Nick and Mike sit down once again to bring you the latest in online poker news in an easily digestible half an hour. The pair start off with a discussion on Split Omaha – is it real? Are PokerStars messing with us? – then Mike brings you up to speed on why you shouldn’t get too excited about a bill’s progress in West Virginia and Nick talks about Relax Gaming’s plans to expand into France. We end the show with a discussion on PokerStars finally confirming changes to its third party tools, and what we can expect the impact to be.

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Full Transcript

Mike: Hello and welcome everybody to the sixth episode of The Pokerfuse Podcast. It is February 28th, 2019. I am your host Mike Gentile along with my co-host Nick Jones. Nick, how is it going today?

Nick: I am very, very good. You get me really pumped up with your intros every week. It’s just, you’re firing on all cylinders, you get me excited. It’s going to be a great podcast.

Mike: That’s interesting because some of the feedback that we received is may be that we should have a more standardized custom intro. Thoughts on that?

Nick: I don’t even know what that would be like. We’ve got the music, we’ve got you being extremely effervescent. What else could you want?

Mike: Effervescent, I’m going to have to look that up.

Nick: I hope I used it correctly. That could be totally wrong. Let’s just blow past it. I tell you what, this week I feel very much that we were ahead of the curve when we started looking at topics we might talk about. The WSOP bracelets, boom, done it already. GGNetwork Cash Drop, boom, did it last week. I think we synced up nicely to the new cycle this week.

Mike: I’m not exactly sure what we’re going to be talking about. Probably things that are yet to come.

Nick: Always, that’s it. Ahead of the curve all the time. Let’s start straight in.

Mike: I guess that’s the value in it, right?

Nick: There you go.

Split Omaha at PokerStars

Mike: One of the first things we are going to talk about this week is the potential for a new game on PokerStars called Split Omaha. They have not confirmed it as of yet but our super sleuth Anuj has found some evidence that that could be their next new poker variant.

Nick: When we first saw this I thought this is the time that PokerStars is actually messing with us and putting something in there to lead us astray because when I first heard this idea I thought this sounds ridiculous. B ut it turns out, and if you read our article you’ll read all about it, that this is actually a genuine game that is played live —Double Board Omaha I guess it’s called.

Whereas , as the name suggests, and if you know Split Hold’em, which PokerStars launched, it was actually first of their novelty cash games which they launched way back in March, 2018. They launched Split Hold’em which is basically two boards, two flops, turns, and rivers are dealt out. Then at the end of the hands, the pot is split between the winner of one board and the winner of the other board. Of course, as with split board games you can scoop if your hand wins both boards.

Mike: The thing that jumps out at me about Split Omaha, and I need to preface this by saying I am not an Omaha player but, it seems to me that with Omaha, in general, you tend to play more hands than Hold’em and now Split Omaha with two boards you’re going to tend to play more hands than that. It seems to be a theme maybe even with the Six Plus which you tend to play more hands. It feels like a trend of PokerStars releasing games that give players the opportunity to be in the action more and fold less.

Nick: I think in that regard that the criticisms leveled at something like Split Hold’em I guess that kind of a double with Omaha you’re obviously going to get a lot of split hands. You’re going to get a lot of equal equities preflop. A lot of reasons to play a hand. I’ll be honest, from a complexity level, I’ve tried to think about it and have struggled to really understand how you’d even go about playing this game but as like you, I don’t play PLO, so no surprises there. It seems the most silly novelty of— of course, this is the assumptions that it plays just like Split Hold’em is released.

We don’t know that for an absolute fact. PokerStars does not tell us ahead of time but this is the sixth game we’ve predicted and we’ve been right the other five. It’s looking fairly good, but this seems the silliest I guess of the ones they’ve had.

Mike: It does seem to be very novelty-ish for sure. Going back to something that you said earlier on this topic about the potential of PokerStars maybe trying to pull one over on us, I wanted to let the listeners know that that suspicion is not just out of the blue. PokerStars has been quite— they’ve been quite— what’s the word I’m looking for?

Nick: I’m watching you choose your words carefully over webcam here. I’m just going to leave you to work it out.

Mike: Thanks, man. Leave me to struggle here. They’ve been quite—

Nick: They’ve made mention before that they notice that we get this out ahead of time and they’re not best pleased that we do.

Mike: Yes, that’s a very politically correct way of putting it. I would not be surprised either if they were to just try and lead us off the scent perhaps.

