hehe, now that Bryan is in charge at Party there's actually hope for this.

Maybe this will be their wakeup call? Would be nice to once again have real competition between the 2 top sites.

call me sceptical but I doubt it.

I doubt it aswell. The wakeup call will be when party has more traffic than stars.

Doubt they even care. Amaya's strategy has always been to milk the poker audience for all it was worth through rake increases and low edge formats while converting as many of them as possible to casino and sports betting.

I've no doubt the long term plan for the Stars platform is to turn it primarily into a casino with poker as a small side thing.

#inbryanwetrust

Well, after Patrick Leonard joined the Party, it was clear that an acquisition of a competent Stars executive like Bryan was bound to happen, congrats to the Party players

As for Amaya's plans, it's hard to hook a poker player on casino games and much easier to lead him/her into a lower edge, higher variance game that is still a kind of 'multiplayer poker' because it's more satisfying for a player when s/he has at least some control over the outcome (at least two buttons) and can be proud of 'making correct decisions' and 'outplaying others', as opposed to the blind luck of the casino.

Fortunately, Amaya isn't promoting its casino games to poker players as aggressively as 888. Stars Rewards are going to give me bonuses primarily in the games that I do play. 888 Club scratchcards tend to contain bonuses in the games that I hardly play (i.e. casino and sportsbetting), and also, a club level normally can't be completed by only playing poker on one day - it's necessary to either bet in the casino or on sports or to wait for a few days in order to complete a level.

I doubt that Amaya is going to make poker a 'small side thing'. The casino and sports verticals will grow, but the poker arm will still be significant too.

_______________________

To amend my post about All In or Fold (I was sleep-deprived when writing it):

(If there are 10 players left in the tourney at 2 tables and there are 8 places paid, people will also be waiting to see what happens at the other table, whereas it looks like the optimal shoving ranges are narrower than 10% for the short stacks and 30% for the big ones on the pre-bubble according to HoldemResources.) 18-90-entry on-demands wouldn't be terrible either, as the pre-bubble would be happening at 2 tables at most, not 3, but the higher ($10+) stakes SNGs wouldn't gather that many entries anyway.

Hey pokerstars, where can I find out more information about Pokerstars Championship Barcelona? (Structure/times) etc

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+1

Luke, can you comment on this? I am waiting for the MicroMillions but still can't see the schedule.
Also, I would like to know, are you planning to make Mini-WCOOP again? As I remember, the Mini-WCOOP was a very good and very popular series, so please run it again.

I asked our live events satellites coordinator and he says that time slots and structures generally stay the same week to week but guarantees and other details change. This Sunday's satellite will guarantee 15 seats + expenses (€5,300 + €700). Satellites will run until at least August 13th. We’ve run out of hotel rooms for the main event, so there will not be any more full package qualifiers.

Thanks for providing some detailed feedback.

This doesn't seem too exciting! How would you brand it?

This year will have an Invitational Freeroll which has a $25K prize pool + some Team Pro Online bounties. As you've noticed, there's quite a few more Events, although they're not going to run on a 24 hour clock. We have tournaments in the schedule at 21:00 ET and 04:00 ET. The schedule itself will have a lot of variety and I think micro-stakes players will really enjoy it!

Thanks for the feedback.

If it would have a smaller guarantee than Fast Friday and not much flavour, players will quickly lose interest. There needs to be a hook!

Thanks for the feedback. I agree with the point about level times in Zoom. Five minute levels in Zoom are not equivalent to non-Zoom and our schedule should reflect as much. We'll update this with the next round of main schedule changes.

So another +1 for 6-max? Do you genuinely think more players would join if it was 6-max versus 9-max?

MicroMillions will be announced soon. We don't yet have confirmed dates for WCOOP.

The traditional TLB is extremely unlikely to return. That said, there is a possibility of some other initiatives in the future.

For now, your best bet would be to play Sunday Million satellites that end before the target event starts. You can then unregister to receive T$.

I believe this is a bug. It has been raised with the developers. Thanks!

