaya/blackstones track record with other poker sites, they eat them and leave the remains.

say whatever you want but that will happen to stars, it will just take longer.

It is ironic I had to snip your quote, but also that you are not really following the dialogue or subject well.

Different players have different perspectives. Stars is owned and operated by shareholders. They can't be interested in long term sustainability. This is what is obvious. It has been sad to watch the players' community not understand this. And frustrating watch Ansky lead the players off a cliff.

Mods, could you please check out the above account? It belongs to a previously banned poster.

I sensed that it was him too after his 1st post. Regardless I think he deserves another kick at the can. So far he's doing alright.

obv each one can have and has diferent opinions, thats fine, obv.

but your opinion and others who agree w you are ridiculous, because you are basically saying they dont care about their own money. you are saying they bought a company for billions or millions idk how much, but tons of money, and now they just dont care.... LOL .

its simple. company care about customers because if they have happy customers they make more money. if they lose customers, they lose money. its like this in all company, all clubs, bar, restaurant, all places about entertainment in the world care about customers because thats their money .

It's difficult to get even simple points across broken dialogue that spans years and is not reference-able. One thing we might not have understood is that complex paradigm shifting subjects are not really compartmentalize-able in a way that different domain experts might simultaneously understand. There is a suggestion here that new and difficult subjects need to be tailored even to those that are experts in various related subjects.

None of these things you suggest are comparable to the monopolistic environment that amaya shareholders took over. They have no reason to look to the long term, it is not their baby. They simply fleece everything they can and will sell shares and move else where. The ship is headed down, it has been headed down for a long time. Bazoov tries to buy it, I'd believe his and a grandiose vision of taking things the other way, but as it stands we are watching rational based economics.

It is much more akin to your governments inflating your currencies for tax benefits. It's not rational but you should still expect it (barring radical evolution).

You are telling me things don't make sense, I am describing observable reality, a reality I painted years ago nearly perfectly.

The reason the sentiments of the collective community don't reflect this is because of opaque winrates-there is a great lag in understanding and honest realization of this truth.

The reason I am making more and more sense, is because I am understanding language better and how to use it (and also because observable reality is reflecting my past sentiments and helping shift our paradigm).

they have monopoly of one kinda of enterteinment, they dont have the monopoly of food, water, or all flight industry. if people aren't having fun playing online poker, they can do another thing. you might stop playing online poker, or you might move to 888, party. or you go bet on sports, online casino, blackjack .

they have a monopoly, but for how long ? isn't impossible to party recover the lead. notice, i wrote recover... party was the biggest site 10years ago. not saying its going to happen, just saying isn't impossible .

and following your thought process, after they kill online poker and get every cent, they sell it. how you sell trash ? isnt better to make the company healthy and sell for big money ?

Now your sentiments are more sensical. Yes unfortunately we are losing poker players to other industries there is no doubt. Some of this is natural, some of it is unnecessary, some of it might likely be reversed.

They have had an effective monopoly since black friday, and it will likely remain this way until technology is allowed to pop this bubble. There are different ways this might happen.

What we should understand is the unlikelihood a new competitor will simply arise to treat its customers, the skilled portion, "properly".

Being a poker site is like a bank, you have all sorts of security to provide, and the more successful you are the greater the power and complexity of attacks. In this the only true solution must be provided through iteration evolution. This suggests the longest standing solutions win. This is the difficultly often missed by players and new site solutions offered.

Yes but it is not the concern of people looking for quick money. If the PLAYERS invested in amaya then we could understand how it would move in a different direction (astute readers will realize this to be the foundation for the solution to poker's triffin dilemma). Many investors don't plan on being around after the demise. They are selfish minded and not interested in planning and cooperative for an even greater good. They don't trust each other or the future.

This is the nature of the game.

It's possible many recs don't really notice the rake...they do notice how quickly they're losing and if they're losing more quickly than a certain point they'll spend their money on something else and are more likely to think the game is rigged or poker is BS or whatever, even if they don't associate the root cause of this to the high rake.

I feel like this is fairly evident and can be confirmed by merely thinking about it, but meh.

^^^ Think that's what I was trying to say, but didn't quite say

Well said.

