I play a lot at Stars, mostly tournies - so can't really speak for cash games.

But why is it that there is no dead button rule at Stars?
That is, consider a four handed game:

On hand 1, the player in the SB gets eliminted. Now, according to the rules of all cardrooms I have ever visited, the button will be "dead" at the seat where the SB previously sat - the player previously in the BB will post the SB and the CO will post the BB.

But on PokerStars, the button will now move to the player previously in the BB - having him skip the SB, and the CO player won't post a BB this rotation.

This has to be a mistake, and given the amount of players that play at Stars, someone must have pointed this out to them before.

So, what is their response?

Seriously, nobody?

I would assume they use the "Moving Button Rule" - but this rule allows for 2 big blinds to be posted in one hand. I havent personally played enough stars tourneys yet, to have noticed how they do it.

From their website.

http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/tournaments/rules/


PokerStars uses a "forward moving button" rule in its tournaments. According to this rule, no player ever receives the button twice in a row; at the completion of every hand, the button is moved clockwise to the small blind. The implication of this rule is that when players are eliminated, there may be players who get a reprieve from one or both blinds. The forward moving button is common practice in online poker due to the technicalities involved in adjusting the blinds after players are eliminated. Since these are basically random occurrences, no player will receive any long-term advantage, and the rule is necessarily fair for all players.

Wow, it's so sick that they publically state "we do things almost good, mmm'kay".

That's not really what they said. They feel that doing it this way is the best option.

I don't think any reasonable person would believe this is the best option, and I think the people at Stars are reasonable.

Also, why include the "technicalities" [censored] if they believed their solution was the best?

I agree with eurythmech. I read:
as, "It is beyond us to figure out how to keep track of where the big blind was from the hand before"

Considering all the sick forms of variance in tournament poker, do you really think a moving button rule will have any significant effect on your overall variance (or even winrate)?

I agree with them - its basically random, and therefore no long term disadvantage to anyone. The moving button rule is easier to implement and understand. There s no need for more complex rules. Keeping the rules as simple as possible is a good thing imo.

From previous hand:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>button = 3
bigblind = 5</pre><hr />

Get next big blind / small blind:
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>button += 1
smallblind = bigblind
bigblind += 1
while (not player at bigblind) {
bigblind += 1
if (bigblind &gt; maxseats)
bigblind = 1
}
post big blind at (bigblind)
if (player at smallblind)
post small blind at (smallblind)</pre><hr />

.... complicated stuff

Wow, wouldn't have dreamed its this easy. Impressive coding skills you got there.

Anyway, the moving-button rule is in fact simpler and easier to understand. Why bother new players with skipped SB's, when there s really no need to introduce these situations?

Xanders&gt;&gt; Can U implement a feature allowing me to always skip the blinds? I already have a superuser-account, just need the script...

Don't you call every bet preflop anyway

might also help with importing hands to poketracker. full tilt has errors every time, pokerstars does not. full tilt uses dead button rule. do other sites use the dead button rule?

(Is it bad form to respond to a thread that is 13 years old? Sorry.)

I have just encountered this issue and I am disturbed by it. Every body of written tournament poker rules I can find speficies a dead button. PokerTDA uses that, WSOP uses that, even PokerStars Live events use that.

So why in the world does their software behave differently?

To the quoted post, doing it the correct way in an online game doesn't bother new players. They don't have to understand it and would probably not even notice it.

To me the only way to create confusion is to have software that works in a completely non-standard way -- and it seems sad to me that Stars has not fixed this after all these years.