Unconvincing response from PokerStars

Astute readers may have noticed, in my last post about a painful razz hand, that I have moved up in stakes. For the last ten days or so, I've been playing $1/$2 instead of my previous comfort level of $0.50/$1. I have Shamus to thank for that (though he doesn't know it). He shared with me some of his razz hands by email, and I noticed that he was playing $1/$2.

This had two effects. First, I thought, "Well, dammit, if he can do it, so can I." Which, in this case isn't really an ego thing like it sounds, just a recognition that I'm pretty sure he hasn't played much more razz than I have, so the step up apparently doesn't require a lot of additional experience. Secondly, I noticed in the hand histories that the play isn't markedly better a step higher on the ladder. So I made the leap, and, sure enough, have continued to turn a small but consistent profit.

Anyway, that's not what this post is about. This is about how tired I'm getting of every table having one or two players that, for whatever reason, won't turn on the auto-ante option. I can't figure out what they have against it. It's a royal pain in the butt to have to click "ante" at the beginning of every hand, and it annoys everybody else at the table to make them wait while you do it.

Today I had had enough, and wrote the following email to PokerStars support:

I hope you can explain something to me. I have been playing a lot of razz
cash games on your site lately. It seems that nearly always there is at least
one player at the table who won't turn on the auto-ante feature, and every hand
is delayed for 10 or 15 seconds while we all wait for the same guy every time
around. It's really annoying, and also cuts way down on the number of hands per
hour we play (and thus cuts down on the rake you can collect).

I can't figure out why auto-ante is an optional feature. If a player is
going to be in a hand, he's going to have to put in the ante, so why is doing it
automatically optional? If somebody wants to sit out for a hand or for several
hands, there's the "sit out next hand" button. In effect, all that having
auto-ante be optional does is to give every player the ability to delay the
beginning of the next hand anytime he wants to, or anytime he is not paying
sufficient attention. I can't for the life of me see any positive benefit to
giving players the power to delay the game.

Can you explain what advantage PokerStars sees in having auto-ante be
optional, given its obvious downside?

Thank you.

To the site's credit, their team responded as quickly as they always do. Within about an hour, I had this reply:

Thank you for your email. I appreciate your comments. The reason that
players have the option of ante-ing is only because, if they are involved in the
prior hand, they may not have time to turn of the ante feature should they take
a bad beat and decide not to play anymore. I suspect that many would be upset at
losing a big hand and then being forced to play the next one when they may well
have wanted to walk away from the table or even quit the game. To that end, we
must give players the option of the decision.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to explain. Please let me know
if there is anything else that we can do for you.

Regards,

Larry
PokerStars Support Team

I think this is bogus. That is, I'm willing to believe that that really is the rationale underlying the decision, but I think it grossly misbalances the pros and cons. They're willing to let one slowpoke at the table irritate seven other players every hand for hours on end, so that, once in a while, one person who suffers a big loss and wants to leave the table without playing even one more hand, can slip away without paying one little lousy ante, if he has had the foresight to leave "auto ante" off the entire time he has been playing.

Huh? How is that even close to a rational justification? From my point of view, the burden and annoyance imposed is about a thousand times greater than the annoyance potentially avoided. If a player has just taken a huge loss (yet something less than all of what he was playing, obviously, because anteing for the next hand is not an issue if you just got felted)--say, at these levels, a $50 pot, which is huge--is he really going to be so much further devastated by having another dime taken from his stack for the next hand's ante before he can click the "leave table" button? That makes no sense at all to me.

Furthermore, if the stated concern were really at the heart of it, PokerStars could add an option that would address it. As I envision it, you could set it to either (1) stop the deal and ask you if you want to continue, or (2) automatically put you in "sit out next hand" mode, if some triggering threshold event occurs. That threshold might be your stack getting down to X dollars, or the loss of X dollars in one hand, or whatever. Personally, I wouldn't use such a feature. But I can understand that some players, after taking a big hit, want a break to get their emotions under control, or whatever. This would allow them to set up the software to prevent the auto ante for the next hand after a threshold loss, while leaving auto-ante on absent such a triggering event. After the feature gets triggered by a loss, if the player decides he wants to continue, he just clicks "yes" (if it's option 1 above), or clicks the "I'm back" button (if it's option 2 above).

Such a system would fully address the concern that PokerStars claims is behind making auto-ante optional. It would allow the player who wants this feature to have it ready in reserve if needed, without having to endure the tedium of manually putting in the ante every hand, just so that he can maybe avoid that one unwanted ante at some point. And, obviously, it would mean that a whole bunch less time is wasted on the vast majority of ordinary hands, because auto-ante would be compulsory for every player, unless and until a pre-defined triggering event or situation comes up.

This kind of option would be a ton more useful to players (and make more money in rake for the site) than having 5000 different combinations of colors and backgrounds available to pick from--but it seems that that's the kind of piffle that their software engineers spend their time on, rather than building in something that would make the game move along faster and more smoothly.

I don't understand why their priorities are so mixed up.

If you play stud-type games on Stars and are similarly annoyed by the constant delay of anteing, and you think that a solution like what I'm proposing here makes sense, please shoot an email to support@pokerstars.com, with a link to this post, and tell them that you'd like to see them implement this feature, so that we can get on with the game already. Maybe a few dozen messages will get their attention.