Solid analysis.

2nd, nice analysis. Do you think they might copy party sit&hero with their spin&ko format (4 handed, 1 bounty)?

Poker sites, especially Stars, are now trying to innovate - not just put a new name on the same game like they were doing before with Rush / Zoom and Expresso / Spin & Go, but add their own ideas to their competitors' offerings to produce an original, better, game.

Party's Sit & Go Hero is too 'vanilla'. It becomes exactly like a Spin & Go if the bounty player busts, and also almost like a Spin if that player doubles up and becomes very unlikely to be eliminated in 3rd. Leave alone that the HU phase is a big part of SNG Hero due to its 'slow' 3-minute blind structure. Thus SNG Hero is only slightly less vulnerable to GTO calculators than Spins.

What poker sites have been trying is to design games that are intractable for modern GTO AIs*. Putting a bounty on each player in the game (instead of just one) is a good way to make life much harder for AIs because a 1-chip difference in stack sizes may result in a huge difference in equities depending on who's covering whom.

Besides, as Hood pointed out in October 2016, basing on the screenshots posted by Randizzle,

Indeed, the screenshot of the Spin & KO description does say clearly,

Note the 'every time' bit.

* Speaking of computational complexity, total KOs take it to the extreme - because the total amount of bounties in play decreases as the tourney progresses, the dollar value per chip in a stack diminishes unless Hero frequently makes KO attempts or (if shortstacked) gets value from bigger stacks hunting for Hero's bounty. The value of a stack is far from proportional to its size, and I think no one knows how to approximate it properly yet, so total KOs are far from being 'solved' in the next few years.

Played my first two spin tickets. First one I won a $1.10 ticket. Second one I lost a play again ticket when I shoved 77 into AA, oops.

How about POKER .
No late Rego.
No Rebuys.
No Addons.
And a guaranteed prize pool ,with satellites.

This sentence is nonsense, and the rest of your analysis appears to be based upon this false premise.

The most obvious proof that your claim is false is that the biggest new product category of the last few years (short-handed, short-stacked, jackpot Sit & Go Tournaments) were solved perfectly by mathematics back in the late 2000s - well more than half a decade before the jackpot Sit & Go Tournaments were popularised by Winamax.

Of course, poker sites would prefer a game that is harder to use bots on, but the idea that this is a driving force (rather than just a minor "nice to have") is absurd.

The late stages of those SNGs, where the push/fold strategy is close to optimal, were indeed approximately solved in the 2000s. However, when the stacks are deeper than 8 bb, push/fold is no longer optimal; limps and, if deeper than ~10 bb, minraises have to be included into the strategy. And the difference between push/fold and advanced strategies is significant in terms of the ROI despite being small by deepstack game standards in terms of bb/100 because the bb is a much larger portion of the BI than in deep games.

Due to the variety of bet sizings available, NLH hasn't been solved by bots - they need to make limiting assumptions (so-called betting abstractions) about possible bet sizings. When only a few sizing options are allowed, a bot can be almost unexploitable, however, when arbitrary sizings are allowed, bots are estimated to be exploitable by hundreds of bb/100 (!), i.e. they'd be better off always folding than playing their leaky strategies. (I'll give a citation later when I retrieve the URL from where I downloaded a PDF.)

Of course, this doesn't imply that bots can't beat the strongest humans. They're already doing it HU. However, even for 3-handed play, with limps, non-all-in raises and postflop action allowed, a bot that can beat human experts is much harder to build because the game tree is much bigger. A publicly available solver for 3+ handed play costs €499 (for its core functionality, not the crippled trial version that can only solve turn and river spots) and appears to require a stronger-than-average computer to get a solution for a non-HU preflop spot overnight.

It's not that easy to have a positive chip EV in a 1 fish + 1 reg opponent $100 Spin & Go lineup, leave alone beating the rake. That's because $100 regs know the shortstack postflop play maths - with wide preflop ranges! - very deep. As every tenth of the big blind in EV corresponds to a 0.5%+ difference in the ROI, they can't afford to be as exploitable by humans in terms of bb/100 as 100 bb cash players.

And besides, I was talking not about the early 2010s but about a tendency of the last 1-2 years when poker sites have finally started realising that shortstack winner-take-all / cash game formats will become vulnerable to bots when hardware gets stronger, and they've started adding various 'gimmicks' into their novel poker formats.

