Party Poker to stop providing hand histories

According to this post on 2+2, Party Poker will completely remove access to hand histories on their site on June 17.

This will likely coincide with the mandatory screen name change, designed to "reset" all player data and make HUD tracking tools less useful.

While I support the mandatory name change, it's a complete joke that they are eliminating hand histories, especially due to Party's recent concession that most of the online cheating they've caught has been via player reports.

Removal of hand histories will prevent players from policing the games, and also make superusers much more difficult to protect.

Awful decision.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dan Druff

According to this post on 2+2, Party Poker will completely remove access to hand histories on their site on June 17.

This will likely coincide with the mandatory screen name change, designed to "reset" all player data and make HUD tracking tools less useful.

While I support the mandatory name change, it's a complete joke that they are eliminating hand histories, especially due to Party's recent concession that most of the online cheating they've caught has been via player reports.

Removal of hand histories will prevent players from policing the games, and also make superusers much more difficult to protect.

Awful decision.

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Ya online poker just keeps getting worse and worse by the day sadly. Really stupid decision

Hand histories should be available to see if I am paying rake. It's important for player development; its fun for marketing for players and the site (who doesn't love to see a goofy/interesting hand?), and of course it's important to self police the games. We shouldn't have to rely on just the site to police stuff like collusion and super using.

Just hope all the sites don't follow suit and Party is pressured into making the right decision

Problems:

- Harder to report collusion if you can't look back at things sending them the hand number later on,etc....

- Most HUDs grab all hands anyways so people who have them will be able to have hangds logged in their hud making it available to them and not others. This is something they likely are trying to prevent but unless they re code the way the HH's are written it will continue on with allowing slight losers, break even players, and everyone winning regardless of what rate to have access defeating the purpose of fish/recs from being more on an even playing field.

- Name changes can be suspect if you think a player(s) could be cheating but haven't proven it yet now you can't avoid them on future tables right away due to not knowing what new name they picked.


The online poker business model has changed so much starting a few years after Black Friday. It's all about trying to cap winners from crushing so much offering various "fun player bingo games" where the site really collects quickly on rake with fast structure minimum edge stuff.

Paying up to 20% of the player pool in MTTs really helps a sites bottom line because the rec/fish cashes for 1.3x his buyin good news he don't have to deposit he can enter again paying rake again profiting for the site and less for the winners to cashout.

We also see higher rake in all formats, less incentives (thanks a lot pokerstars rewards program leading the way here), eliminating some formats like heads up cash (could be restructured with certain changes to prevent bum hunting or hit and running), and a lot more. These sites are about making it more difficult to bring down top crusher win rates making it seem more and more like you have to be a mass tabling MTT reg with sick skills in order to really crush online because other formats they are finding ways to eliminate people from playing them.

hmm the one site I ever played on that I never trusted their RNG, good solution for them to hide it.

https://poker.partypoker.com/en/blog/fair-play.html

LOL @ "Keep the faith" at the end

I wonder how this will play out. Years ago on Party they tried that beginner / novice / advanced cash game model that failed and now this?

In an ideal world to a poker operator nobody would cashout and they would continue to come back for more but that is only a dream. This network was doing some decent things picking up players that left Pokerstars over their rewards slashing and other changes but I can't see this being a good business model long term.

The bottom line is you need players to create games keeping them running and some of are going to win in the process. The sites should look at these players as paid employees even if they aren't actually being paid by them sort of like old school casino propping that happened a lot bringing more action in.

Fish/Recs aren't the biggest for starting tables and keeping them running. These type of players also want to see big prize pools for MTTs which might be the reason they come to the site to begin with and then they will dabble in cash games as well.

This new Party Poker model will likely end up costing them some traffic over time. Online Poker has dried up in a lot of areas due to legal regulations and people less interested as they once were. I'm not sure how you get a ton of new people in the game these days but what you don't do is give them a bad taste in their mouth sending them out of the game or to play elsewhere.

The sweet spot would be to find a medium where regs are slightly unhappy but not leaving over it thus keeping the games healthy for everyone. A site needs to understand you can't expect a decreasing player pool to pay more because your 4th quarter earnings have decreased 15%. Don't send them away the players still grinding by thinking you can trick them into changes that they will see through your bullshit.