PokerStars, the biggest online poker website in the world recently announced that it will be implementing its successful ‘Seat Me’ system in its shared liquidity network in Europe once the French, Spanish, Italian, and Portugese pools converge in the coming months.

Seat Me System Protects New Players

PokerStars first launched the Seat Me system in Spain in January 2017. The Seat Me system simulates live poker room regulations and assigns a random seat to the player, unlike in traditional online poker rooms where the players get to choose their tables and seats.

When the system was launched, PokerStars explained that the random seat generator system will safeguard poker players from being “bumhunted,” a cheap trick where more experienced players tail weaker opponents to rake more cash. It aims to eliminate the use of seating scripts, a special software that uses room data and algorithms to seat the player at the best seat possible. Best seats usually are to the left of a recreational player, without having to play against other regular players three-handed.

Seating scripts have become a huge issue in the poker community for years since it gives an unfair advantage to the users of the software and huge disadvantages to poker newbies. As early as 2014, PokerStars started working on implementing a system against seating scripts by limiting the number of times a player can reserve a seat at a table without playing. After years of study and development, PokerStars finally launched the Seat Me system which was received positively by many poker players—including PokerStars Team Pro Daniel Negreanu who said that the effort was long overdue.

Seat Me System Provides Better Online Poker Environment

PokerStars spent the whole 2017 fine-tuning the Seat Me system to be able to achieve their goal of making a fairer and friendlier environment for both regular and recreational poker players. According to the operator, one of the biggest challenges that they had to overcome during the testing of the system was the creation and implementation of a penalty system. The creation of an optimal time penalty system seeks to prevent abusers who would table-hop to find the optimal seat for play, without limiting those who need to switch table for legitimate reasons.

While the Seat Me system put in place many advantages for poker players, one of the downsides was that it effectively blocked railbirding. Railbirds are players who often hang out in poker rooms to just spectate and not play. Railbirding in high stakes tables have been a popular experience for fans and poker enthusiasts.

Now that Spain and France are poised to share their online poker player pools, PokerStars aims to bring this successful system to the French market. PokerStars was the first to receive a shared liquidity license from French gaming regulator Autorité de Régulation des Jeux En Ligne (ARJEL) in December, and the only operator with online poker rooms already set up in the four countries that are participating in the liquidity agreement.

Tags: ARJEL, European shared liquidity, France, Italy, PokerStars, Portugal, Seat Me, Spain

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2018 at 12:25 am and is filed under Poker Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

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