It seems that stars just took approach to develop their own way for every game they are offering and after the first boycott it pretty clear that they don't give a damn about our feedback. Obviously it is sad, but to be honest I don't care any more, they will definitely will lose their loyal customers in a long term. The fact is there is plenty other sites who started offering great games [Party, 888, iPoker has some great tournaments too], sure they do have poor softwares comparing to Stars, but I am more incline to adapt to a slightly worse software and support them, than to be a victim of greedy Amaya.

Just a like year ago myself and my friends schedule was like 90% of Stars MTT's, now I do play like 20-30% of Stars and the rest is other sites, my friends taking a same path.
Stars targeting rec's which has less knowledge in rake changes and tournament structure changes, but people are not dumb in every live stop people talking with each other and the word is continuously spreading.
These new schedules obviously has some great benefits of a new tournaments offerings, but majority of the changes is just another rake increase, in a way that tournaments will play more fast, therefore average player will get those register more of them.


Probably Luke has no power there at all, I guess just a pretty **** spot to be in his shoes, were to make players and those greedy Amaya share holders happy is just impossible.


Although our feedback is pretty much worthless I will say and join the group of players who says, that these payout structures are ridiculous and that all freezeouts has to be slower. Your offering plenty of turbo's so let people choose what they want to play.

I used to grind $2 turbo, $2+R; $5 and $11 Deepstacks; $3.30, $5.50 and $8.80 Freeze outs. All those are gone.

For me, Bigs and Hots are more like a shot take because those are high variance (is way tougher to final table a 3,000+ tournament that a softer 500 player event like the 2r). I want to reduce my variance, not increase it.

Also the fact that everything is semiturbo increase the variance and reduces edges. The only winner is, as usual, Amaya. Basically we are increasing our rake in 3%.

But hey, they always do whatever they want with us, and we continue there. The players strike took like 2-3 days and nothing change.

I don't know you guys, but today I cut almost all my MTTs and just satting for some Bounty Builders and Bigs; while grinding softer and way better structure MTTs like the featherweight at Party, or the deeps at 888.

I like the increase in speed of the blinds!!

but fix the blind jumps in the red and blue tournaments... this can't be real

Where is the mention or advert about any of the changes that have taken place in STT and MTT SNG? I can't find anything anywhere.

The new 18man hyper KO games are completely ******ed imo. Pay 3 from 18 with 1st getting the same as 2nd which isn't much more than 3rd???????? FACESMASH.JPG

Totally agree with this guy regarding the big structures these would be perfect levels sort it out Luke an ad some small stake freezouts and anything starting with 3000 with 8min blinds change to 10min blinds and the schedule will look a lot better

agree, bring these back please

1000 times this

in love with new tournaments! bigs and bounty builders need change in structures ASAP tho!! i think if u change that ones all will be fine

@doggz why would the 11:05 cet $109 be a hyper? The old $109 turbo around this time was fine, didn't go on for too long, seems to be very weird to now have it as a hyper.

55 6 max turbo used to be a really really amazing tournament too, people loved it now you've made it into a hyper aswell? Why?

Big 215 and hot 109 should almost definitely swap around, I think you might underestimate how many people are "over it" after that hour and thus won't reg, I know it was like that with me for the b162

Hot 215 would do a lot better roughly 1 hour earlier too, many people would reg it every session, now it's a little too late.

Hi guys,
Is it lagging for you too? it started to lag as crazy after these changes and I have no idea is it Pokerstars softwer or something with my computer. Will appreciate answers.

And if you really read it luke:
Have you lost your mind? I understand that regulars have lowest priority because, as most of them say: they will play at your site anyway and you will be squezing us like oranges.
Most of the changes you made are to lower the regulars edge. I understand it. You done it because you can. But I, and most of us - poker players can hate you, and we will hate you.

You think that you don't have to care about us, but you have no idea what is the thinking process of amateur. We make a living from it so maybe start to listen. Most of amateurs in the industry want to see themselves as good players. If they met some poker player with good reputation, most of them start to act like a kid and treat professionals as their parent. Haven't you seen this? It can be succesfull businessman but in front of professional he will be subimissive as hell and if professionall will say that **** is good he will eat it. Because they want to be liked by professionalls: it help them to think about themselves that they are good players.