Examples are super-KOs (they're not a new thing, but only last year did Stars begin to promote them hard), Win The Button (that requires future game simulation to estimate the extra value of having the button, and the penalty for being in the blinds, next hand!), Hit & Run satellites at Winamax, Sit & Go Hero at Party, and also, maybe surprisingly to you, Blast at 888 (the reason why it's hard is that when 3-4 players are put all in at once in the end, and 2-4 places are paid, ICM is inaccurate because it doesn't account for the possibility of finishing in 2nd by virtue of being 2nd in chips when the chip leader wins the main pot).

Even the All In or Fold MTTs mentioned above can't be solved by modern Nash calculators on modern hardware because that game requires future game simulation (FGS) looking up to a whole orbit ahead. When Hero is sitting in the HJ at a full 9-max table, he's going to be hit all-in by the BB in 5 hands, and this must somewhat loosen up Hero's range as opposed to the (unraked) cash game setting against an imaginary maniac who has straddled all-in, however, the FGS tree looking 5 hands ahead at a 9-max table is so big that it requires a strong computer to be processed in reasonable time, let alone that Hero might be reseated or (very likely) someone with an unpredictable stack size will join the table to replace someone who busts during those 5 hands.

please stop playing on stars

cardmatch gone ? :/

Not showing up here either. While I know this will be cheered as a good thing by many here it leads to a question. Currently the only "promotions" running and that is using that term very loosely are, the extra $1000 prizes given out in chests and the special MM spin & gos. Does this mean the end of promotions as we have come to know them in favour of everything being given away through the Stars Rewards program?

Weren't there too many technical difficulties caused by CardMatch (too big computer resource consumption by the CardMatch browser app)?

Either there will be a similar promo that will be less resource-intensive... or Amaya wants to transfer people from cash games to tournaments because the latter allow to sell the dream of winning big easier.

As a 2nl player trying to build a roll, the extra 50cis every day from the Card match helped me a ton, it was actually one of the promos I really enjoyed. Hope its not gone for good.

Yea card match was pretty nice: +10-15BB on average, every day (micros).
So they went from solid rakeback + cardmatch to <5% rakeback, just horrible.

Pity Partypoker is no alternative for many micro-players, since their rakeback only kicks in above 25$ rake/week.

Here's a quote from the PokerStars MTT thread that will make some of you sigh with relief

Luke didn't say anything about total KOs, though

Thread title says it all. How much worse is this new chest system compared to what was there before?

What is the details of new system? I've been playing party poker mainly recently.

Sent from my SM-G900F using Tapatalk

It's not a rakeback system, it's a rakekeep system.

Have you played at 888? It's like that you get basically nothing back. In terms of % the common return is ~5%

- This food in this restaurant is terrible.
- Yes! And it comes in such small portions!

Hi Arty!


For anyone who may have stopped opening the PS client every day, here's some updates that may be of interest to people?

• The Deal jackpot's back up over $85k
• And the Micro Millions series starts tomorrow, with a $5.50 Sunday Storm with a $300k guarantee

If it's raining in other peoples' neck of the woods tomorrow afternoon like it's supposed to in mine, guess a Sunday Funday might be an option?

GL to everybody giving the MM a go this summer!! Should be a nice chance to get some practice as well!!

I'd imagine The Deal will take longer to pay out now, there's significantly less StarsCoin in the system.

Such a great point Imp - was wondering what was going to do myself after my stash of StarsCoins expired ... but that's true, everybody's in the same boat

Maybe longer in between jackpots, so may have to play more coins every 12hrs - but maybe payouts per person might be larger now?

This new rakeback system even affects The Deal

Nice to see some MM Deposit Offer
Deposit 200$ for free 40$ cash + 1x1.1$ MM tickets.

Thank you coon74 for your post. I find it very nicely structured and informative

Before some weeks my PS7.bg was finally updated to the new version i find the new tournament lobby very bad structured. Please PS consider the option to can manage tournament tabs like before - like to have on/off the new version.

When can you withdraw the deposit ? I deposited 200$ got the 40$ bonus. But it says amount i can withdraw is 80$ After the Micromillions are over?