^^ perfect thanks for the help! Appreciate it

I'm crossposting my rant from the Internet Poker thread because I can already feel UnibetAndrew ignoring the whole thing or responding with a single sentence "keep the MTT stuff in the MTTc thread" type of thing. This started from them not wanting to allow note-taking (hence the beginning of the post) but there's a bunch of relevant mtt stuff here IMO. Feel free to flame if you disagree




I know this isn't going anywhere but I really can't help myself from needing to point out that this is a pretty cringeworthy response. It's a really thin line between doing things that are good for the ecosystem and just being greedy (see: PokerStars). As I've said 500 times in these threads, I've been super impressed with Unibet's general attitude of sorta bringing online poker back to it's roots before all the HEM/masstabler/VPP hunter etc stuff happened and ruined it. BUT lately virtually all of your responses in both threads have made me wonder if what you're trying to do really is much different from the Stars shortsighted greedmodel after all. I think your answer about note taking highlights this pretty well: Note taking has been a built-in feature in every client since day 1 and it gives no unfair advantage to anyone. Yet you are actually taking it away to have losing players lose slower and thus having your company make more money. You are essentially changing the game out of greed, not fixing anything. This is very different from not allowing HUDS and tableninjas and all that crap, which were never a part of poker and are essentially just additional cheating tools. But note-taking is an inherent part of the game and saying "we don't include this because better players take better notes" is like saying "we only want to include coinflip tournaments because better players make better decisions". It's a thin line between trying to optimize rec playing experience and just being flat out greedy.

This same attitude is reflected in a bunch of other things, you've now had a faulty software for 2 years or something, after every update it gets worse, there's barely a single night when there's not some freezing or other errors (last few days we've had bounty MTTs without being able to see the bounty values on people, nice update there). It's almost like you don't even try to fix it to make sure that only bad players play on your site because good players suffer more from faulty software. You still haven't fixed any of the tournament structures, your rake is the highest in the world when you compare them to playing time (=tournament structures). You have very misleading tournament descriptions, the stuff you advertise as turbo or speed tournaments is faster than a hyperturbo on any other site yet you rake them so high even Stars wouldn't dare to do it. I final tabled one of these things yesterday and the final table average was 1,5 big blinds. You read that right. And you rake 11% for that. I pointed this out in the mtt thread like 6 months ago and not a single thing has been done. This wouldn't be a big deal, but again makes me suspicious of whether this whole "we have pure poker" campaign is just an elaborate sham. Based on what you said about note-taking, I could very easily imagine you commenting the same about 1,5BB average tournaments with 10% rake: "We don't want to have a real structure because better players make better decisions the deeper they are..."

Or another example of where you mislead people is the Sunday major. Yes it's a cool idea that you can only satty in. Again, I think you're already on pretty damn thin ice by essentially forcing out all the good players in the world from playing it, because trying to satty their way in isn't worth their time. I assume you guys were brainstorming at the office pretty hard when you created that: "how can we have a Sunday major and make sure no good players play it without it being unethical" and you came up with that. Nice job, and despite being one of the people who would always just buy in straight and who is somewhat annoyed by having to waste time sattying in every week, I'd say all in all it's a decent thing to have. BUT here's the catch. Your satties have 2 minute levels (=hyperturbos) and you again charge outrageous rake. You try to point the attention elsewhere by saying that the major itself doesn't have rake (duh, since you can only satty in), but essentially playing the major is just playing the satty over and over since on average (assuming no skill edge) you have to play 90€ worth of satties for every 90€ ticket. And for the structures you offer for this experience your rake is not even a scam, I need to find a stronger word in my vocabulary to describe it. I mean jfc you're charging 11,1% rake for ****ing joke 2min level hyperturbos, which is the ONLY way to satellite into this tournament, and the fish are bleeding to death losing infinite money to rake. Yet you have everyone fooled with this genius idea of a "major that is fair for everyone" whereas in reality it's the most shameless moneygrab in recent history. This has been pointed out over and over in the mttc thread and nothing's been done. And I know exactly why you haven't fixed them: "The faster structure diminishes good players' skill edge.." Again this would be no problem if you raked them in a reasonable way but currently it is just a scam.

I know that was pretty mtt specific, but 1) I don't play anything but MTTs so I don't now what you're doing when it comes to cash, and 2) your mtt guy isn't responding in mttc, and when he is he's ignoring all these obvious things. I was just trying to point out your worrying overall attitude and misleading advertising here, not trying to talk about MTT stuff specifically.

Sorry for the rant, it's just really frustrating when your forum presence is starting to wither away like it's done with every other site's reps, you're not responding to emails, the software is still the same buggy POS it was when it came out, and there are a bunch of smart posters in both of these threads trying to help you out and you just ignore them twisting the "for the good of the ecosystem" in the exact same way as Stars does, while cunningly pocketing highest rake in the world with the worst software and structures and giving all these bs excuses.



PS. Another reason why the Sunday major is a bit of fail: virtually all hsmtters I know just have plebstakes guys playing the satties for them over the week for a small fee so that they can then play the maj themselves without having to play those WTA hypers all week to get a ticket. The more popular the site becomes the more this will happen, there's no way to control it. Again I like the general idea but the way it's actually implemented is terrible. This how you should actually do it:

1) Make buying in possible for a higher price/give additional chips to those who satty in
2) Have satellites that are not hyperturbos
3) If you only have hyperturbos do not charge 11% rake

See, it wasn't that hard.

so because your friends are multi accounting/account sharing scumbags they need to change it?

I've replied to that in the main thread, but thought I'd mention that the SE final is rake free.

Well you didn't really reply to any of the mtt stuff at all

Well duh, if you can only satty in how could there be rake? This is where your advertising is so misleading and (imo) scummy until you fix the structures of the satties. Currently the ONLY way to get in is to play 11% rake hypers with 10bb starting stacks over and over. That is just ridic and the major being rake free doesn't help this in any way. Any rake in the major would just be additional juice on top of the 11% you're already charging

And janitor, it's not my good friends or anything but I know infinite mtt people and hear stuff through the grapevine, yes imo their thing is very vulnerable to be exploited by regs and I just pointed that out. It's not like I'm boys with some specific Sunday Entitled takeover ring, I think it's fair to point that leak out that's all

Its not the ONLY way to get in and this 10bb starting stack game you speak of doesn't exist. You could be referring to the "Last Chance" satellites but those games start with 16bb (not much diff I know). I do agree that those ones in particular need a rake decrease though. All the other sats are 2k starting stack 3min blinds, which is fine for a sat imo especially when the antes don't start till t240.
___

On a side note, I think the ordering of the Saturday Stack qualifiers could be altered. At the moment there is a 5e pre-qualifier to win a 25e qualifier 15 minutes before the tournament starts without a 25e qualifier in between, because it started 10 minutes before the 5e . All the Saturday stack sats could be put back at least 3 hours. Start with a load of 1s-5s then as it gets closer to the event start putting the 25s. Then add the last chancers but in the proper order. It just ends up making it so people end up with a ticket to something that will be played out next week, and makes it so less people play that game in future. Plus missing out on buffing the prize pool a bit more in the target event. Just an idea but maybe there could be a "1k GTD Saturday Warmup" type tourney either 25e or 10e multi-buyin that starts as the first bunch of satellites start.

Alright so I spent some time looking at these lobbies and structures and this is what I concluded. Last chance stuff: pushfold tournaments with 11% rake as you described. Need I say more? Complete robbery. Other satty option: 2k ss starting from 15/30, 11% rake, 3min levels. I could not find anything more reasonably structured than this. But here's the thing. These are not even labeled as turbos in the lobby. They are marketed as regular tournaments, when they are in fact not even turbos but HYPERturbos. This is very very misleading IMO. Add to this the steal rake and I am having a hard time seeing any part of this Sunday Entitled as anything but a huge moneygrab. Unibet reps keep refusing to fix the structures and keep defending the SE with the "but the target tournament is rake free" line which has nothing to do with anything and is just twisting the reality, which is that essentially the Sunday Entitled is just playing the satellites over and over and over (since for every 90€ ticket you have to buy in for 90€ on average assuming no skill edge), and playing 11% raked hyperturbos is the worst playing conditions in any online tournament on the planet afaik.

I don't even have the Stars client installed on my computer, can anyone confirm what's the rake for hyperturbos there nowadays? Iirc it used to be 3-4%ish, I assume they would have lifted it, but it sure as hell still isn't 11% these days (or they have completely lost it). And also, their hyperturbos are clearly labeled as hyperturbos in the lobby. Not labeling tournaments correctly + charging hideous rake + charging even more hideous rake for the 10bb stuff + refusing to fix structures + cunningly marketing the Sunday Entitled as some poker economy-saving innovation when in reality it's probably worse than anything Stars has in their client in the sense of raking fish to death is IMO not making Unibet look very good.

This is what I meant in my other post when I said that it is worrying to me imo that they are masquerading all these moneygrabs under this pure poker / saving the economy stuff, and then doing this. It's pretty much exactly what Stars is doing, and I wouldn't like anything more than seeing Stars burning in flames and Unibet (or anyone else) becoming #1 site, so it's disheartening to see this stuff

Also, I've said this before but it would be a REALLY good idea imo to put Sunday Entitled tickets into regular tourney prize pools same way as Winamax does.


Disclaimer: I'm really not trying to hate, I've tried to get all my friends to play on Unibet, I've tried to suggest all kinds of promotions to get the prize pools going, I've streamed (a stream aimed at recreationals) on Unibet a bunch and I *always* highlight how soft the games are and tell people to get in there, I've tweeted about your games and been friendly with Unibet from like 2008 when I first played in a Unibet Open, which I've also always raved about to people. But you should realize that you need regs to keep the games going, growth leads to more growth, and any reg worth their dime sees through these things. Just don't treat us like complete idiots. I have nothing against next to no rakeback program (or whatever these random tickets are), no huds, and I agree that the focus should be on recs, and most promotions etc should be directed towards them. I'd be happy to receive 0% rakeback for every winning month and have it given back to losing recs instead. BUT you need to have reasonable playing conditions to create traffic, which will then create more traffic in terms of both recs and regs, and imo it's exactly as shortsighted as the recent Stars stuff when you just rake everyone to death with these tournaments that no sane reg plays and fish keep losing infinite to the house in. It's not even big fixes that needs to be done, but there's been no fixes whatsoever or any sign of them happening. I know this looks like I'm on some huge tirade against Unibet honestly I'm just trying to help, am frustrated by these things when I think you could make the site grow so easily if you just altered some things.

How bout you open up your own online poker site and run it the way you see fit and see if you satisfy 100% of the people.
Of course this would require getting out of bed a little earlier.

Stars hyper MTTs used to have 2% rake, now they have 5%. I have been vocal opponent against high rake in Unibet since I think it's against everything that Unibet is trying to achieve in cash games, and most important would at least be lowering rake in hypers and satellites to 5%.

Hypers because edge in them is so small that currently Unibet does not support viable poker ecology in MTTs.

Most satellites are hypers anyway, but players in them (except in Entitled) pay double the rake as they pay rake from satellites but target tournaments as well. By cutting that rake it would support growth in target tournaments and support larger tournaments in Unibet.

Currently main problem for me as a potential MTT player in Unibet in addition to small tournament offering is the software. I hope it'll get better in terms of usability. I'm not talking about notes or things like that, but less crashes and more user-friendly interface including, but not limited to following:

- Better tournament lobbies.
- Better search options (text search, favorites etc.)
- More clear cards and information in tournament tables

Again, also rebuys would be preferred.

How about keeping quiet if you have nothing to say?

Stars Hyper MTT rake seems to be ~5%. It varies from stake to stake it seems. 3min blinds with 3k stack and earlier antes which is the main hyperizing thing.

At the moment Unibet has defined 3 speeds. Turbo/Normal/Deep. I agree there is definitely some stuff that should be altered. For example, there is Deepstack Turbos defined as 'deep' but its the "turbo" 3min 10k stack structure. Same with the Deep Crazies that are 1min blinds. I guess it could be quite confusing. Maybe everything needs to be re-normalized.

Stars called their hypers "hyper".
Full Tilt called their hypers "super turbo".
Unibet should call their hypers "crazy" (which they kinda do but its more like a super hyper which demotes their turbo to a perceived hyper in the eyes of some people).

I think the problem is that there is a clash between stack size and structure.

Crazy / Deep Crazy - 3% fee
Turbo / Deep Turbo - 5-7% fee
Normal / Deep - 9% fee
Long(extended) / Deep - 10% fee

This would be competitive pricing and the Deep is in the name of the tournament instead of being a speed. At this point these games could become more popular which will increase guarantee's and allow for more crazy/turbo to be added to the schedule in the future. For example, instead of those flip qualifiers you could just have 2k stack 'Crazy'.

Alright just out them then if there not good friends

Also can't u just look at the sunday entitled as a €25(?) tourney that starts out really shallow and then gets a decent structure? (11% is off course like a rip off regardless) U can't however compare to stars hyper sats where u have to pay 10% rake on your entry for the target.

^ yeah you could potentially get in cheaper too. If you restrict yourself to 5x5euro sats per week. Sometimes you will win a couple of tickets to 25s which you can then try to sat into the SE. That's the point of sats really. I don't get it when people play a bunch of sats that end up adding up to more than the target event. Or even worse when people still register after they spewed a bunch on sats. Just need a bit of discipline, restrict yourself to a weekly amount and effectively you are playing a smaller buyin tourney. If you bust the sats you busted the SE.