We (poker players) were naive for too long in thinking that pokerstars is our partner and we just met and have a fish to share.
Unfortunately pokerstars has better position, but it's the same situation like in employer-employee in 19th century and we should act like labor unions.
And I think it's happening. You (pokerstars) created community where poker professionals are treated as gods. And now professionals will use their powers to influence amateurs that pokerstars is not as good as it was before.

Just in math your changes should clearly increase pokerstars profit, but poker and life is not only about math. There is also human factor and this human factor will f**k you in the a** in couple years or months.

Don't think that this anger is, a sign of weakness. You just changed status quo. And we (poker community) are warning you to go back and not to start a war (because war is expensive for everyone), but sometimes it's the only option.
And we are getting closer to this point.

That's exactly the point. You play already on sunday anyway. They want you to fire up saturday session too.

YES! This is EXACTLY what Pokerstars is missing right now. I think you're ignoring on purpose what a lot of other players said and just took a random comment and made it a conclusion.

The goal is to claim the new schedule is succesful when the low Gtds are surpassed.

Yup! This is their plan. The question is...what are we going to do about it?

That's a great idea! I wonder how didn't they think about that before. Anyway, we still have time for that to be implemented.

I am really happy that a higher stakes player sees the whole picture and if something has to be done, it has to start from you guys. A lot of lower stakes regs and even recreational players look up to you and respect your opinions and love playing/testing their skills with somebody who has a reputation. That's why it was very smart from Amaya to make sure the changes didn't affect this category of players. But PLEASE DON'T BE FOOLED by this, as it will not last.

As someone who’s played on Stars fairly regularly for the last 10 years or so here’s my two pennies worth…

Overall I like a lot of the ideas implemented in the new schedule, the rotating Big/Hot/BB’s, the various time zone/stake versions of the majors, the euro grind improvements and the introduction of some cool new MTTs are all good. A number of people have already summarised the main areas for improvement, the Big structures, Mixed Game offerings and the reduction in micro/low stakes games.

It’s that last point that bothers me the most, the $5-$20 buy in range has been the staple of my grind for many years (as it clearly has been for a number of others based on the posts in this thread) but it seems many previously successful tournaments have been culled with no equivalent put in place.

DoGGz – you asked for suggestions, well basically I would suggest bringing back some of the below. These were great little MTT’s for the low stakes grinder and recreational players alike and as far as I’m aware never had any issues meeting guarantees etc.

Apologies if I have some of the previous time slots wrong, I’m just writing this from memory but I don’t think the exact time is important, we just need some of those kind of MTT’s returned to the schedule between 11am EST and 6pm EST.

Also I appreciate Quad/Cubed etc are unlikely to return, that’s fine just some equivalent FO’s would be great. Oh and one final thing, I do see a few in this buy in range in the lobby range as 3-stack tournaments. Maybe just reverse these to regular FO’s with 3k/5k stacks. I’m not averse to the 3-stack thing but it might be putting some people off or even confusing them as I noticed that a number of them didn’t make their guarantee yesterday where an equivalent FO of the same buy in in the old schedule would have.

10:30 - $2+ Rebuy (there were two of these, plus an action hour I believe)
11:30 - $8 Cubed
12:15 - $11 Cubedh
14:30 - $13.50 KO
14:30 - $5 Cubed
16:00 - $5 quad
16:15 - $11 FO
16:30 - $8 FO
17:00 - $5 quad

There were more than just these but you get the idea.

Also Luke, you killed the $3.30R at 14:30 EST, that was like losing a member of my family, remember when that thing had $10k plus for first….

All of you guys complaining that the sky is falling do any of you guys around back in ~2005 even remember how bad the initial structures were on most sites at that time? Structures were much worse and Stars as did other sites improved upon the situation over time.

Now while it's possible Stars is attempting to squeeze ROIs with these current "big" structures it's also very possible that Luke and PokerStars were just trying to shorten the length of these specific MTTs a bit and got the structural changes wrong with their initial trial run here. The "Hyper" and "Turbo" structures feel better than before with more play and many of the changes in this initial released schedule actually feel very positive for the overall format. Maybe Luke and his staff overestimated the effect these larger blind level jumps would have on the later game play of these large field "big" tournaments. It's my opinion that they would want these prestigious tournaments to have a solid structure and if their whole intent was just to lower reg edges in MTTS why not go out and make all of their structures worse and faster rather than the improvement to the Turbos/Hypers and other MTTs as they seem to have done.