Nick: Yes. With that said, I think that would probably harm them more than it would harm us. I suspected it when they launched Fusion because literally, I’m like, pokerfuse, Fusion. That again was a real game that they ran. I would be surprised if Split Omaha isn’t real and isn’t released next month.

The dates that we are looking at, Six-Plus Hold’em, which again, I might have talked about in this podcast. We definitely suspected this game might be permanent. We’ve definitely seen more of an uptake in the game, more traffic and it’s not definite either way, but they did send out a mailer to customers saying that it was a temporary game. That might have been an indication that this game is going to be withdrawn.

Mike: One thing that leads me to suspect that it may not be is they are positioning themselves to launch the game in Italy? Is that correct?

Nick: Yes, yes. That’s absolutely right. In fact, it might have already launched. Also, we saw, I believe yesterday, that they have updated their web pages to talk about Six-Plus Hold’em on their Italian website. Yes, it is the first time that one of these variants has been— they’ve gone through that regulatory process to launch it in another market, in a segregated market,

Mike: Right. That’s usually quite an arduous task to get a new game approved by a regulator. That leads me to believe that it could be leaning more towards a permanent game.

Nick: Yes, in fact, when we break it down, the only games that have really made it into Italy or France, Spain, Portugal or in New Jersey is obviously Zoom, Fast Fold, and the lottery sit and go, Spin & Go. I know there a lot of talk when Power Up launched, that they were going to bring this to other regulated markets. That was actually really interesting because under some regulation, certain Power Cards of Power Up, they couldn’t launch, I think in Spain. One Power Card wasn’t permitted under the regulations, which I thought was fascinating. Saying that now, I don’t think that that has happened with Power Up. If they do do it with Six Plus, it really does go and show a level of interest in the game.

With that said, what we haven’t seen with Six-Plus Hold’em is it hasn’t been transformational in the way that Spin & Go’s or Zoom were. In the sense that maybe they were looking for explosive interest or it’s going to be a temporary game. It might fall into the temporary game bucket. I would also think that maybe that’s setting too— If that’s the case, it’s setting too high of a bar with just ultimately, a rules change, which is what we’re looking out with Six Plus, Fusion … that slight rule changes, they’re not lottery—

Mike: Not like Power Up. Yes.

Nick: Yes. Power Up, lottery Sit & Gos where it’s— I don’t know. It’s introducing that whole new element with that jackpot. Zoom Poker, it’s changing something fundamental about the way you play it, rather than the rules of the game that you’re playing. I don’t think Six Plus Hold’em could have gone much better. It’s not like all of a sudden, everyone’s going to start playing this game.

Mike: That could change once they or if they decide to implement that format into a tournament format. If they start releasing Six Plus Sit & Go’s or start having Six Plus MTTs, that could be the thing that really puts that game over the edge and starts the interest in it to explode.

Nick: Yes, and so I suppose just to give a bit more context, the reason why we’re talking like it might be removed is up until now, they’ve always run one game. They’ve ran it for approximately six weeks. I think just looking down our table here. If you’re interested more on this, do check out pokerfuse. In the latest article, we got a great table which shows every game that they’ve had, how long it’s run for. It’s been very consistent, 55 to 64 days that each of the last five variances has run for. Six Plus Hold’em launched January 16 so it’s been running for five weeks going on six weeks, I think. If it were to have the 60-day duration, it’s going to be until mid-march, so a couple of weeks away.

That would tie in nicely with what we’ve seen with Split Omaha. Normally the time we spot this game, we spotted this a few weeks ago, within about a month it gets launched. They haven’t had to run it in tandem yet. Potentially, I guess maybe Six Plus Hold’em is promoted to a permanent thing and it takes over a different section and that part of the lobby is dedicated to a new variant. We’ve never seen it. It’s already quite crammed in the lobby with all their times to have two of them sat next to each other. We’ll certainly see where this goes and how this plays out.

Online Poker in West Virginia

Nick: Also hot off the press is an article, which we are just putting the final touches on , an article penned by Mike Gentile himself about West Virginia and the situation with the bill there.

Mike: What we have seen in the West Virginia is the house of representatives has passed an online gaming bill. That bill has moved over to some Senate subcommittees and is fully expected to pass the Senate and be signed into law by the governor. My take is that online poker even if it is legalized it’s not sustainable in a state the size of West Virginia.

Nick: Yes, so for context West Virginia is tiny, isn’t it? Population is about two million is that right?

Mike: Yes just under two million.

Nick: How does that compare with Delaware which is also tiny? Is it a bit bigger than Delaware?

