I have to agree, I just don't get it either but he does crush! Won a WPT this year too so he's definitely doing something right.

One thing I do miss are the old $16.50 freezeouts and $16.50 bounties. Those were always my favorite games. Especially the nightly 16.50 sh bounty, hope that gets brought back sometime

They changed the MTT schedule again. No more deep and 15 min blinds for $2 and $5.

Please change it back Carbon.

Maybe the T2o is an homage to Doyle Brunson.

Hmm? I still see tournaments like the $2 Deep at 21:00 that is 15 minute and deep. Maybe they got rid of some of the others though.

Yea would be nice to have some decent $16.50 and $20 tourneys.

There are $22s not a whole lot but there are still some.

Am I fully comprehending the new rewards system?

1. Entice players to signup and work hard to reach the 35% rewards tier. Promise them it will carry-over to next month too.
2. Next month, go back on your commitment and kick your highest raking players to 15% without notice or compensation. Make sure to do it so suddenly that they have no chance to convert their points at the higher 35% rate.
3. On a whim, destroy any sense of fairness or transparency by making the tier these players previously earned and should have still had INVITE ONLY. By not having clear requirements and not disclosing how to get an invite, choose to give this tier to far fewer players than before regardless of merit.
4. Take more rake, treat the players badly and expect that they will continue to trust you and play on your site. Increase short-term profits!
5. Get a lot of bad PR and lose a huge chunk of players by taking a mutually beneficial relationship and making it completely one-sided. Players are disgusted with your behavior and move to sites that show them some respect.
6. See step 1.

i gotta be honest so long as the last week was just a small hiccup in processing cashouts im still cool with merge. if they start taking forever to cashout again though then **** em. thats about my number one concern with any site so long as they have at least a decent mtt schedule, not vip status or rakeback or if i can use a piece of software to help me play like a robot. im not a shill for any site as someone called me, i hate all poker sites equally.

Whenever I see an affiliate react to your nonsense it amazes me how ignorant they actually are. You should ask them how much Merge has cut their affiliate program kickbacks to them since they began taking everything away from the players while increasing rake. It doesn't take a genius to realize the affiliates are making much more now than before. That is if players still ignorantly play on Merge after the BS they have been pulling for the last several months.

Obv why I get worked up about it. You have affiliates in here polishing the turd all day so players don't leave cutting into their profits.

I guess I'm doing the same because I cashed out my Merge money and am now split between Bovada and ACR. I obv want the player base to leave merge to play where I'm at. The difference is it's also in their best interest unless you're just grinding mtt's.

Really what I'm saying is not non sense.

Merge has been strategically gutting the VIP program for months piece by piece. They do that thinking players can slowly digest the changes like that getting used to less and less.

Meanwhile they raaaaaised the rake lol.

Cash outs were at 11 weeks which I trolled the **** out of them for. They were being processed 1-2 days for a month but all the sudden we're going on business day 7 since anyone has been processed which has $2500 of my money with its **** in the wind. I'm vocal about that change in pattern and where that might be going. I asked support 10 different ways to get an answer if anything is wrong and they copy and pasted their 6-8 weeks policy everytime.

They've dropped their forum taking anyway any chance for the players to form a consensus of opinion and limiting all their backlash to this shill vs. player mess of a thread.

I guess they have a glitch in their system which showed the last man standing bubbling 2 days in a row only to have players added later that day. Somehow I'm in the wrong for stating once the page shows >101 players that the leaderboard should populate. as stated by their rep. Which is different from the page that says it should populate at the beginning of the promo. Again I'm the troll for that lmao.

And that wraps up my nonsense. Just an aggro personality upset with a site who's exploiting a niche taking advantage of US players who have little choice and have been loyal to their site. Whatta ya gonna do?

Mark is a solid live player as well. Watched him crush live Foxwoods Classic series not to far back.

This

I think I will copy/paste this in an email to carbon because this articulates perfectly what i've been thinking the last couple of days. Nice post.

maybe you should check your tone, lifecooler is a boss on the network that is the primary discussion of this thread and was making legit, constructive criticisms while you opt to troll and try to undermine any value his post had. who should we pay attention to? hmmmm..

i agree with the ideas to have more afternoon jigs, that would def be fun but would that kind of thin the player pools? most rec players wouldn't play 12 hours straight, they would likely either choose afternoon or night.

a few more thoughts: troy is probably a robot, mark is probably a real person. and speculating how you "run" is the dumbest ass **** you could ever argue about, newsflash its the exact same for everyone over any meaningful sample. for anyone to whom that was news, you may be pleased to also learn the grass is green and the sky is blue

wow some of these late reg are 4 hours. interesting

Just noticed the VIP changes. I went from 25% to 15%...

Edit: also major lol at the new VIP icons...

Kind of bitter sweet for me. I work late some nights so it's nice to be able to degen it up and have a chance at making a run in a decent tournament, but at the same time it's crazy that reg is ending around and the bubble is soon to follow. After hour 2.5-3 you're just burning money anyway so who really cares?

congrats, I went from 36% to 0% in February on Sbook/Ponly after being a major rake member for 5 yrs straight. enjoy

I will say the only thing I've really noticed that's been slightly annoying is that there was no ahead warning or mention from Merge that each night's GTD amount would fluctuate among the $5k GTD or higher tourneys. As well, I recall the other morning going one day in advance in the client to check out the next day's schedule - I wrote down the aforementioned MTT's and then when I re-opened that following afternoon, the GTD's had changed.

Hopefully things on that front will stabilize a bit and people can get into a groove with this new schedule. Say what you want about Bovada - at least you can bank on consistent MTT's and GTD's week in, and week out.

If anyone at Carbon is monitoring here please give strong consideration to bringing back the old MTT schedule, at least at the micros. Only a handful of days into the new schedule and I'm playing fewer events than before the change due to cancellations and significant gtd reductions.

There is also little variety in micro buy in amounts unless you want to play in $25 and $50 gtds. The old schedule had its flaws but the daily changes are making things worse.

Just one persons opinion.

Interesting is one word for it.

Check again. I was registered for that one last night and got a pop up message about 10 minutes prior to start saying that the tournament was closed and refunds would be issued.

That is/was a fun tournament. I would think they have to keep working on making this better. Its just terrible now. Last night I saw a $2 with a $25 GTD with a 3 hour and 45 min late reg get up to $130 and take over 8 hours to play. Its just silly.

Update: at 21:00 there is now a $2 deep with a $50 guarantee and a 3 hour 45 min late reg. Have fun.

Did sportsbook head to another network or is it the same as carbon? The sportsbook schedule seems impossibly weak. All I see are 3 or 4 guarantees. No guarantees are in late registration. I have been messing with the filters in disbelief for 3 days. Is this real?

They're still on the same network but they may as well not be. A few months back they segregated their cash game and sitngo players from the rest of the network in order to separate their fishier sports gambling oriented players from the larger player pool. On Oct.1 they separated their tournaments, completing their segregation from the rest of the network.