As others have already pointed out many of the smaller field "bigs" actually finished with favorable and fair end game effective stack sizes. It seems they just need to add a few more levels in there in the larger field "bigs" and all will be well with this situation. Let's give them a week or so to act on this initial trial run before pulling out the pitch forks.

this is very good advice

the effort put in the new schedule is quite promising, eventhough its not done yet imo

couple things people seem to agree on

-Fix bigs and payouts as commonly suggested
-add a couple 8m/9m 5$ hypers (there are stretches with none or only 1-2$ hypers)
-more regspeed lowbuyin tournies with non-semiturbo structure

What do you guys think about adding Deep xx$ Reds?
Atm there are tournies at .00, 0.15 and .30 with Bigs, Hots and BBs, correct?
Add Deeps with sth like 10/12/15min levels at .45 every hour and you could actually see how they fare vs Bigs over the long run, i believe they would be extremely popular (and not as extended as prev deeps) and also "complete" the regspeed schedule, esp. on lowstakes. Thoughts?

exactly. Remember in 1990 how computers were slow? Now those kids have fast computers complaining about fast structures

so because it was bad 11 years ago it should be ok if it's the same now? times have changed, winrates have changed and the whole poker/world ecosystem has changed.

Personally I think that they should just fix the current "Big" schedule to have a more favorable structure. No need to add more "reds" out there on the schedule and I'm also fairly sure that is not PokerStar's goal here. PokerStars is trying to move toward a more rec friendly model and that more than likely includes less overall MTT offerings to dissuade professional or reg like predatory grinder types from setting up shop solely on their site. If you look over their new schedule from a "recreational" type player perspective you can see that is the route they are going with this "new" schedule. No need to clutter it up with more junk that will mostly just attract more grinders. Just make the formats of the MTTs you do run solid. People that want to play deeper stack MTT poker should be able to get that experience in the standard Reg speed offerings, including the "Bigs".

Ya, obviously. I wasn't arguing that we should go back to those structures and only that those structures were far worse than anything we have now including the current "Big" structures.

It's pretty simple-

Problem: Luke and PokerStars want to shorten the overall length of time that their average large field reg speed MTTs take to finish

The solution doesn't have to be a ****ty structure in this case. I pointed out examples where PokerStars have actually improved upon the structure in other formats; turbo and hyper. So why is everyone jumping the gun that Luke and PokerStars just wants to kill the reg edges in the "Big" MTTs.

It's very possible they just made a mistake and underestimated the effect that some of these changes would have in the late game of these games. I'd be very surprised if Luke is satisfied with all the complaints of the low effective stack sizes currently averaged across final tables in these games. Give it a week and I think we will see some changes to these "Big" structures.

Just one thing : If I remember correctly, the former big 162 at 10pm CET every day (guarantee of 60k) usually attracted some 500 players and lasted until 4.30 am or 5 am the next day, that is around 6.30 or 7 hours.

The big 109 I played yesterday night attracted 757 players and still had 4 players at the 7 hours mark (don't know how much longer it lasted, maybe 30 minutes).

So overall that seems pretty consistent no ? Not trying to defend the new structure, just wondering, as I don't seem to see huge differences, although it did feel like it was more turbo when playing it yesterday.

Can't complain about the changes they made.
tbh 8.8r 10k and 8.8r+add on on sundays were my favorite.

my 2 cents

overall its on the right track, but some GTD should be bigger.

please stop asking for those 2r/5r deep 12hrs boring stuff to be back.

for the low buy ins side some extra mtts between 15-17pm(ET) would be good.

and add extra HT PKO plzzzz

bring back my nightly 55 at 9 pm eastern

why the buyin increase in mill and st x3 sats?

I think there are waaay too much 6max, the format isnt that popular, thats a fact. Just regs likes it, if you change some of the 6max KO turbo to FR i believe would be more popular. To play 1 tabble 6max is a lot funnier, but overall its just not as popular as FR.

between 14-15h ET you have in my filter (5$>) 5 6max tournaments for example.

And again, just change those N-stack to STD vanilla tournaments with 10mins blind