the 1ks are law unto themselves and there's interesting history there. i'll delve into it a bit with a tl;dr warning.
a bit of background:
in husng's recs like to join games, but dont like to start games. stars has two available lobbies at each stake. so being able to sit first is worth a lot. also husng hypers are incredibly profitable and very low variance. all the big winners hide the sharkscope as their graphs were showing huge profits with no variance - dan coleman spoke about having a $2m year with zero variance that 1k/2/k plo players would have had wet dreams about. the high stakes lobbies were always protected in the sense that a small group of players would be very protective of the two lobbies and any new players would be sat relentlessly as the spots were worth hundred of thousands of dollars per year.
[one of the first players to do this was skaiwalkurr. there is an old training video where a $300 reg / coach says on video that skaiwalkurr was no longer allowing regs to grab the spare seat @ the highest stake and was sitting all but maybe 3-4 players who tried to share the lobby with him.]at lower stakes with bigger player pools it was hard to grab a lobby manually with lots of simul-sits occuring where regs would accidently sit each other in the rush to grab a valuable open-sit. so stars husng lobbies below $1ks became effectively controlled by a program called sharkystrator. this program places all users in a list and regs you one-by-one into one of the two lobbies available at each stake. you can colour code players so if a rec tag or unkown player manages to snag a lobby you can jump the queue by being willing to play that tag. this meant that regs could all sit in the sharky list safely avoiding each other and only playing people outside of the program. since any reg with any clue about poker would have the program it meant near 100% rec action.
but this meant queues got huge as people moved up and hid from the regs. 60-100 players all waiting to play recs.
the better regs had enough of wating. and a few started to clear the queue by sitting all the bad and mediocre regs. this allowed some better regs to freeroll off the hard work by profitting from smaller queues without having to battle the weaker regs.
so the process was formalised: all member have to set sharky to sit non-members.
to become a member you have to battle the division and achieve a certian ev roi
here is the 30's division list with rules expected of members and people trying to get in:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FCxkfTYpWQguIoDSyugjEwQBncq_5b9_8ewdvbV2y9s/edit#gid=0a player can get in touch with a division member and ask for games, the division member cannot decline the action.
its terrible for bad regs. and a lot of people got found out. being amongst the worst players in a division is awful. all people moving up stakes want to battle you and you cannot decline action. when someone gets in the division kicks someone out. that someone is likely going to be the poor sap who was being targeted by all these motivated skilled triers.
but the divisions do have clear entry and exit points and everything is open.
ish
until you get to the 1ks where things get a bit more murky...