Sick graph.
I'm playing a lot of zoom 200/500 ( around 100k hands per month ) and in my opinion level is mutch lower than last year.
I'm just scary about killing on line poker by stupid legislations ( France, Italy, Spain ).
Poland probably will be closed too couse we have morons in government.

I hope someday France, Spain and Italy will back to global playerpool...

To look at this chart and not entertain the possibility that the changes to the lobby and rake are a big part of the dramatic decline would be disingenuous. Pretty much everyone knows it's not the boom time anymore so the initial decline comes as little surprise. But the last year and a half have been extremely accelerated. Around 2012 you can see that they had sort of calmed the storm a bit.

This graph certainly doesn't 'prove' I'm right either. It's still just conjecture, but it seems very reasonable to believe that the removal of popular game types like heads up, the purge of the lobby creating far harder games, and the increase in rake have had the overall effect of making poker far less enjoyable for most recreational players.

In my opinion, it's never too late to correct past mistakes, but with each passing month the long term damage to PokerStars and online poker as a whole continues and some of that will never be able to recover. If you do believe the premise that these changes are hurting PokerStars traffic, there is still positive reason to petition them to right their wrongs.

Legal issues over the years cutting out more and more countries could be reason? To even compare 2008 with 2016 is just so lol

You can't read? No one was comparing 2008. Specifically they righted the ship from 2012 only to crash from 2015. Why do people come here with basically zero to contribute? At least find a real argument and don't attack a complete straw-man.

Hey, someone posted alink to this Russian PokerScout-like site in another thread some time ago - but then the graph disappeared for a while ... looks like it's back now. Guess it's nothing new, but maybe sometimes it can be interesting to be able to see a graph that's for longer than the 6 months that PokerScout uses?

https://www.bigpot.ru/stats/show-room-stats.php?id=2

Happy long weekend everybody!! Also, GL to everybody playing the WCOOP and mini-WCOOP starting Sunday - always sure sign that it's Fall

So siq!

Yes

Don't always notice what's happening at higher levels - have noticed when whole stakes/games start to dry up though ...

Was so shocked when full ring zoom started to dry up at higher levels ... was that around 2013? Guess was maybe still assuming at that point that Stars would want to try to fix things, but they didn't so maybe that was part of the surprise ...

Shocking to see it starting to happen to the short-handed tables now too - just a little bit for now, but still ...

Guess ya all the new legislation this year sure hasn't helped - sometimes it seem like it can take forever for things to get passed ... Would be lovely if Stars is able to get one of those temporary licenses from Poland, so everybody can still play while they work out the new legislation?

Also, guess Phil Galfond must see some reasons to feel optimistic about the future of poker, so guess it should be interesting hear more of his thoughts on things in the coming weeks?

Will be nice to have something to do in the coming weeks, now that the promos on Stars seem to have dried up - guess there'll be new ones eventually ...

ha cool graph, would of thought BF would be a bigger dip

yes 100z fr died in 2013 i think which was sad bc it was one of the softest zoom games around at that time (relative to the money). Anyway its harder for fr to run at zoom bc u need more ppl to start the game/keep the game running esp for 4tablers.U could get a bunch of regs into a skype group and start up the pool during prime time, but it prolly isnt worth it.

6max z has lost some action this year bc of the stars rb changes. Its just not worth it to play there 24/7 wo rb anymore unless ur really good. So many sne grinders either moved down or they are only bumhunting the pool (only jumping in when there are good fun players in the pool).

There is a reason why im saying that BF was a problem but it wasnt teh problem

Meh.

While there is certainly some truth its siq to see how few NL200 is running these days even compared to 2 years ago. If we are honest games from 2010 on run around fish exclusively and if you have 10 200 tables at 2am europe that means there are 10 fish at that time compared to 30 or 40 2 years ago. Regs dont really stop playing bc rake gets up, they stop bc there arent enuff fish to feed them

2011 Reg: "I've got the Fishfinder Tree Fiddy. I'm printing money!"



2016 Reg: "Jeez, why can't I find any fish?"



#FishLivesMatter

HA you must be a women cus no man could be this nice all the time!
You have a nice weekend too.

There's a couple of really fun cat pics in my posting history if anyone else enjoys a good cat funny


Ya, guess maybe it's been more of a 'death by a thousand cuts', than just any one thing by itself, even Black Friday? Guess some if it is Stars' own doing though, like the rakeback cuts.

