Amaya won't die, it will just be operating games with high variance and thin skill advantages that some old-school poker players won't be regarding as poker.

I'm not that picky - I'm OK with playing craps tourneys, dominoes or whatever multiplayer shell game as long as it has at least two buttons, is raked endurably, and my opponents are OK with paying the price for fun to both Amaya (mostly) and the occasional regs who're still in.

Well what most people don't realize is what is happening isn't exactly a new thing. If you know who Barry Greenstein is he wrote about it in his book or on 2+2 here. Before Moneymaker boom poker was already dying because Casinos were closing poker rooms everywhere and putting there blackjack/craps/slots you name in the place in exchange. The money they make in those games is several times more it is simple as that.
When Chris won the Main Event and the poker boom started casinos all over the world they hated it. But because of the demand they couldn't say no.

But there were several elements People don't realize:
-Poker rooms during the boom are (at least the biggest ones) were owned and managed by poker players (if you look at Daniel Negranu stories he played all the time with Scheinberg as a teenager in Canada he was an avid poker player and quite a good one to add), Full Tilt Poker ( and before people start off top of course their handling of the money was terrible and they should be ashamed of it but the way they were managing the poker room was top notch and they were massive in scale, Party Poker (Mike Sexton) )

So they never treat poker as a casino game they had understanding of the game nowadays most of the guys in poker world they have extensive experience in casino they barely know the rules in poker (if even that)

-Poker was a grey area in US so it was really never illegal to play real money games from USA only facilitating the transactions for US cilents was. So basically Pokerstars/FTP could easily promote in the US and get the clients from the richest market in the world. They didn't have to compete in US with Casino or betting or daily fanasy sport (which is also the reason why dfs so massive now simply because it is exempted from the law banning other forms of gambling because it is skill based game.

-Poker wasn't known so thanks to that in most markets was it grey area means no taxes no regulation now in many countries it is either illegal or heavily regulated and taxed or ring fanced from the global market.
(for example people here complaing about Eastern Europeans but I remember the times with massive Russian fish but then Russia made is illegal to play from there and they actively ban sites promoting it/make it very difficult to deposit for your average fish hence the numbers now. I mean regs will always find their way to play but fish they play for enterteinment if it is too much hassle they won't bother and do something else in their spare time.)


So it was basically a perfect storm for poker that can happens only once.


Now with all main sites being owned by Casino groups we have the massive decline in poker which is the result of it. It is not suprising (read today Pokerstars is already the biggest casino in Italy) so from their point of you mission accomplished. Again even if they make 1/4 of their player switch from poker to casino/betting they are going to profit massively even means the rest will quit or play a ton less. They just don't care. Now they just treat poker as a way to lure players to play and they try to funnel them to games where the biggest % of player deposit end up as a rake (so games unbeatable,barely beatable due to rake).


Back to your main point that it doesn't make that much sense for them to get rid of regs. They bought POKERStars so they have to offer poker in some form but what they cleverly do is they slowly sure no one wins there. They want to offer entertainment not the skill/winning part.
IF they pulled all the changes at once the boat would sink (thats what happened with FTP when they did the changes with table selection,rewards etc. all at the same time) So they do every couple of months one change pushing it one step closer to their goal where all the money in the end goes to them. So either you play casino or bet on sport and money goes to them or you play poker where it is impossible to win and the money goes to them anyway (they introduced lately beat the clock games which regs already proved are unbeatable with current rake structure even for the best SNG MTT regs). So they are closer and closer to it and I genuinly hope people will stop playing there because they will realize how greedy and unfair it is (when you want to play poker and the company treat your deposit like their profit and try to scum you off your money)

People don't realize that already 80-90% of players deposit end up as a rake and goes to Pokerstars pocket. Now it will be just 90%+.

Yes if you are patient you can open a chest using only boosted play. This effectively cut the cost of a chest in half. ie. If your chest costs 240 points and you only play when you have a boost on you will have to rake $1.20 to open the chest versus the $2.40 you would play if you used no boost. If you want to maximize your rake back then you should only play when you have a boost on and then quit once it is completed. So far it looks like the size of your boost goes down when you are winning and up when you are loosing.

Your next boost is unlocked 8 hours after the completion of your current boost. They do not accumulate. So it is best not to end your session a few points short of completing a boost.


Everytime you complete a 200 point boost you have earned 400 points towards the completion of your chest. You have raked $2.00 which earned you 200 points which has been matched by an additional 200 points. So it would take 3.5 boost cycles to complete your chest or about 3 days if you played on session a day completing a boost every time.

This is true for red chests only. Higher volume players who grind for better chests need to earn at least 2 chests a day in order to avoid a downgrade, and assuming that they can realistically use merely 2 boosts a day, it turns out that boosts can cover only part of the volume.

