Hey everyone,

I am making this thread in the hope for Pokerstars to consider changing their view towards the current online cashgame scene.

Current situation
If you look at Highstakes you see there is so little action. The majority is filled with bumhunters that only play in good games.
And Pokerstars really doesn't give a fluck about this and the highstakes dream.
Before it was;"I really want to play highstakes one day and sit at NL40k."

Now it's: 'hello funplayer, here are some chests and pancakes so you can throw at other people on the table so you will still have a good time while your money decreases.'

What happened to actually playing to improve yourself and outwin anyone at the table and move up the stakes. Now it's: 'oh i got it in bad, time to use the ridiculous cash out feature.'

Pokerstars went for an entertaining route that doesn't reward good players. Less and less rakeback and tablecap are prime examples.

The scene has turned from this



Into this


It's a joke honestly, and imo they should stop glamorising the Pokerstars Casino dream.


What happened to great innovations like Allstars Showdown?
Great idea in which highstakes regulars battle it out together with 0% rake for a $100,000 prize.
Not only does this incentives to play more but it's also good for the ecosystem in general.

Players from every level will rail games and play more. While still keeping the rake on normal tables.


This is also why many players quit.
You dedicate your whole life to master and craft your game only to sit on top with little to no action.
Just to play the whole bumhunt game like everyone else. It's all very sad

Classic make 10 000 buyins at nl 2 to move up to nl 2k

This was so fun to watch.
Unfortunately AMAYA happened to PokerStars

I agree with you, a lot of parts of the marketing system for a poker site is so overlooked because every site is so greedy. The problem is that regs are not incentivized to playvs each other. What the pokersites fail to acknowledge is how much free marketing they got through the years from the guys that battled at high-stakes. For example I would bet that when Isildur1 first showed up at full tilt he brought more publicity/customers to the site than any other paid pro ever did.

I also think that you shouldn't have to pay rake when you are starting tables, you are doing the site a favour when starting a game. To me it's clearly a big issue if new young people download pokerstars to see that the biggest game that is running is 2 tables of $5/10 where half of the guys are playing a 40bb stack.

Some kind of leaderboard as there is for scoop and so on would be nice for cash games as well. Highstakesdb probably also generated a lot of profits for sites like pokerstars.

There are so many other examples, but I do believe 100% that the reason poker is declining is because of greedy and shady poker sites, not AI/Bots or whatever people want to think.

just b/c something in the golden age of online poker was a thing, this thing won't necessarily bring back the golden age.

classical "cause and effect" misjudgement imo. in the heydays fish deposited tons of money and at the high stakes you could make a ton of money. sure, rail heaven was a thing, but without average joe depositing a few $100's in the first place, durrrr and others wouldn't have had a chance to battle it out.

anyway, if you want to ignore the fact, that the market and the environment have changed, why don't you team up with all the other creators of revolutionary threads like "rake free" or whatnot and show these greedy corporate pen pushers, how to safe online poker ...

it wont make games the same as in 2008 but 100% if will be more attractive to (new) players

If there was a viable business model for a poker platform to run “old PokerStars style”, don’t you think somebody would do that?

Pre UIGEA / Black Friday / end of boom, the larger platforms all had a pretty similar business model: Reward players for playing high volume to drive up overall business. PP / PS / FTP all offered the same product, just executed differently.

Today, after recreational player deposits have long dried up, all larger platforms still have a very similar business model. It’s just a business model that’s vastly different to the one they had 10-15 years ago.

If you tell PS “hey guys, here’s a way to make 10 million new players deposit $1k each and they’ll reload $500 every other day” and all they had to do was turn back the clock to their old business model, don’t you think they would do it?

I agree with the sentiment. But highstakes now like the allstars if it was to promote action it would be on nl2k to have quite a few participants, and 4-10k pots max are not as exciting as hs in the past.

Maybe they could promote matches with highstakes regulars (like the Galfond challenge did) where a team of players invest in various opponents in 6max tables, and there could be small side bets by viewing public (like pokershares does) to see who would have the highest winrate or points in some sort of leaderboard.

So the players wouldn't pay rake but the interested audience would pay for it via the sidebets and could win the bet. Not sure if this is allowed for the site. Then make clipa of best moments/hands and post it on youtube to promote the games.

Would you really say it's pokerstars that do not care about the highstakes dream or highstakes players themselves no longer really see it as viable to battle it out when it's come to the point that skill levels are similar, solver use, RTA, bumhunting, less easy money in the environment and lack of rakeback killed any chance of playing so high where the risk of significant loss is present, to makes sense playing. The cons outweigh the pros in this case, so much risk for so little gain.

I don't think having highstakes wars is important for pokerstars bottomline, raking the larger population of midstake players grinding 60-80 hours a week on zoom and reg tables probably benefits them more than going out of their way for a smaller population of players, no? Plus, everybody says the easy money is gone now, just where will you see people flinging 80K pots plus like chump change online. Unless they bink big MTTs and really want to degen it up, or the person is a super whale like last year that one guy on PS whole lost close to 7 figures in a week and then never came back; it's certainly not going to be from players grinding the stakes and chasing the poker dream to battle the best at the highest stakes when people can barely beat the rake to make a living playing the midstakes to even get the chance to shot take at higher stakes. Just where will the money come from?

It's long gone.

Stars is making very less money from poker than in like 2015 where there are still VIP sistem? It seems obvious but i have It not clear.
Then point is that they want dry games so they can use their image as better poker room just for bait peple to Sports bets?
So they want poker as bad as posible but without kill it totally?
What i miss?
They are doing things good for themselves or just ridic bad at It sames in online poker shoes?
Is really sad to see lobby

damn, why didn't I think of this??

cut out the middle man, genius