Cuz all of those games produce periodic big wins, that's the hook. Are there still any lotto variants that don't have the $5-20 payoffs that hit with regularity?

One thing I would genuinely like to hear from you or anyone else who is somewhat qualified to comment is what do you expect the realistic prospects for Amaya's casino/sports business are over the next 5 years? As near as I can see that's pretty much what this whole thing rests on. I've always granted that they might pull off a coup there, but as of right now it doesn't look like its happening. Why would it? I'm repeating myself again here but its mostly because there haven't been answers proffered. Amaya's indicated annualized casino growth's been cut to 50% based on the first two months, which is both a very significant sample and decline. I don't see any reason to suppose casino growth won't converge on somewhere in the single digits. Assuming the existing consumer monetization growth phase for casino/sports is coming to a close how is Amaya gonna run roughshod into the fortified territories of inveterate operators like Ladbrokes or Will Hill with iron brands and street presence?

You're right that this has been talked about over and over in other threads but I don't remember reading one compelling reason that Amaya would be able to sustain outsized growth relative to the industry as a whole for its casino and sports products, while its easy to list a litany of reasons they couldn't. I don't know what financial statments you've been reading but if they don't either A) immediately stop poker declines, then significantly reverse them or B) continue to grow casino/sports at outsized rates they are currently, that's right now, in pretty dire condition.

Slight correction: annualized growth has slowed to about 70%, still a very large decline vs last year's 530% and also a large decline in $/time.

The prospects are terrible as they failed to grasp just how saturated and competitive both of these markets are in regulated countries. Both that and they overestimated their ability to get customers to "cross-over".

They seem to think because they have a large user list they can get these people to transition over to blowing wads on casino/sports. That is not going to happen because everyone who already enjoys sports betting or playing blackjack/slots has several other accounts to do just that elsewhere.

My friends, with PokerStars accounts, who are rec gamblers and punt on poor odds sports bets all give that action to places like Bet365 (who are the kings of rec gambling). AmayaStars has grossly overestimated and overstated its potential in these areas.

^^
Poker is not your typical casino gambling game. The average Pokerstars customer plays poker because they believe that the game is beatable if you are skilled enough. Cross selling to degen games will never be too effective here (sorry Amaya shareholders).

Of course when thinking about poker as a game of skill many players don't take rake and tournament structures into consideration just yet. They will be forced to pretty soon with those new "changes" though.

Amaya should really concentrate on bettering instead of worsening the customer experience in their core business, if they don't want to quickly and unnecessarily sink their own ship that is.

well yea obv they should increase every players experience but do they care? they dont give a **** about ur experience, just rake money and deposit and dont complain.

It's called addiction

Big mtt field must be like a 45man

Recreational players (and even a lot of regs) won't notice or care about rake unless it becomes absurdly high in an absolute sense. Absurdly high in an absolute sense would be something like 30% rake or higher.

Recreational players care about how fun the games are, how fast they are and how big they can win. This is why there are so few recs in cash games, because 24-tabling regs who take 20 seconds to make every decision with their software aids have destroyed all the fun.

The guy below me sums it up perfectly:

If it was a difference between grinding $0.10/hour at cash games or the potential to win big at a game like blackjack or lotto, 99.99999% of recs would choose the latter. Even if the latter is -EV long term.

There is plenty of evidence, you just havent seen it. Multi-million/billion dollar companies invest lots of money into research/focus groups and data analytics, to make sure the decisions they are making are seemingly correct. They don't just blindly say "rec players dont care, lets jam up the rake". When you have access to large databases, you can usually know the answer before you make the change.

Tournaments though.

And it use to be a rec could blink in cash games now and then. Never really on stars anyway... but elsewhere.


My point is more that if stars makes games recs like to play there long term win ability is not necessary. You all say stars cant do that with poker. Good i hope you are right.

I'll meet you halfway (or more specifically something I am going to write about called tabooing without touching core values etc.). Perhaps what you say is true...but I say/add "pros would/should not want this".

You spell out a game marketed to recs, but not one that inspires reasonable achievable winrates (profits/income) for pros. We agree pros shouldn't want this right? The rational "pro"?

Do we need more definitions, or that is more or less agreable?