Thanks everybody for taking the time to share your stories and tips - with Wild Card's tips and your tips, these chests are starting to seem a bit less confusing

And there's probably lots of other people who may be reading this thread and not posting who are in similar shoes, who have maybe only opened a chest or two who are still trying to figure out the whole new system of points and the boosts as well, who will likely be helped as well - so thanks everybody!!

Hope you're all having a great weekend - GL with your games!!

You could do this with one chest at any level but yes you will likely get bumped down for the next chest. It would be interesting if you were at the highest level and took a week to get it with boosts how far would you get bumped down, one level or more? If you are grinding then these are questions you would not even think of asking.

ah thanks, good to know
didn't know if they disappeared after a day or what

Just curious what anyone thinks is coming next. The last year or two have been tough, consistent cuts, with this one really really shafting most players. They actually hit so hard most people assume this is it, It will actually likely get even worse.

Also did anyone tell DN that recs got at best the same or sliiiightly better, so he's either uninformed or a complete shill? Don't follow closely enough to know if he had a response to that, last i heard he back tracked from his high rake = friendly games argument.

Took me a while, but have now legit moved the action i gave stars to party.

Blind lobbies.

Great post

Most regs will move most of their action to others sites or already have. Not sure about recs, it's astounding to see that nothing has been done (mass social campaigns) to fill recs about how greedy Pokerstars is and what are alternatives to pokerstars. No famous poker players movement, no angry russians, nothing.

I don't think that building a poker reward program is an easy thing to do.

One of the key challenges that PokerStars has sought to overcome is to reward most players on most play sessions. If that's a starting point for a reward program, then that's going to nessecarily lead to a large number of small rewards, because a lot of play sessions simply aren't very long and don't generate much activity.

I can imagine that there are some players who prefer lots of smaller rewards, and some players who prefer fewer, bigger, rewards. Maybe in time it will be possible for poker sites to tailor different rewards for different groups?

except for the fact that those 'lots of smaller rewards' equal no where close to as much as that fewer bigger rewards was , on average for a rec player its going to total 1/5 or less of what they used to get and anyone with a brain will realise that after a couple weeks of playing. Unless we are talking about a rec playing 2nl they were still getting quite a few stars coins before from their spins / hypers / donking at cash etc

I also hate the excuse of 'its hard to make a rewards program' lmao, this is a multi billion dollar company with hundreds of millions of profits annually. The hard part is making a rewards program where they can bend over their whole playerbase the absolute hardest to squeeze every penny of profit they can while keeping their player base happy.

*opens gold chest
*gets zero dollars/zero tickets

Thanks Amaya for making poker fun!

You're overestimating the impact of Beat The Clock on the overall poker ecosystem. At peak hours, ~60 $1 games (Amaya earns $4.50-4.60 from each - $4.80 minus rewards) and ~30 $5 ones (~$23 net rake from each) go off per hour, while $10 and $25 have stopped running at all - regs are not that dumb, and there are too few recs who're OK with blowing money away at a rate of $1 a minute (at the $10 limit) to get a boring chip split if they make it to the end.

Hence Amaya earns less than $1K an hour from BTC at the peak, and of course significantly less at the off-peak. I think the overall revenue from BTC is $15K-17K a day and ~$1.5M per quarter, which is 0.5% of Amaya's overall revenue.

The biggest contributor to Amaya's bottom line is still the almighty Spin & Go, and there, I'm sure that only 70-80% of deposits are converted to rake even after the reward cut - short stack 3-max and HU play in the winner-take-all mode is well-studied, and regs have decently thick edges over recs relatively to the game duration (3%+ ROIs at $100s with 5% rake, otherwise they'd just move down, and bigger ROIs at lower stakes, of course), which result in decent hourlies due to a high number of games (20+) that can be played per hour.

The variance is not such a big deal because old-time regs had accumulated large bankrolls prior to the advent of spins anyway and usually don't know how to put the rolls to a more profitable use than staking. As for the new regs, the main reason why they don't move up is that they're underskilled for higher limits (would have a smaller hourly there than in their current games), not underrolled. The Dunning-Kruger effect is much smaller in spins and HU hypers than in NLH cash because the chip all-in EV improves the precision of winrate measurement greatly in spins and hypers.

It's not that easy to increase the rake on spins further - higher stakes would stop running and producing mouthwatering jackpots, lower stakes would also see a drop in interest because either the jackpot hit frequencies would get lower or the 'typical' series of consecutive 2x games would get longer (recs hate hitting dozens of 2x's in a row).

Of course Amaya is trying to design another game where regs' edges would be thinner, but it's hard to accomplish too because even the poker recs would like the games to be significantly dependent on their decisions - that's why they've deposited with a poker site instead of one of the myriad of online casinos.

coon74 you heavily overestimate the winrate:rake ratio in most of the games. PLO there were huge post here about rake being to huge especially in ZOOM PLO where literally no one was beating the games pre rakeback.
Cash games I made huge analysis with hand2note on insanely big databases (20 milion hands+ having problem finding more than handful of players beating nl100-nl200 with more than 4bb with literally one single player having 6bb with a meaningful sample (I mean 200k hands+ but still may database maybe still wasn't big enough).