Probably they already know how much more they want to cut this year, but won't announce it until November ... wonder how low the graph will be a year from now


PS Hey Arty

The lobby and rake changes have been catastrophic for the long term value of Amaya. With the ugly details emerging from the announced failed merger bid, do you think Amaya could ever realize they need to undo many of the changes that they made?

Much damage is already done, but as I've said before, it's still better to correct past mistakes now than keep digging heels in further.

I'd really like to see Amayas profits from poker this Quarter relative to last years Quarter.

This should be doable since Amaya is a publicly traded company and has to publish its financial statements every year.

https://pokerindustrypro.com/news/ar...transition-new

Online poker is so ****ing dead. Looks at this week filtered QQ-AA, which I had 67 times playing $2 HUNL. You literally can barely call a bet with any 1 pair hand or a raise without absolute coconuts. There is no ****ing way in hell I can grind up from micros/low stakes. It's sickening to play and I'm 99% of the way of quitting online poker altogether. No ****ing point.

AA 23 hands: won 198 bb
KK 23 times: lost 46 bb
QQ 21 times: won 180 bb

http://imgur.com/j6xzaHG
http://imgur.com/7fnaVar
http://imgur.com/cAs1fSJ

should be doable since there're search engines out there

http://www.amaya.com/press/2016/10/a...ce-00340.shtml

numbers are not to bad and in some parts better than last year. on the other hand i think (not sure though) last year they had C$ in their report and claimed the conversion between C$ and $ made the report look worse than it is. so i don't know how much this plays a role this time.

didn't find infos about deposits, which i think is very interesting. BUT never the less, active real money players grew 5% and even 3% in poker sector. which is also positive (for amaya), is that their casino expansion works well. so basically poker is a bit less important for them, but at the same time they still have roughly the same market share.

that it's still a long way to go, shows the comment about some $400m payment to the old owners, they have to pay next february. so bottom line is (imo), amaya is doing better, than nvg wants to believe, but the paying debts ain't easy.

Fwiw, this article has since been updated. The -8.6% figure came from a comparison published in Q3 2015 which doesn't match the figures published this week. The ones published last year were adjusted to be compared on a constant currency basis, so a comparison to these figures was not on a like-for-like basis. Using the numbers published this week from the prelims posted above my NerdSuperfly, the decline is a less pronounced -0.5% to -2.3%. Better than expected - Q1 2016 was a double-digit decline. This is the same as we saw in Q2 (poker revenue almost flat); and much better than Q1 (~11% decline).

The overall trend in all quarters is the same - successful cross-sell to casino and sports, more than offsetting drops in poker.

You guys are implying a causation to a correlation that may be irrelevant. The growth of casino and sports for Amaya cannot just be assumed to be because poker players are migrating from one to the other. In fact, I'd argue that it's more likely the result of new customers coming to those areas which had a lot of upside when first added since they obviously had only one way to go (up) when first starting their casino operations. The growth of them does not at all imply that successful casino has anything to do with lagging poker.

That's literally what the then-interim CEO said during the Q1 2016 conf call.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/3999...nscript?page=2

Emphasis mine.

no sure if "you guys" was referring to my posting too, but i didn't wrote about lagging poker (or at least that wasn't my intention).

i just mentioned that more players were active (overall and within poker), that PS has the same market share and that the casino has more impact. so i just tried to say, that PS is crashing talk seems far off.

besides that, all the data from the link i posted can be seen in various ways and personally the main factors are deposits, global deposits, market share and debt payment, are not available.

anyway, about market shares, global development and detailed numbers, i don't know too much and Hood has far more insight (plus he is a native speaker), so i don't want to go too deep into speculative territory

If you talking about hit n' running poker and then, mostly Pokerstars, as it is mostly online poker, then I don't think it is just Amaya. I would look at all the training sites and hold all of them to account to see in what way they cared about the long term sustainability of the online poker environment.

Fine if you want to consider only the money that is being redirected to Amaya, but if you look at the ecosystem then surely you need to consider also the cash that is being redirected to players as well. Then logically, you should perhaps consider where that cash is being spent?

I would hold the "good guys" running training sites as accountable as well obviously.