Dear Pleno.......Best Regards, Richard

[DaveShoelace]

So which games is it actually safe for us fish to play without having scheming pros taking every advantage they can?

Every pro fucking hates Spin & Go, so that.

[Woodsey]

So which games is it actually safe for us fish to play without having scheming pros taking every advantage they can?

Every pro fucking hates Spin & Go, so that.

Ok lol 

[cambridgealex]

V interesting Dan. A couple of questions if you have the time.

You say you were in charge of the $100 cartel? Did you want to move up to $200s but found yourself blocked by the $200 cartel?

So in order to move up you had to play the very best $200 regs (you'd be on their radar / list of ppl trying to move up)? As in, they made it impossible for you to play even one sng with anyone but one of the cartel?

So did you settle at 100s because you were one of the best regs at that level but not as good as the 200 regs?

[arbboy]

how long has this been going on dan and over how many sites?  Was it going on back in 2010 when i was playing heads up stts with you for rake races?

[DMorgan]

Just to clear up some misconceptions, I started the $100 turbos & regspeeds group, I have nothing to do with hypers which is where the idea started.

I also found it interesting, all very logical but slightly depressing that things have evolved to ensure that the fish get eaten as quickly and efficiently as possible. Much like a food chain where a predator that is just too successful will end up decimating it's own prey and end up starving to death.

The formation of these groups isn't to send the fish skint quicker, the fish go skint at the same speed. Without the groups they still always play a reg, its just whether that reg is strong enough against other regs or not. The recs are losing to both groups of regs. It makes sure that the players that have worked the hardest on their game get to make the most money, rather than having letting the bumhunters sneak in via this registration program and get the chance to play games against weaker players that the good, established regs have fought their way up through the stakes to get access to.

The vast majority of HUSNG regs would very happily see the software banned, myself included because its impossible to get a lobby without it and it costs $400/yr.

[DMorgan]

Thanks for the input Dan, seems I was not the only one who was stunned by all this. Most of us here on blonde have been in poker a very long time, & yet most of us knew nothing of this "inner world".

Can you explain this to me, please?

The 100's recently kicked a well known coach as his students were killing the members.

They would not allow him in the cartel because he was training others to become better players?

That was from the hypers group, I don't really follow the husng forum on 2p2 any more so I don't know anything about that situation.

What I must stress though is that it is very much in the interest of the groups to be open and transparent. If it all gets political and people that deserve to be in aren't getting in for whatever reason, they have a legitimate complaint and stars will have to listen which could eventually lead to a battlenet system (blind lobbies where everyone in the player pool gets matched randomly, kinda like zoom) which hurts everyone but the very best regs, so secrecy and politics was a big no-no for me. It all went on the numbers and it was as simple as that.

[Rod]

This is a very interesting read. I assume Cartels only exist for HU games as there would be on need for them in games like 6-max? Is $100 the smallest stakes that the cartels exist in currently as I would have thought any lower would not be worthwhile?

[PaintingByNumbers]

The formation of these groups isn't to send the fish skint quicker, the fish go skint at the same speed. Without the groups they still always play a reg, its just whether that reg is strong enough against other regs or not. The recs are losing to both groups of regs. It makes sure that the players that have worked the hardest on their game get to make the most money, rather than having letting the bumhunters sneak in via this registration program and get the chance to play games against weaker players that the good, established regs have fought their way up through the stakes to get access to.

Why would the fish go skint at the same speed versus better players?

[cambridgealex]

The formation of these groups isn't to send the fish skint quicker, the fish go skint at the same speed. Without the groups they still always play a reg, its just whether that reg is strong enough against other regs or not. The recs are losing to both groups of regs.

Surely that's not correct.

Alpha Reg will win at a higher rate against Joe Bloggs than Beta Reg. That's what makes him the Alpha. He wins against the other regs at a higher rate, it should follow that he wins against Joe Bloggs at a higher rate than them.

I guess it's possible that all regs share the same skillset and use the same tactics to beat Joe so might have the same winrates. But the regs separate themselves when they play each other, is that what you're saying?

[arbboy]

They have to win quicker under this system and the lower churn hurts stars profits long term as the pros withdraw a bigger % of the deposits quicker from the system.  I am amazing Stars knowingly allow this to go on if it's software driven and they can block the software.

[DMorgan]

What do 'Stars think of all this? Not fussed?

What would happen if 'Stars banned "Sharkystrator" & similar sites?

If I owned an online poker site, I'm not sure I'd be keen to allow these players to exert that amount of control over my Clients in general.

Yeah its pretty incredible really that stars are happy to allow their lobbies to be completely controlled by a third party program.

The most insidious thing about it is that the guy who created the program (Marko) has actually banned a couple of people from using the program because they posted negative things about it on 2p2, so these guys have pretty much been denied access to the games even though they were good, established regs in the games. This has created a culture of people just not really speaking out about it because if Marko decides that he doesn't want to sell them a licence they can only ever get games against regs, and still stars does nothing because the loss of rake from these players switching to lower raked games (SNGs are big rake generators as you know) is offset by the massive increase in rake generated through the fight between the groups their sit lists.

[DMorgan]

Alpha Reg will win at a higher rate against Joe Bloggs than Beta Reg. That's what makes him the Alpha. He wins against the other regs at a higher rate, it should follow that he wins against Joe Bloggs at a higher rate than them.

Yeah thats not really the case at all and I guess its a reflection on the state of the games in general but how regs play vs other regs is the determinant of how good you are at heads up SNGs. If you want to find out how good someone is you're not going to sit and rail a bunch of their games vs recs and see how well they do, you're going to play them yourself.

For a long time I had better results against weaker regs than I did against fish because I had the solid fundamentals but I wasn't very good at finding/making the super exploitative plays that the guys that crush fish were making.

Actually I can think of a few guys that had crushing results (10+% ROIs over huge samples) from being able to exclusively bumhunt because they had impressive sharkscope graphs, but they didn't know any other way than to play super exploitably so when these guys were forced to move down by the guys that were good at playing regs, the fish actually lost slower.

[Doobs]

So which games is it actually safe for us fish to play without having scheming pros taking every advantage they can?

Every pro fucking hates Spin & Go, so that.

Ok lol 

Hyper nlo8 6 seaters.  None of this goes on there.  Look at your cards shove chips in middle.  Easy game. 

[cambridgealex]

Did you see my questions about the cartel above yours dan, did you try and break into that one?

[DMorgan]

Amazed by this

Dan

do you think many recreational players in games where these lobby cartels exist know of their existence?

what do you think they would think about them?

do you think being excluded from a "secret club" would encourage recreational players to even want to sit in these games, if they knew about it?

aren't you all contributing further to "poker eating itself" and yet more software to iron out the recreationals quicker can only negativiely affect the longevity of the games for most, rather than the few in the cartel?

Do the recs know about it? Anyone that looks at 2p2 does, if you look at the heads up SNG board on 2p2 there are a ton of threads about it on the fist page. Contrary to popular opinion, most of the people that read and post on 2p2 are not winning players, so there are a plenty of people that know about it. There are no secrets, the lists of who is in what group and who is on their sit list are in public google docs. Short of putting a public information notice in chat at the start of every game I'm not sure what else they can do to be transparent.

As per a few posts ago, the recs don't actually lose faster because they've always been playing 100% of their games against people that are exploiting them. Its been this way for years and that isn't going to change as much as people want to gripe about it.