Mike: Yes, it’s twice the size of Delaware. Delaware is under a million but if we look back at the history of shared liquidity in the US we can see that the first two states to join forces were Nevada at three million people and Delaware at one million people. They had a potential player pool of four million people and they still struggled, it wasn’t until they added New Jersey and its nine million population bringing that total to 13, that we really saw a change in the amount of revenue generated. With West Virginia at two million, they’re going to struggle with even a single online poker operator. I can’t see them being profitable or having the potential to join in with the other states given the current political climate.

Nick: Nevada is a great example there because that was the first to launch regulated online poker. It was just online poker and they launched with quite a fanfare we had Ultimate Poker launch at the time, but they had a lot of marketing behind them. WSOP and— was it just those two launched? Real Poker as well launched and already took off.

Mike: They were really small. They were never able to get their feet off the ground really so it was just those two but then we saw, in the end, Ultimate Gaming ended up closing up shop. I suspect if it weren’t for the actual World Series of Poker being in Las Vegas for six weeks during the summer, that population of three million people would still struggle just to house a single online poker operator.

Nick: Of course, Nevada also has that advantage that it is a vacation destination and people who visit there can play online poker when they are in Nevada. It’s fairly easy too. You can actually go physically to the cage to deposit into real money online poker. I’m going to guess here I’m not particularly familiar with the state of your country but not as many people go to West Virginia on a gambling vacation.

Mike: Yes, I haven’t looked it up either but I would definitely say, I’d put my money on the fact that Nevada has a lot higher tourism than West Virginia does. A million less people than Nevada, none of the tourism. I’d be surprised if anybody just goes into that state even with the future as an outlook because of the current situation with the department of justice.

Nick: If anyone is just tuning in and don’t know what Mike’s referencing there, I would say get back and listen, last week I think we covered the topic in terms of the WSOP. I think every week we’ve touched on that because all news coming from the United States is tainted by this reinterpretation of the Wire Act which has really put in jeopardy the future of liquidity sharing across borders in the United States.

Mike: Touching on the topic that we did cover last week as well is the World Series of Poker announcing their online bracelet events for this summer’s 50th-anniversary series. The thing that jumps out to me there is the Department of Justice gave operators a 90-day period to get into compliance with their new opinion. That 90-day period is going to end at some point in late April. Prior to the series starting and the actual ramification to that are really unknown. The obvious one is the players in New Jersey would not be able to play the online event as they were able to last year.

I guess a more extreme thing that could happen is, depending on the routing of the data within WSOPs Nevada operation, if it does extend across state lines and back, it’s possible that the Nevada regulators could step in and shut that down completely.

Nick: It’s sad that after for half a decade or more of very slow agonizing but ultimate progress towards safe regulated online poker in the United States inch by inch and finally we have the development of cross border liquidity sharing. This whole thing is— As you say the WSOP and online bracelets and just building a bit of momentum, building a bit of interest and again in a safe regulated manner. This is all thrown in jeopardy due to one letter and one interpretation which seems very politically charged is perhaps the most euphemistic [laughs] way I can put it.

Mike: There are opportunities for things to turn around. As I said that 90-day period will be coming to an end but we also have lawsuits that have been filed. We have the attorneys general for both Pennsylvania and New Jersey seeking to get the DOJ to reverse their opinions. There’s a lot of moving parts to this story. A lot of things could happen between now and then. It’ll be something definitely interesting to watch.

Unibet Moving from iPoker to Relax in France

Another big story that we’ve seen this week is that Unibet will be moving off of the iPoker network in France. Nick, what’s the latest on that topic?

Nick: Yes. It is actually a press release that was just released today that we’ve been working on a little while but I think it’s official now and it’s going to happen. They said in Q1 which I guess is some point next month. It’s R elax Gaming which is the software developer and platform provider for Unibet’s —doing air quotes here —independent online poker software. The piece software which they moved on to some five years ago and they are moving off where they are in France on the iPoker network and launching an independent new network in France which is fascinating for various reasons. For one, it’s the first new investment in the French online poker market in this way for a very, very long time.

Mike: Yes. That’s pretty big. Just to clarify, the iPoker network Unibet in France right now is not utilizing the software that they use in the international market. Is that correct?

Nick: Yes. Right. In the international market, in the dot.com market Unibet uses this Relax platform which if you play then it’s quite iconic. I would say it’s— Particularly when it came out five years ago it was very opinionated in its online poker experience. It’s the software with the blind lobby, anonymous usernames, a cartoonish look and feel, achievements built in. That has powered Unibet’s online poker presence globally for the last five years and it includes the end of the UK and Sweden and Denmark and that kind of thing.