And I know several people with an access to SmartSpin stable and granted this isn't representative but I can assure you that if you beat 100 spins with 3%+ ROI you are the 1% top reg so thats not anywhere close to representative.

Hypers etc you can ask Jdawg when he is like the king of the hill or close to it and he has like 1-2% ROI.

The only exception to this would be MTTs with still the biggest winnings to rake paid ratio.


I didn't follow your career coon74 but I belive you play fairly low?? which might explain why you have such an exagerated idea of peoples winrates in the games. Yeah when you play for a living micro maybe still it is possible to have insane winrates.

What's your opinion on Unibet's Challenges program?

FYI, their new Head of Poker has told about research showing that their program is too complicated for a new customer, but he'd like to still leave some 'useful gamification' in place:

The thing is that you're not obliged to play 100s if you're not a top 1% reg.

The exact reason why I play so low is that I'm aware of my position in the food chain.

And that's the reason why the poker action in general is going to shift from high to low stakes. That's what has happened at 888 too.

The reason why the rake-to-deposit conversion ratio won't rise to 90% is that regs will move down or cut their table count and start paying less rake. Winning less for sure, but paying less rake too.

The reg-to-fish ratio at the $100 spins is going to take care of itself by virtue of the worst regs being moved down by their stables.

Let's take a $1K 6-man hyper as an example.

I assume that no reg in their right mind will sit if there's no mark, and no reg will play a lineup where he has an ROI smaller than 0.5% (I'm not even sure that anyone smart agrees to play with an expected ROI less than 1%).

Then, if such a hyper does go off, then jdawg earns $10 (which is a pessimistic estimate) and the other 4 regs earn $5. The regs' total profit is $30.

Amaya takes $120 net rake ($125.16 gross rake - $20.86 from 6 people - minus ~$5 worth of chest equity considering that there's a rec in the game).

By the law of conservation of money, the rec's loss is $30 + $120 = $150.

The rake-to-deposit ratio is thus $120 / $150 = 80%.

Again, this is under the assumption that the regs are in their right minds - they shouldn't battle for the lobby under the circumstances; rather, they should form a division like those that exist for HU hypers, and carry out division admission tests in play money home games instead of the real money lobby.

In higher raked games, regs will accordingly have higher requirements for the softness of the lineup in which they're sitting. In games where the lobby is blind, they should lean on the pessimistic side in their estimates.

Those who're smart enough to earn a bankroll for such expensive games are definitely smart enough not to let themselves operate on thin profit margins when high margins (ROIs) are still available at lower stakes. If a reg can't attain 2% at the $100 spins but can attain 7% at the $30s (i.e. is, say, in the 2nd percentile of the overall reg population by strength), the reg will obviously play the 30s.

I play(ed) hu plo zoom on stars. The rake is about 15bb/100. Not really responding to anyone, but it is pretty fkn funny how hard they raped it.

Well, there's no wonder why HU Zoom isn't very populated above NL50 any longer.

Amaya could have lowered the rake but it doesn't want people to play HU Zoom cash anymore (or any cash, for that matter) because it wants to transfer people into some of the newer games that satisfy most of their customers better and thus elicit more deposits.

Power Up will be an example of such a game, and note that it's not a low-edge game, but Amaya still wants to develop and release it because it's going to attract a 'new audience' to Stars.

it's like a high rake spin n go with special 'power ups' and animations lol can't imagine there will be massive edges to be had

More action buttons -> more edges for those who take time to learn which of the new buttons to click in which spots.

The fact that the current regs of 'traditional poker' will be bad at Power Up at first (the PU regs of 2019 will be laughing at the plays that the early bird regs will be making in the first month of real money PU) doesn't mean much to Amaya - it's looking to enhance the gaming experience of a large group of its net depositors, not the comfort of a smaller group of its current net withdrawers.

your reasoning regarding how more actions lead to more edges is fallacious I haven't played their Power Up poker yet but I could easily imagine a version that lowered edges.

i also dont see how the fact that players who haven't studied Power Up will play worse than those who will have studied it is relevant

Until you play it, you won't have an idea of how much stupid stuff the current players are doing there. The more you play, the better you'll become at spotting fish at your tables, and the more understanding you'll have of the effects of power cards on your equity (some of the powers allow to draw 1-2 extra cards from the deck, and if you have an idea of what hands typically win showdowns in PLO as opposed to NLH, you know how much these extra cards can change).

I can't really see where all players go. The traffic on 888 and party is still low. Pokerstars does whatever it wants.