I could be wrong and I'm just talking out of my ass here, but I think maybe a part of the reason why Unibet are charging such steal rake for the satties and turbos is because they have these strict buyin models. They've just programmed these 4€, 10€, 25€ tournaments that all have the same rake structure, maybe it's just difficult to alter? Like their system only allows them to run 9+1 tournaments but changing it for 9,50+.50 would require some heavy software updates. That, or then it's just pure greed. But either way, IF you can't change the rake and are stuck with this rake model, then ffs make the satellite and turbo structures something else than pure lottery. I know you want to keep them fast to ensure it's as bingoish as possible to feed recs into the main, but you can't have both worlds. As pointed out these are the nut worst playing conditions on any tournament on any site on the planet I'm pretty sure, and we are talking about your flagship tournament here. I've also noticed that some of these satties frequently overlay, and I assume this is costing Unibet money - fix the satties and this will happen significantly less if at all.

OldBurf, re: labeling, I think they also have something called SPEED tournaments. I have no idea what the difference between Unibet's "turbo" and "speed" is but I think speed is even faster (as if that's possible). But again, they are for some reason not labeling their satellites turbos or speeds, they are not mentioning it at all and then you just notice that oh, I get 500 chips for 11% rake? Cool. If you look at the lobby, you can have the following things starting close to each other:

10€ TURBO XXX GTD
10€ SUNDAY ENTITLED QUALIFIER

And the latter will actually have same or even worse structure than the turbo, when people have no way of knowing unless they study the structure, which I assume especially recs don't do. The satty should very clearly be called 10€ Sunday Entitled (hyper?) turbo qualifier. I guess they are hiding that because they don't want people to realize the entire scheme behind this "rake-free" tournament which in reality is the worst raked tournament in the world. That's just really bad imo. And I doubt the recs study the rake either, nor realize how they are getting raped even worse than they are by Stars.

I'd like to know if the world's best hyper mtt player would beat the rake in those last chance satties at 11% rake. I guess maybe they could be since players on Unibet really are bad, but it's gotta be pretty close. Like Farseer says it's really contradicting how you have this (awesome) philosophy in cash games yet you're doing your best to rake fish to death in MTTs.

Anyway this rake stuff has been discussed forever and it would be nice to get some commentary from Unibet reps after the bank holidays.

Chuck I'm glad that you brought the rake issue up because it is important. I disagree with the motivation for why the rake is too high. I don't think it's greed but more of an oversight. The reason I feel it's an oversight is it isn't consistent with their cash or SNG offerings... which certainly don't fleece the recreational players. Furthermore if it was greed they'd be looking to maximize all of their offerings... yet some have 1% rake and others have 11% rake with similar structures. This leads me to believe that they've just failed to spend the time to work out the various structures and what the appropriate rake should be for each one.

I really like Unibet and I can tell that Chuck and nearly everyone who posts in these threads does to. Hopefully things can be evaluated more carefully in the future and guidelines are set up for rake, based on structure, to offer users a consistent offering.

can't be the reason, there's actually a 1,01% fee tourney:



(from the €10 Unibet Turbo Multibuy)

I like that the blinds structures are all the same and you know what is coming next; altering the starting stack and the minutes per level gives them enough flexibility to offer different styles of tournaments. I don't see what is gained by going the pokerstars route where some tournaments had a 250/500 level and some didn't.

I don't think it's a technical issue though because of course they already have "another" blind structure for the ante tournaments.

Thanks guys agree with Friday event, it is on the short-term list; shootouts will be long-term consideration at this point.

We are aware of the demand for rebuys and there will be a solution for this on the long-term. Thanks for the feedback anyways.

Thanks for the feedback on Jackpot tournaments, will discuss this within the team.

It's that I know you are supportive and you really care about tournaments in specific. Even though you might not be pleased to the fullest we take feedback seriously and can tell you we are going to improve the structures, but can’t give an exact date at the moment. Priority at the moment are crashing issues, which we likely have been able to tackle by today, bringing back bounty tournaments and other long-term projects. Color-coding/ note taking isn’t a feature we are going to support as it doesn’t fit that well within our philosophy and gives unaware/ unfamiliar new players a disadvantage.
You will have to log-in to be able to look at our offering.

Canadians are accepted. We don’t allow tracking software or sites that track our games, because we believe it is bad for newer players. Also do we allow alias changes, which make tracking harder.

