It was the moment that US online poker has
been waiting for – the return of reg-infested PokerStars to the US of A. I am
pleased, dear Melted Felt readers, to report that things have gone swimmingly
well as far as the launch is concerned.
Things went so well that New Jersey online
poker broke a new record, as a 3rd cash game table was completely
full (with 1 person waiting) on Easter Sunday at around 5pm. Sure, all of the
tables featured 8 regs all multi-tabling and 1 clueless fish wondering why his
limps were always getting reraised… but let’s not nit-pick, we are celebrating
here! Celebrating the fact that a poker site that is only really good because
they have the massive volume of players that allows more games and bigger
promos returning to the US – without their biggest benefit. Of course, once the
fish lost a couple of buy-ins he went back to the casino games and the regs
swapped bankrolls for the next 3 hours while Stars took the rake…
Wonder-f-ing-full news.
Now, here at Melted Felt gratitude is the
name of the game [are you sure about that, I thought it was poker? Ed]. I for one am very grateful to all the poker
players who continue to play at Amaya properties despite the investigation of
their CEO into insider trading deals.
Players have obviously taken a look at the
history of online poker, rationally assessed the risk to their bankrolls should
the owners be found to be corrupt and decided that the rewards of playing
against hordes of multi-tabling regs outweighs any risk. Or maybe they just assume that ‘it’s
different this time’.
After all… what could possibly go wrong
when the person in charge of the site which is your livelihood gets indicted?
Rake Increases
I’ll finish this post by adding my comment
on the recent rake increases. No, not to congratulate a certain Mr Negreanu for
being man enough to state that these were put in place to increase revenue for
the owners… that’s all well and good.
I wanted to applaud the regs for their
indigent ‘told you so’ posts over at 2+2 after DN came out with his comments.
You were probably able to work this out for
yourselves if you had really really put your mind to it guys.
Then again, we are talking about a group of
people who think that they are doing some kind of favor to a fish by sitting in
a table with their HUDs and experience and raping new players of their bankroll
within minutes… this kind of ‘service’ is known as ‘providing volume of games’,
right?
I’ll look forward to bringing you more happy,
sparking, wonderful news of US online poker soon!
MF