Over the weekend, Party Poker went down for a bit, and when it came back up, there were some new features, like prop bets on the color of the flop, and black jack games. (These are very -EV bets, so play them at your own risk -- or better yet, remove the buttons entirely.)I didn't pay attention, because I don't play on Party, but with these features also came a change which will almost certainly affect the economy of the online poker world, at least for the online grinders and pros who rely on fish-finders and rake backs to make a living: Party Poker disconnected their skin sites.
The big change here is that if you're playing on Party, you're no longer seeing players who are playing on Empire, or Multipoker, or any of Party's other skins. The effective player pool for someone on Party dropped from over 70,000 to around 10,000.
I didn't understand what the big deal was, or why Party disconnected the skins, until I read Bill Rini's always-awesome blog. Bill says, "Well, I’m not privy to Party’s business dealings but . . . from a business standpoint, it’s a mixed bag for Party. It was smart of them to get out from under the skin agreements they got themselves into when they were trying to fuel growth. The skins take a large cut of the rake and were killing Party’s bottom line and most of them were turning a blind eye to affiliates who were offering rakeback which was luring away Party’s best customers. On the other hand, they nearly halved their customer base and now must fight with other sites like PokerStars and FullTilt to win the skin players who will likely be up for grabs. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see shareholders filing class action suits against Party if the markets hammer the stock."
There is much discussion about this in the 2+2 Forums, which you can read by following the link below.
Late Update: Several readers pointed out that I erred when I wrote, "The effective player pool for someone on Party dropped from over 70,000 to around 10,000." I got my numbers backward, and should have written "The effective player pool for someone on a Party skin dropped from over 70,000 to around 10,000." I regret the error.
(Thanks, Bill!)
1. Blackjack can have a +EV if you count the cards and vary your bets correctly. PP is trying to limit this with the following:
- Eight decks are used and each deck has 52 cards.
- The deck is shuffled after 10% of the cards in the decks are used.
I wonder how effective that will be and if they are going to ban successful counters from their blackjack games. It would be pretty easy to detect counters. All you have to do is write a program that counts the cards (from the server side) and determines optimal bets for the current count. Players whose bets are close to the computer's bets are possibly counting cards. When those bets match for long enough it is a pretty sure thing that the player is counting.
Posted at 11:50AM on Oct 11th 2005 by Alan