Lets Not Overreact

Pokerstars finally announced its much anticipated changes to their cash game buyin structure, and implemented said changes today. They are as follows:

Many USD currency Hold’em and Omaha games with No-Limit or Pot-Limit betting will be offered with new and different minimum, maximum, and default buy-in amounts. Most stakes of NL Hold’em and PL Omaha will be offered as follows:

20-50 bb, with default buy-in of 40bb
40-100 bb, with default buy-in of 80bb
100-250 bb, with default buy-in of 200bb and ante equal to 20% of the Big Blind

All games in Euro currency will still offer a buy-in range of 35 to 100 bb, but the default buy-in will be lowered from 100 bb to 70 bb. Euro games are now available at some new stakes.

Pokerstars is the last of the major poker networks to make changes to their structure, will Full Tilt being the first. Unfortunately for us Stars regs, Full Tilt did a much better job from the perspective of a full stack player, labelling their low BI tables as "shallow" and setting them to be 20-35bb buyins with their 35-100bbs tables labelled as "standard". Thus far on FTP, the fish have generally flocked to the "standard" tables and SSing has all but died.

On Stars however, there is no labelling of any kind, and at least thus far it seems the 20-50bb games will be just as prevalent as the 40-100bb. Short stackers will survive for the time being, but with their game selection reduced somewhat, their edged reduced in their games (50bb "fullstacks" should in theory play less speculative hands preflop and thus be at less of a natural disadvantage to SSers), and the rat-holing time doubled (from 30 min to 60 min), SSers should start to become significantly less profitable, and hopefully stop making any money at all even after rakeback. However, unlike on Full Tilt this happening will probably be a slow process as 50bb stacks adjust and SSers realize their winrates have dropped. Thus, Stars will still collect a ton of rake as the SSers start down the road to busto, this at the expense of those who want the best possible game selection playing 100bb full stack poker.

I wish Stars had simply copied FTP's model. They love money however, and these changes should in the long run be better than nothing, though they may actually be a negative for 24 tabling fullstacks in the short term. I suppose we'll all have a better idea of what results these changes are actually going to bring in a month or so.