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man... has this been a while.

im currently playing on stars, since black friday actually.
and im finding myself once again frustrated with the poker thats going on there.
i.e. normal mathematical odds and satistics doesnt seem to apply there. lost count the number of times i've stacked off dominating only to lose to a miracle river lately.

be nice to play against american players again, and im after somewhere that does rakeback. as the stars method of bonus's sucks balls. it only really bennifits those that play platinum or higher (still).

any suggestions?

btw - thinking cake or carbon.

Your basically saying stars is rigged, which is pretty ridiculous.

I would spend time dealing with variance, which can be tough to get your head around. By this I mean getting the emotional parts of your brain (the non-logical bits) to accept that some portion of the time you will lose when you are a huge favourite.

I would get a sick rakeback deal from a Euro site. Sites available to Americans are likely to be shut down at any given moment.

Every site I've played at people seem to think is rigged because of the bad beats. It's easy to believe that a site is rigged when you lose to dominated hands five times in a row, but that's poker.

You have a good point about the point system because Stars' system isn't as good as rakeback for players who don't play high volume or who play low stakes. Most players on Carbon or Cake though would kill a puppy to play on PokerStars. Nothing beats PokerStars as far as the ability for table selection goes.

If you do start at one of the sites you mention, Carbon, I feel, is far superior to Cake. But Carbon has just introduced some new software which is really buggy so it would be best to wait a few weeks before changing if you decide to go in that direction.

donked, ongame....

What are these supposedly sick rakeback deals? For as far as I'm aware you can get 70% on minted, 60% on ipoker as under the table deals. The rest are bog standard deals 30% microgaming, 35% merge, 36% revolution gaming, etc. Didn't think ongame did rakeback deals anymore?

I been thinking about intertops they seem quite reputable and or on the revolution gaming network but since they are US friendly I'm not sure it's worth the risk of having money locked up again...

Variance does happens, last week I had 8 full houses cracked by bigger full houses and it all happened in span of 3 days in row. I never had anything quite like that happened to me before in almost 2 years of playing poker, just a total mind blow.

Than it all gone like it never happened, and I started winning again.

But you have to realize you just run into wrong side of variance, have a loss stop, keep studying game and improving and grind it out.

Stick to your guns.

Think for a second why stars would have it in for you specifically to such an extent as to risk their entire business by shafting you.

Now if you know anything about maths and time complexity give me the time complexity of rigging a massively multiplayer site such that you can shaft a list of players. It's computationally unfeasible to do even if they wanted to.

If you move to a new site because you think stars is rigged you're going to have a bad time.

They are not targetting players to give them bad beats or downswings, they just create big pots to increase the rake they earn. At Stars, every 10 hands there is a stackoff. Have you ever seen that in live poker with that frequency?

They are not targetting players to give them bad beats or downswings, they just create big pots to increase the rake they earn. At Stars, every 10 hands there is a stackoff. Have you ever seen that in live poker with that frequency?

Yes. I know, let's just turn this into yet another "poker is rigged" thread. we all know how helpful and productive they are.

The same bad beats happen live all the time.

You are right, this is a never-ending-discussion. I'm not going to reply in this topic anymore

They are not targetting players to give them bad beats or downswings, they just create big pots to increase the rake they earn. At Stars, every 10 hands there is a stackoff. Have you ever seen that in live poker with that frequency?

This is basically not true. I play on stars and ipoker and I dont see stack offs/coolers every 10 hands. Maybe on 1 table per session, out of 1000 hands+ thats not alot. So by your calculations I should be seeing 100 stackoffs. I can assure you I don't.

Variance does happens, last week I had 8 full houses cracked by bigger full houses and it all happened in span of 3 days in row. I never had anything quite like that happened to me before in almost 2 years of playing poker, just a total mind blow.

Than it all gone like it never happened, and I started winning again.

But you have to realize you just run into wrong side of variance, have a loss stop, keep studying game and improving and grind it out.

Stick to your guns.

been sticking to my guns for 3 months. biggest frustration is getting called by low PPs in 3bet+ pots to lose to sets. thats happening a lot. or someone slow chasing TP vrs my over to river 2 pair. losing 80% of the 50/50's, people stacking off with draws that always hit by the river.

atm it seems very one sided. last time this happened, i jumped to FTP. odds seemed to work "properly" on there. for want of a better word. last time this happened on stars, my roll was at 2k, and after 3 months of some of the worst beats ever, it was down to 400. this time, i'm fighting just to stay break even. and with no rakeback, there's absolutely no go forward. at least on FTP, the rake mean the roll was still climbing, and i can see if moving up stakes was enough to see a change.

on stars, thats not possible. im just trying to get my roll back to where it used to be. thats all.


sorry for brining up a contentious issue, wasnt the intention. just looking for a site to play on. mainly as a change of scenery. and listening to the advice on sites allowing US players, i think thats a pretty valid reason to not play on those sites.