Victory Poker Waves White Flag at Successful Future and Become Defeat Poker on Cereus

An alliance of the weak was formed this last few weeks as Victory Poker - formerly the flagship poker room on the growing Everleaf Network joined the home of the rooms involved in the Absolute and UB Poker Scandals, the Cereus network. With a roster of well reputed pros one has to wonder how they will feel about being associated with a network even Phil Hellmuth eventually severed ties with.

Cake Joins Full Tilt Attacks Shortstackers

Cake Poker has announced that on their network now the minimum buy in for cash games will be 30 big blinds in No Limit Games. This is significant as Full Tilt had already made moves to encourage shortstack play only on the capped tables they spread.

The Cake network had been coming under pressure as major Skins (or members) of their network have announced moves or have already moved to Merge Gaming. This move is the first step of their fight back looking to appease the high volume and by definition high raking regulars and retain some of them in their games.

PokerStars have announced they are reviewing their response to shortstacking and the community eagerly awaits their response. Most commentators are suggesting we should hear something by the end of April.

The reason shortstackers are hated so much by full stacked players is simple. An easy to learn mathematical style can be applied to a 20 blind stack which exploits full stack regulars taking money from fish by playing a looser style versus the fish. It's nearly impossible to optimise play against the shortstackers and fish but it's most profitable for regulars to attack the fish (since they have more chips). Therefore the shortstackers exploit this and reduce profitability for everyone else with a simple and boring style which many feels take the 'poker' out of the game.

That said I had nothing against it while it was allowed by the sites but if fun and liquidity are being hurt by their play then naturally they will respond.