Starting from July, 7^th all the countries implement new loyalty program: Stars Rewards. No more VPP and VIP Steps. From now on, there are only chests… CHESTS! This is another step towards turning online poker to some sort of slot or social network games variation. All the details are below.

The biggest poker room announced this way of rewarding its regular users in April this year, but the details were unclear back then. In May, official blog has a post about what is Stars Rewards.

Power Up is a so-called poker hybrid of poker and card video game. Currently there is a closed alpha-test, so the final release is far away. The game reminds HoldemX, the development of the company of Alex Dreyfus, one of the most famous innovators in the world of poker.

There was a new trend in gaming-industry that has been formed during the latest years – it is card games. Not poker, but close (or not so close) analogues of Magic: The Gathering, a popular table and online game.

In its new update, the world’s largest room did what it was long asked for: started an active fight against bumhunters and scripts. PokerStars.es is already testing an automatic system of seating of players. Which means that soon it will be impossible to select specific tables or tag along weak players.

The room’s blog summarizes the major changes. The most important one is the Seat Me button. A player selects a game (e.g., No Limit Hold'em) and limit (say $1/2). Then clicks Seat Me to be placed at a random table at this limit.

There were only four buy-ins in $25,000 PLO at the first historical stage of PokerStars Championship Bahamas. It would be an understatement to say that this is a failure. Main event had 738 buy-ins, while there were 928 registrations the previous time. This all happened even now when he buy-in became lower (for mere $300).

The big experiment of transformation of European Poker Tour and many other local tournament branches into two formats – Championships and Festivals – doesn’t show the best of results yet.

It all started rather good. There were plenty of super highrollers in $100,000 Super High Roller (54 against 58 buy-ins last year) but then they’ve realized that something went wrong.

One of the major peculiarities of online poker is that players remain relatively anonymous. When you are playing cash games or tournaments in poker clubs – you will be identified in the future this way or another. But when you only see an avatar, some random nickname and country of the player – it is easy to create atmosphere of mystery around yourself.

We seldom write about online poker. It is not our profile. However, sometimes there are interesting stories there. And it doesn’t make sense to leave them without our attention: why limit ourselves with some unnecessary borders.

Besides, the topic of the article is somehow connected with live poker as well.

Should one eliminate respect from poker – there will be only market relations. Soulless chips trade, pure competition with no conscience involved. Limit Hold’em is pretty close to that. It is quite regular to use sitting scripts at top stakes for a long time. There are also various forms of angle shooting in practice. Russian top regular Feruell is accused of heavy buttoning and he admits it.

“King of Limit” Feruell, one of the most famous Russian regulars, was banned at PokerStars in July 2013 for buttoning (avoiding posting blinds).

Stars sent Feruell a warning – should he continue breaking the rules, he will imminently receive permanent ban. And so it happened. Elite regular with still secret name (what gives him some sort of being fantastic) can’t play in the biggest poker room on the planet:

“Well, I have my PokerStars account closed. Forever… I had a warning before that for some bullshit, I wrote about this on 2+2 with the text from PokerStars support. Now I have permanent ban.”

Despite all the irreversibility and strictness of punishment, Feruell got his right to play at PokerStars back. Looks like he found “the right words” in conversation with the security department.

And now we have this thread in the end of March 2016 where the mysterious player gets old accusations in the other room.

Recent cardinal changes on Full Tilt Poker mark the beginning of the new era of world poker development. Poker is now becoming targeted only on amateurs. These changes in online poker may doom it forever.  Regular players have to find new fishy places and with time there is great possibility that they’ll end up in live poker rooms.

We do not discuss online poker very often; we follow some other aspects of poker life. But sometimes changes in virtual world are so massive that they affect live poker also.

And that is the case here.

First “let’s-make-poker-more-user-friendly” changes at Full Tilt Poker were made few days ago. Their logic: the number of deposits decreasing, regulars are over their heads, we need to find new stream of noobs or we are going to die soon. Changes in poker terrify.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the New Year is just round the corner and it’s time to sum everything up. We’ll tell you about the most significant events of the leaving year, name the best offline player and the largest distribution in poker.

This year is extremely authentic. It is pretty foolish to say that it has been a better or a worse year than a previous one – it is just special.

It soaked up the large amount of the most interesting events, some of which have brought the whole poker world into the state of shock.

Even before the monopolist room PokerStars has been bought by the Canadian company Amaya there was strong trend for room to be reconstructed in favor of the recreational players. The latest changes have caused an outrage even among those-who-have-seen-everything regulars, who are now taking votes for the most famous team PokerStars player Daniel Negreanu to leave the poker room.

Just to confide this statement, let’s get through the list of the latest controversial changes in global poker economics: