SeatMe on PokerStars - innovation, that regulars already hate

Online poker leader PokerStars never ceases to amaze its customers with fresh thoughts about the development of the entire industry as a whole, and its some specific segments. The last memorable breakthrough was the Spin'n'go format, which many regulars at first accepted with caution, seeing in these tournaments a potential “kidnapper” of fish from cash tables and tournaments, but everything turned out perfectly and it turned out that sweet players in the Pokerstars ecosystem became even more.

The introduction of such things as a casino and a bookmaker into the main client of the poker room will not be considered separately - this is far from a breakthrough and has been asking for a long time.

And in early 2017, the news about the upcoming global change in Pokerstars 'approach to cash games and the formation of the poker cash ecology fell on the regulars' head. Yes, yes, we are talking about the very Seat Me, which, probably, many have already forgotten, as an unsuccessful post-New Year joke from the poker giant.

What is SeatMe

Let us briefly recall the essence of the novelty: according to this new feature, now when you try to play cash, you will only have access to the choice of the limit and table format (heads-up, 6-max or 9-max). That is, no selection program, such as Table Scan Turbo, will now work, since for the correct functioning of this kind of software, there must be tables in the lobby that will be constantly scanned. And since Seat Me now decides at which tables customers will play, there is no need for a lobby of the kind it is in now.

But the bad news for regulars didn't end there. Another nuisance follows from the absence of tables in the lobby: now programs that collect poker datamining will not be able to get to the tables as an observer and, accordingly, will not be able to collect hand histories.

In general, wherever you look - this is the end and "boss, everything is gone!" It's good that these changes will not affect programs like Holdem Manager and Poker Tracker in any way, at least nothing was written about this in the release of Pokerstars.​

When is the launch?

Now for the good: Seat Me will be rolled out gradually, starting with the countries of Pokerstars customers who are on the reservation. The first "punishing sword" fell on the Spanish players, that is, on the clients of the site Pokerstars.es. The first feedback from the regulars on 2 + 2 was pessimistic: there were very few games, the regulars prefer not to fight with each other, but go to sit-out and wait for the next fish. Less patient ones just switched to ZOOM or tournaments - they have to live on something.

The sharp drop in traffic in the Spanish version of the Pokerstars client was a good sign after the introduction of Seat Me. For obvious reasons, there was so little game, and it became even less, and this despite the fact that not everyone quit poker, but simply went to the same ZOOM, in which the hand / hour ratio is much higher than at regular tables.

Seeing this data, the majority of reasonably reasoning players quite reasonably assumed that the same reasoning people sit in the Pokerstars management and will not chop the branch on which they themselves sit. As in that anecdote “it didn't work out - the bainki laughed too”. In general, everyone tensed at first, then laughed and finally went to “sleep”. Until the alarm clock rang in early 2018!

If we can freely translate the Pokerstars press release, then it looks like this: “After successfully (!?) testing the Seat Me function on the unfortunate Spanish regulars, we are pleased to present to your attention a similar tool for the torture of boarding Seat Me tables, now on our French domain Pokerstars.fr! ”.

Moreover, the introduction of Seat Me to the main customer is proceeding at an accelerated pace and is planned for the summer of 2018. Based on this, many forward-thinking regulars began to repurpose and try other types of poker, for example, the same SNG or MTT. And by the way, on our site there is a rather large selection of various software in order to make your life at the tables even a little easier. Pay attention to such must have programs for any tournament player, such as Tournament Shark and Sharkscope. However, you need to work not only at the tables, but also outside them, so a couple of programs to hone your tournament strategy offline will also be useful. You can find the entire set of software for SNG and MTT tournaments here.