pretty dead

I think the answer is lock or cake at this point. Merge is starting to look nearly impossible to make a living off of... unless you are bumhunting 1knl+. But it seems there's plenty who are doing that.

for every 1 +eV reg you see doing that there are 10 who didn't run well enough in the few k hands a month possible to play in those few-and-far-between games that you'll likely never hear/know about

i think that the biggest issue with getting the fish online is the perception of online poker. When I play live, most people don't even know that you can still play online poker. Those who do know either think it is illegal or that it is rigged. There needs to be a big advertising push. With what money and where I dont know, but the fact is these are the guys that need to be targeted.

yeah agreed... on top of that: sitting around all day waiting for 1 fish to play you hu at 2knl for 40 hands is a pretty awful existence imo.

IMO, while you are abroad, you should make some arrangements to allow you to play on the European sites, if you can.

The split off of Lock from Merge was a pretty devastating development for US online poker. I think Lock is probably your best bet for now, but I'm afraid that if the ever got rid of the Ronin promo, everyone will leave, just like they did Merge.

Gadol, I didn't realize you were so cute... in an awkwardly tall kind of way.

Not sure why the Mrs dislikes her... it's not like she caught me fapping to the Love Story video or anything.

lol nh

smashing on merge..bamming slamming

Absolutely. There needs to be some grassroots effort by regs to destroy this perception and get those live fish to come back or to start playing online to begin with. I don't know how it will be done, but there are potentially millions of terrible players that would play online if they could. Even when Full Tilt was alive and well, many live players still thought if you played online the govt will come and chop your hands off or send you to jail. The avg joe just doesn't trust online poker, and doesn't want the pain in the ass of depositing on a rigged site that could possibly get DOJ'd along with that. There is a huge untapped market of ******s out there

fish will always believe its rigged... cause they can't beat it.

Which alot of the thought goes along "I beat my 1/2 game at xyz local casino... and i can't beat 1/2 online... this must be rigged."

Most of you dudes in here are FT regs pre BF, Something I want to know is what did FT do that made their games somewhat softer than pstars? Did pstars seem harder than FT due to their 24 tabling policy? What if any promos/advertising did FT do that Merge could borrow?

If it's backed by a familiar/reputable name, it will draw in a ton of them in, not all but still a large amount. If it was backed by Caesars or WSOP fish would come flocking in droves wearing sunglasses from their computers.

Probably alot of that and because Poker Stars had more incentive to grind millions of hands a year to reach SNE. The reg to fish ratio is a big big factor to how difficult the games are. If the site only let you 4 table it would be much much easier, see Bodog. Another reason why live games are much easier at a given stake compared to online is because you obviously can't multi table.

I mean lets not kid anyone here... the games were pretty ridiculously reg-infested on FTP prior to black friday.

Like 7 of 9 people at table were regs... I feel like people kinda glorify FTP nowadays as a fish heaven before BF.

compared to today's games 2/9 spots is a fish heaven

It's the same ratio... just less tables imo. and it doesn't reach as high... but FTP's 2/4 games were dead before they introduced rush.

I think that speaks to the matter of fish not knowing online poker is here and legal in most states. The biggest factor is obviously the matter of no more easy deposit methods. We can go back and see the slow decline once the E wallets started pulling out to where we are now.

spam the zynga forums to recruit

pretty good idea imo

One factor is that fish were able to deposit without having any money deducted from their bank accounts.

And with respect to the status of FTP games pre black friday, 1000nl was already dead for months except for the random table once a week, 600nl had two tables on a good day and was also dead a good portion of the time, and 400nl usually had at least 5-6 tables but some of them were really crappy.

I played 400-1000nl exclusively towards the end but some days the number of tables was so bad that I had to play 200nl just to play my typical number of tables. Also, I never played more than 9 tables...so that says a lot.

It's ****ing impossible to win. Half the regs are fish cakes that are so goddamn lucky. xVR4Spyderx, if you are on here and think you are good, I'll play you heads up for rolls. I have never tilted so hard in my life and I get it in good over and over again and lose over and over again

Willow, understand your frustration for VR, but he's really easy to play against once you get hands on him or do a villain review..I mean really easy. You should be happy he plays as much as he does. You might want to put an X like VRx4Spyxder or something so it doesn't come up on google. I've probably won more money off of him than anybody else on Merge, and he seems like a pretty good guy. Doesn't berate etc. that I've seen.

I'll keep that in mind, thanks. I know he's easy to play against, he's the biggest calling station in the world, gets there on every river, and it goes c/c every time