However, in France— Unibet is also a big brand in France. They have historically just been on iPoker’s software in the French market. They’ve shared liquidity with Betclic which is just another company Betclic-Everest. that has skin and the pair of them have shared liquidity in France. Just because it is such a hard market to operate in and the two companies wanted an online poker offer so they’d have something to offer customers there but they couldn’t really go it alone and run their own thing. That got a slight boost a couple of months ago because iPoker combined their French network with their Spanish network.

In Spain, they have three or four skins, bet365, I think Betfair and Casino Barcelona itself which is the casino where everyone holds their big Barcelona events. That was a fairly new license. They pooled their liquidity and also a very small network in Spain so iPoker could join those two liquidity pools together and compete in this new European market where we’re seeing a lot of investment with PokerStars and Winamax and Party Poker.

Mike: The thing that strikes me about Relax Gaming is anyone that has seen this software in action it definitely has a new age online poker look and feel. It seems to be very well crafted. It’s gotten a lot of positive feedback from players but yet we haven’t seen Relax take their platform anywhere else besides the Unibet product. It’s quite possible now that if they’re looking to expand in regulated markets that we could start seeing that platform perhaps and other regulated markets as well?

Nick: I think Relax Gaming and Unibet, the two have been used interchangeably in the past and certainly all the marketing has come from the Unibet and it is that been there independent poker platform. It’s made it a bit more complicated in the sense that a Kindred group who own Unibet do own a share of Relax gaming and there’s also been a fair amount of movement of staff from one to the other. There’s been a lot of crossover and it’s been fairly easy to consider them as kind of one individual entity and Relax being the software development arm of Kindred. The reality is that I think Relax Gaming, is in other products they do bingo. They’ve got a big bingo product and they’ve just got into slots as well.

They have other customers, B 2 B customers on this. With their poker product up until now, it has just been Unibet. As I understand, I’m not sure on the exact specifics, but you get the impression that in the dot.com world it was an exclusive arrangement to use this platform in this dot.com market but we definitely get the sense with the PR this week that in its French market and into this shared European markets, that Relax is proactively looking for other customers to pool liquidity with Unibet and build this competing French market.

It could be an operator in Spain. It could be potentially an existing iPoker customer in Spain or France who might be tempted to move over to, as you say, a fairly interesting product that although is five years old now, which is a pretty long time in software development, certainly still leads the way in some areas. We’ve absolutely seen other operators copy many facets of the Unibet poker client or perhaps I should say the Relax Gaming poker client. In particular, Run It Once Poker is I think heavily inspired in many regards to some of the design decisions that Unibet poker have made. We have not seen a product like that in the French-Spanish market at all. It’s definitely going to be a unique addition to for players there.

Mike: Right. As we see this new wave of poker software hitting the market, and I’m speaking specifically of Relax and Run It Once, it’ll be interesting to see which one of the major online poker up operators, the traditional ones, gets the most competition from these newcomers and how that changes the whole landscape of the online poker market in general internationally as well as in regulated markets?

Nick: Yes, it’s exciting to see smaller companies, obviously they have the flexibility, and they have the nimbleness to try out different feature sets and take both things like blind lobbies, like anonymous table names, a blanket ban on third-party tools. I mean those three things describe both Unibet and Run It Once. We’re seeing some of those properties filter through to some of the bigger operators. Once again, we just generally have an industry where we have, multiple competing companies trying different things and going in different directions and also they now have the flexibility to take them into new markets as well. It’s a very exciting development and it’s great to see that kind of innovation.

Mike: Yes. I think with, with this one specifically, it’s kind of a milestone because what we’re seeing for the first time is we’re seeing one of these smaller new wave operators enter a regulated market where the barriers of entry are limited amount of competition and high, usually higher than normal, regulatory fees. To see someone take that leap or overcome those challenges bodes well for the future.

Nick: Just to put a final point on it, I think it’s just— Going back to the previous conversation about US shared liquidity, this would absolutely not be happening if it wasn’t for the fact that France signed a deal with Spain and Portugal to allow liquidity sharing. I mean, 100%, that is Relax Gaming’s plan. That’s what’s attracted to them to the market. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the French part alone is not profitable for anyone. Famously, it’s been very hard to make a profit in the French market because the tax rates are so high. The reason why they’re starting in France in my mind is because I’ve seen Unibet already has a presence there. They already have some liquidity. They can look at the numbers, the network traffic and know that they’re taking that onto this new platform to seed it.

