Isaac “Ike” Haxton announced in the early days of the year that he will resign from PokerStars Team Pro Online. He made the announcement on the TwoPlusTwo poker forums thread Resigning from PokerStars where he promised to answer questions relating to the issue.
2p2 member KILLingIT asked Ike a question about the future of online poker:
Ike, What do you think is the future of Pokerstars? You talked to a lot of people, and have inside knowledge of what they picture for the years to come. Would you mind share their visions of the business and what we as players can expect?
To which Ike gives a rather gloomy answer:
I have less inside information than you might hope and can’t necessarily share everything I know. The people I got to talk to often were in Poker Room Management and I believe they’re pretty reasonable and well intentioned.
I didn’t have access to the highest ranking people at Rational Group or anyone at Amaya. I don’t, frankly, know what their goals are or how they think about things. To put it mildly, I think it’s fair to say that they’re placing less emphasis on the original business model of providing a great, player friendly, poker room. Given their dominant position in the industry, that’s pretty scary for serious online poker players, pro and amateur alike.
ZenX asks a question that has been on everyone’s mind ever since PokerStars announced to VIP club changes:
I am curious as to how you feel the VIP changes will affect the economy. Dnegs and Pokerstars have stated that the new changes will be nothing but good for the future growth of online poker and are not only positive, but were necessary to ensure the long term health of the game. Do you believe this to be true?
Ike seems to be far from convinced that PokerStars strategy changes are optimal for the future of online poker, as he reasons that all the players are getting hurt with the changes:
No, I think that’s crazy.
First of all, we haven’t seen anything other than vague claims from PokerStars to suggest that there was anything “unsustainable” about the status quo. Given the context in which we’ve started hearing about it, I’m not inclined to take them at their word on that point. So, to begin with, I’m not convinced that there’s a recently emerged problem with losing players losing too quickly that needs to be fixed.
Just for sake of argument, let’s assume that there is. To be charitable to the view that the changes are somehow good for the net depositors, lets also assume that the amount of rake they pay is unchanged. In fact, at high stakes anyway, a bunch of them are SN and even chromestars will now pay more rake.
Anyway, let’s think about what changes in a game where the regs start paying more rake than they had before and the recs pay the same. The player pool is already over-saturated with regs. If one rec wants to play 25/50 6m NL, there might be as many as 20 or 30 pros online at any given time who are willing to fill those other five seats. Many of them are very small winners or even don’t beat the full price rake and can only survive due to rewards.
Now, in a higher effective rake environment, a bunch of those guys can’t win anymore or can’t win enough for playing that 25/50 game to be a better use of their time than playing lower. So the remaining player pool for that 25/50 game is smaller and stronger and PokerStars is taking more $/hand out of the game. How is this possibly a better situation for the rec?
To actually have the (supposedly) intended effect of making the games softer for recreational players, Stars would have to raise the rake so high that (almost) no one could win. If the rake got so bad that nearly all pros required two amateurs per table to play, then, sure, the amateurs would get to play in softer games. This might actually happen in certain game formats, like hyper SNGs. But then the games would also run dramatically less often and the extra rake might prove to be an equally unbeatable and even less fun adversary than the tough player pools that are (supposedly) deterring net depositors right now.
To be honest, I have a hard time believing that the people making these decisions sincerely believe that killing SNE does anything good for net depositors. I think the purpose of cutting spending on the VIP program is to cut spending on the VIP program and all the poker ecology mumbo jumbo is made up after the fact to rationalize it.
Ike is still answering questions, including questions regarding Brian Hastings multiaccounting scandal on PokerStars in 2015. You can read more and ask questions in the thread Resigning from PokerStars.
