Full Tilt Overhauls Ring Games

The trend over the past few years for many online poker operators is to protect its coveted recreational player base.  Many online poker rooms believe this is important to protect its ecosystem to help their site's liquidity grow, or in many cases, shrink at a slower rate.

Full Tilt Poker is the latest to join in on the bandwagon, introducing a few new radical changes to how ring games will be offered, with hopes that recreational players are better protected.  These changes came with little notice; Full Tilt customers emailed on July 28, the same day the changes were implemented.

Also on July 28, Managing Director at Full Tilt Dominic Mansour announced the changes on the Full Tilt blog, while Full Tilt Poker Room Manager Shyam Markus explained the changes on the TwoPlusTwo poker forum.

The first change you will see the next time you log into Full Tilt is that you are no longer able to choose what table you want to sit at.  Instead, you select the stakes and type of game you want to play and are automatically seated at an available table.  Furthermore, table dynamics can switch quickly, as if there are two or more short-handed tables, the software will merge them into one to help keep the action going.

The idea here is that this change will protect the site's weaker players by removing the target on their heads that they previously had from potential predators using seating scripts and other methods to identify tables more advantageous to them.

Another radical move Full Tilt made to protect its weaker players was entirely removing heads-up ring games from the software.  This was primarily in response to a select group of regular players who avoid each other in these games and instead pounce on tables with non-regular players.

While removing a game offering entirely does solve the problem, many believe that there could have been another solution that would allow for more random opponents.  One idea would be to require all heads-up ring games be in Rush format, where players would face a new opponent instead of not being able to play these games at all.

The last big change will not affect many players on the felts.  Effective immediately, there are no nosebleed stakes.  Railbirds will not be happy with this changes: however, they can instead watch the high-stakes action on other sites.

The least important change announced was the removal of Stud, Draw, and Mixed ring game tables.  While these games were very popular before the site temporarily shut down after Black Friday, they were never able to gain traction and won't be missed by more than a small handful of players.

Share with us what you think of these changes on Full Tilt Poker.

More articles