But I won’t be surprised if soon we hear that’s expanding either Unibet into the Spanish market or another customer entirely to start building this, network. That wouldn’t be happening if we didn’t see France, Spain and Italy and Portugal. Hopefully, Italy follows through on its agreement and doing it to really reinvigorate the market. There’s no clear example of that than a move like this.

PokerStars confirms third party tools change

Regular listeners to the podcast might remember back in episode two over a month ago, it feels so long ago, that we had the exclusive news of PokerStars changing their policy on third-party tools. PokerStars has finally confirmed these changes. That they will be going live next week restricting automated settings perhaps what they can do.

Mike: How do we expect that that is going to change the experience for players that are on the PokerStars network?

Nick: Well, yes. That’s a really good question. It’ll be interesting to see if large numbers of players change their behavior, that’s the big thing. It’s very hard for us from the outside to know how many people today benefit from automated seating scripts and whether they will stop playing on PokerStars entirely, whether they will have to reduce their volume because it’s harder to find games. Whether they will change the types of games they play. Obviously, what PokerStars wants—

To add a little bit of backstory here. Amongst a few changes, restrictions on what third-party tools can do, the major one that really caught our eye is that you cannot now use any tool, any third party tool to sit you in games if that tool uses any heuristics regarding players sat at the table, their statistics, any color coding, it can’t use that tool. It can blindly seat you at tables, but it can’t base it on who sat at those tables.

Mike: Right, so you can’t have a tool that uses any information about your opponents or potential opponents in selecting the table to sit you at.

Nick: Right. The behavior PokerStars wants to encourage, they were fairly explicit about that in their official blog post about this yesterday, was that they want people either to continue playing the games they were playing before but you’re not hunting out the weaker opponents, you just take your seats and play. The reality is that the types of players who do hunt out good seats and play aren’t all of a sudden just going to accept playing in worse game. The question is, does that play go elsewhere? Does it go to a competitor’s site, which potentially PokerStars won’t mind? Or will some of these players play less tables or spend more time manually choosing their seats. I think we don’t really know the answer to that and PokerStars probably doesn’t know the answer to what the impact will be.

Mike: I would be very surprised if we see any sudden change in the ecology on PokerStars as a result of the implementation of this policy. I think it’s more likely that this is something that is going to shift over time. You may see more recreational players retaining their bank roles more, as a result of playing with less professionals or less high volume players. You may see a falloff in the amount of games that are played by the high volume players as you suggested, with them possibly seeking out a different operator. I don’t expect any overnight changes but it’s something to keep an eye on as time progresses.

Nick: Well, another thing that really stands out to me with the news and the details that came out yesterday is how hard it is for an operator today to have a policy where they permit some third-party tools and not others. Drawing that line is very, very tricky. PokerStars updated a document that they published on their website regarding what tools are permitted and what not and tries to draw that line. That document is, I think 41 or 42 pages long. It categorizes third-party tools into seven different groups and then breaks them. One of the rules that came out yesterday was, “You can use”- I might not get the details right there, “You can use starting hand charts to help you play. But at most, you can have 9 charts on a 13 by 13 grid.”

Mike: Wow. How are they even going to be aware if that policy is being violated?

Nick: I think go back maybe a year or 18 months since the last time they did these changes. They have similar things about HUDs, “Can’t use more than three statistics to categorize a player,” or two streets or something like that, to the point that I didn’t understand [laughs] I can’t remember the time. But this is the thing, this is the question that we brought up a month ago when we discussed this was, why PokerStars is doing this now? Because they have stated for longest time, that they wanted to stop automated seating scripts, but they didn’t want that rule until they felt confident that they can enforce it. Why do they now feel that they can confidently enforce it? Now, what they said in the blog post yesterday was that they have spent extensive development time and have used artificial intelligence to give them the confidence that they now feel that they can detect this kind of behavior.

Mike: I didn’t yet read that blog post so I’m going to ask you some questions on it. I know that part of the movement to stop these automated seeding scripts for PokerStars anyway was the implementation of Seat Me which is a a blind lobby system. Did they say anything about the future of that blind lobby system in their blog post yesterday?

