Taking Place December 1-3rd
I talked with Joachim, who is trying to gather as much participants as possible. There are already about 1700 participants. Many high stakes players like Doug "WCGRider" Poulk or Donger Kim have joined the strike.
The list of participating players in the 2+2 thread: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showpost.php?p=48754570&postcount=598
Joachim wrote: "It doesnt matter which stake or format you are playing right now. We need as many people as possible to send a strong signal! Please send me your stars SN (blurred if you want) and your current game/stake, if you want to participate. Are you in?"
---
Charles Hawk: How did this start?
Joachim (Choqi): Originally the strike started in the russian community and they started the 2+2 thread. I don't know those guys, but I thought it was a good idea and therefore tried to motivate as many people as possible.
Charles Hawk: What are you trying to achieve with this strike?
Joachim (Choqi): We want to show that we are able to organize a big group, which consists of players from all formats and all stakes. Pokerstars should know that we are not accepting all those changes quietly. Organizing strikes in forums creates a lot of bad publicity for Stars, since recreational players are often not aware how drastic such changes are. Especially in husng, where a large % of games are regbattles, a decrease of rakeback makes a big difference. It could happen that it won't be possible anymore to play regbattles profitably, which might be the end of husng poker.
Joachim (Choqi): Strikes in the past (e.g. the hu sng regbattle strike after their rake increase this year) have shown that stars cares about the bad publicity of such strikes. Therefore we are hoping that the rakeback changes might be less bad for regular players. As an example, for hu sngs a bonus system for regbattle games might be a good idea.
Joachim (Choqi): Another probably even more important point is the lobby system of hu sngs. Amaya just introduced blind lobbies on Full Tilt Poker. This means that players cannot decide anymore against who they want to play and therefore even more games in husng will be against regs. Due to the high rake, regbattles are often unprofitable for both players. Therefore the introduction of blind lobbies combined with an even higher rake will very likely kill husngs. This might even be the goal of Pokerstars, since they earn more money with spin and gos and if hu sngs die, most people will probably move to spins. With the strike we want to make people aware about this issue and we are hoping that Pokerstars will as a result re-think their policy about blind lobbies in hu sngs.
Joachim (Choqi): Overall we have seen a constant decrease of the playin gconditions on pokerstars, since amaya bought it. Therefore there is a big need that players unite and show them that we do not tolerate everything they want.
--
About Joachim:
My name is Joachim, I am 28 years old and I am currently playing hyper turbo HU SNG's up to 100$ under the screenname Choqi. I started playing poker with some small MTT's and SNG's about 8 years ago and transitioned to HU SNG's as main game a couple years ago.
--
Pokernews wrote about this strike too: CLICK HERE