Many of our players find satellites via the target tournament's lobby. We don't have the ability to surface ticket tournaments that would appear in every eligible lobby. For instance, we can't create a generic ticket satellite that would show up in the lobby of all $215 tournaments. I do think we should explore this further, though!

Thanks for the feedback - I dig this one.

Likely because you already won a package. This tournament in particular was restricted to players who had not yet qualified because we anticipated that the tournament would overlay and we also gave away entries to a large amount of players. Although this isn't policy for all of our satellites, it is likely that it will happen again in the future. If there is a permanent policy change, I'll communicate it here.

FYI, this was tested during the recent Half Price Sunday Million promotion. The $11 on-demand satellite was restricted to non-qualifiers to test the functionality.

Ugly is subjective and I understand, but why illogical? In a nine-handed tournament, a pay jump at 18 means there's tables with six, six, and seven players. At 17 it means there's two even tables of nine.

I'm not sure if I mentioned it in a previous post either, but happy to discuss it! The short of it is that it ensures that all tables have the same number of players before a pay jump. It isn't rolled out to all tournaments nor is there any active plan to do so.

Zoom tournaments require a large number of players at the start to ensure that they stay Zoom. I do not think players would respond well to this and we'd be left with a significant number of tournaments cancelling.

Thanks for bringing this up. I don't foresee an overhaul on the horizon, rather we'll iterate on the current offering. There isn't a solid plan in place yet since MicroMillions and WCOOP are the main focuses right now, but if I had to guess, we'll start with the Majors.

They've been removed for the summer. They were either cancelling or players were forcing overlay from the start. They'll return around WCOOP time.

http://www.pokerstarslive.com/champi...nts/barcelona/

If you click on the schedule, you can click each tournament to see its structure.

MicroMillions will be in the client Monday afternoon UK time.

Mini-WCOOP did indeed add an exciting dynamic to WCOOP by engaging a large number of players who wouldn't normally be a part of the WCOOP experience. We are going to experiment with this again in WCOOP 2017. That experiment won't be the same Mini-WCOOP as last year, but will still have the goal of opening WCOOP to a broader audience.

I think the basis of the anti zoom Friday complaints is that it can't be part of a larger session and as such it pushes out all the regulars who like to have other tables at peak time which quite frankly is a shtton of players. This is why we are asking for a 3max zoom pko after or at sonic time because then we actually have space and love the format. Make Friday majors run much later and make them 3max zoom pko and it'll explode. This way you can actually also add a Friday freezeout (hello branding) at the traditional time and everybody would be happy

why does every tournament have to be a gimmick or have a hook. To me having a vanilla 8 max freezeout is exciting because there are not enough in a schedule dominated by psko, turbo, hyper formats

There are not any 8 max tournaments in the schedule and it did quite well in scoop.



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Like blakks idea of pushing zoom back if it stays and having a normal 7pm major.

+1

this so bad

+1

On a side note, why is there a need to vary the table sizes, why not just turn all the 6-9-max MTTs into 7-max (so that there are equal numbers of players at each table on the bubble of the last 2 tables as well as the FT bubble because 2*7+1 = 3*5 and 7+1 = 2*4)?

Can we have at least one more 215$ ULTRA sat to Barca 50 package gtd?

yeah this, 8 max is great!

[QUOTE=buffyslayer1;52494873]why does every tournament have to be a gimmick or have a hook. To me having a vanilla 8 max freezeout is exciting because there are not enough in a schedule dominated by psko, turbo, hyper formats

There are not any 8 max tournaments in the schedule and it did quite well in scoop.



luke says this isnt exciting how would you brand it lmfao


Brand it like this luke PROPER POKER

Friday 8-max

Friday Freeze

Friday fourmax

Friday five max

Friday anything but idiot zoom unless it's later and shorter handed and actually a fun one

There's already an 8-max $8.88 Saturday Spider (it's hyper, though), and the names for 8-max tourneys could revolve around spiders / octopuses / snowmen / pretzels / Möbius strips (just kidding) / the infinity sign / whichever of the many things associated with 8.

THE QUADILLA $44 4 max 40k zoom turbo last major on a sunday

God yes plz