Nick: No, and this is something else that we brought up a month ago. It’s that the implication here is that they clearly don’t plan to roll it out anytime soon if they’ve gone to the trouble of detailing this really new and specific rules with the plans then to enforce. Because, obviously, the easiest thing with a lot of these third-party tools is we saw with all the details. We’ve run it once in Unibet. As much we’re going to prohibit them how about just to nullify their value.

Obviously, a blind lobby just nullifies the value. That’s the easy technological solution to it. They specifically have not taken that path. All we can surmise there is that they are either implementation issues or adverse behavioral effects with a blind lobbying system. When it’s applied to a player pool the size of PokerStars.

Mike: I am quite surprised to see the industry headed in this direction to be honest. It was a few years back where I thought we were going to start seeing more operators eliminating the use of third-party tools on their site altogether and implementing some of those things built into the software such as HUDs. We’ve seen that’s happened on some of the online poker player firms.

For the large part, a lot of the tools, the third party tools that are available out there for the online poker industry or the experience have not been incorporated into the software packages. I guess that’s a route that I thought the industry was going to head in a few years back but it just doesn’t seem like that happening anytime soon.

Nick: Yes, I would agree. The big changes, the blanket bans are still relegated to the smaller niche size, like the ones that we’ve been talking about earlier on this podcast. The big three PokerStars, Party, 888 still trying to walk this tricky line. To the point that actually right now I wanted to talk a bit about how what PokerStars, partypoker 's policy is and I couldn’t tell you because I can’t keep up on what’s that like. I can tell you that for example on 888 it’s like they support HUDs on all their tables except Blast tables.

Mike: Blast is their fast -fold?

Nick: The fast fold game. How are players even meant to know that? Again, you have to rely on that the HUD developer is conforming to … I don’t even think— PokerStars does an excellent job in publishing 42-page pdfs for everyone to read, journalists, players, and developers. They reached out to the developers over a month ago which is why we knew about it, why he heard about this.

They published a really good page on their website saying here are some examples of tools that are allowed, here are some example of tools that are allowed but not when you play. Here are some examples of tools that are never allowed. They go above and beyond other people but it just really goes to under score, a s you say the big operators are still choosing to take a middle ground approach rather than the blanket ban.

They are not implementing the easy fixes that nullified the value of lot these tools. We can only surmise that on the large scale, the large player pools, things like blind lobbies have negative behavioral impacts. They have prevented these operators. PokerStars have got a lot of data in this now because it’s been live in the European shared liquidity market now for coming on a year. It’s been live in India since India launched. They know how it works and how it impacts the players.

Mike: When you say there’s negative behavioral impact are you saying they could have seen a reduction in liquidity or the amount of activity that they see on certain games because of the blind lobby?

Nick: I’m guessing here but absolutely there must be some. They must be looking at some numbers and going, “That’s not as good.”

Mike: Yes, because there is the complexity of keeping up this allowance of third-party tools, there’s that gross. It has to be for a reason. If the easiest solution is just to ban it there must be a reason they’re not doing that.

Nick: Yes and we look at why also it’s anonymous. PokerStars reason is they wanted to be like a real poker game and say you have a name and you can remember the name. Of course, it’s not people’s real names so you’re still using an online handle but they don’t want you to change it that frequently. Again, that’s something that we started to see six years ago. We probably wrote and talked about how this was the trend that was going to proliferate and it started on Bodog and then went to Unibet and then we’re seeing it Run it Once. It hasn’t gone beyond.

It might be as you say a numbers thing, or it might just be the implementation details. There’s something like the blind lobby. There are nuances there in terms of, to prevent people from just hopping tables you need to draw lines on that kind of thing and have sit-out times you need to maintain the global wait list. Potentially it’s just an implementation detail, but I’m now of the opinion that we are not going to see some of these on the bigger size fair for whatever reason.

Outro

Mike: That covers a lot of the major topics that we saw this week. There’s still a few out there that we did not have time to get to.

Nick: Yes, this is the first week I think where we’ve had show notes, and we just haven’t got to a topic or two. Maybe it’s just going to be a totally dead week next week and we’ll talk about it, because we were going to talk about Zynga Poker and them having bots, and that’s really, really interesting. We just haven’t got time. If you would like to hear about that, and you’re a pro subscriber, you can read about that on Poker Industry PRO , and if not maybe we’ll get something up on pokerfuse about it, or we’ll talk about it next week. It is a really interesting little topic that isn’t being talked about anywhere else, but in our own minds and on our website.

Mike: Definitely. I’m looking forward to having that discussion. Until next week, I am your host Mike Gentile with Nick Jones here for The Pokerfuse Podcast. Take care.