Even though I find it hard to put a label what the “standard” has to be when it comes to a fee number for a certain game, we know sites that lowered and raised their fees over time, who might be considered to lead the standard. It means there is no such thing as optimal pricing for those games. Something we‘d like to avoid as much as possible is lowering and then raising rake. I think lowering rake should definitely be considered when the games are unbeatable and players are effected too much. In our environment we don’t find this is the case at the moment. There are enough games that overlay and make it easier for players to step up towards the target events, as a result the games are a lot softer higher up in the qualifier ladder towards the target events and make them not unbeatable, far from that. Looking at the fee as just a number is short-sighted and comparing our tournament offer at this point of time just to the biggest tournament site is not fair. Looking at any other site we are raking in quite similar fashion.
The trend for fast games evolved from a higher demand for those games, but we will work on something to balance it based on your feedback, because it would be nice to have the option for players that prefer slower structure.

I think you got a bit carried away with this from “hear and say” and saying this is “spreading uproar” 101. We like hearing constructive feedback from you and a lot of it is, but some of your feedback content is based on pure assumptions.

Thanks for your feedback, we will look if we can improve the SE schedule soon.

Functionality to add tickets to the regular prize pool as secondary pay-out isn’t there at the moment, but I am positive about that concept. We are glad you’ve been liking Unibet for such a long time and appreciate that. We are not against regs at all and we will need them to grow. The only thing we are try is to minimize is predatory behaviour, which hurts the poker experience too much. We are very confident that we are not raking everyone to death in out poker ecology.
Thanks for your feedback, the software is our highest priority at the moment and a lot is going on behind the scenes to get it in a better place.
Within the Unibet philosophy simplicity is one of the key factors and with introducing more types of games and satellites we are getting to a point where some of the simplicity implementations are being questioned. The rake in those games are close to a lot of the competitors, but is not competing directly with the biggest tournament site, which already increased their rake for such games, rebuys and other games. Just bear in mind that I am discussing this subject with everyone in the team and we will do what is necessary to deliver the product we stand for.
We like to keep things simple, but more flexibility in blind structures is something we are working on as we believe this could improve our offering.

Hi UnibetRep,

Any updates/new stuff happening with the schedule in the coming month?

Lots of good things suggested in this thread and I haven't seen anything fresh from apart the re-addition of the flipament qualifiers (3% ;O) and some extra UO sats.

Any exciting series or new MTTs to look forward to?

Throw me a bone, Cheers

For the next Leaderboard could you guys do something extra special for the winner of the Leaderboard like a weekend vacation etc.

Before I think about trying out a MTT series I try to calculate my chances of winning and then consider the prize. If the prize isn't big enough then I don't bother and I think a lot of people think this way to.

Some feedback after playing Sunday Entitled €4000 GTD on Sunday:

1) I'm a bit confused about the "qualifiers only" and "tickets only" thing. I won the initial ticket for first step trough missions and then advanced to the finals.
When I clicked to register for finals, it offered to me if I want to register with a ticket or with cash ? Is it actually possible to register with cash ? If not, that query should not exist.
Also, since final tourney is rake-free, perhaps it shouldn't even have €90 worth entry for it, and instead just be called Step 3 or Final step or something ?
I don't know, it was just somewhat confusing to me. Also, it would have been actually good for everyone if it was raked because we'd get points for that, heh.

2) I'd suggest to maybe alter prize structure a bit, make it that more players get ITM, because I think that probably many of them are very happy to get there but the tourney prize structure is just a bit better than standard top 15% paid. Perhaps people would like it more if it was like top 30% paid (or even higher) and feel more motivated to participate. I'm sure the top 10% players wouldn't mind much because their reward is high anyway.

3) Maybe move the start either couple of hours forwards or backwards. Maybe I'm wrong but I think many players are usually having dinner at around 19 CET.

Other than that I think it was a fun experience overall

+1

With the Bounty tourneys being MIA just now the nightly schedule is pretty thin on the ground.

Is the software capable of doing a Phase/2 day tourney? Shootouts?

Also, can the Butler results appear consistently on a specific day and somewhere other than the twitch page as well. Would be nice to see them on the main website or the client somewhere.

+1 Kapetain's post;

What happens to the extra prize pool in the Step-It-Up MTTs?

I'm sitting in a €4 one just now and there have been 22 entrants (€88) and the prizepool shows €80 with the top 4 getting €20 each. What happens to the €8 extra? What would happen if the entrants hit 24? The blurb for the MTT only says a €20 prize is added for every €20 in the prize pool.

There's rake, so €8 goes to Unibet.

Absurd rake though imo. in such tournaments. I don't know how possible it is to get good ROI% in those after rake (3,60+0,40) to 20€.