Daniel Negreanu is a member of the Poker Hall of Fame and considered to be the great poker player of all time. The Canadian poker pro leads the all-time money list with nearly $36 million in career prize money. Negreanu who is a PokerStars Team Pro, recently published a YouTube video where he goes into details of a recent online poker experience he had at PokerStars and Negreanu is not a happy camper.
Negreanu Turns His Attention To Online Poker
Daniel Negreanu is known playing high stakes poker and participating in most of the top poker tournaments in the world. He is more active playing live poker than online poker but from time to time, the PokerStars brand ambassador does go online and test his skills.
Some of the top poker pros in the world have stated that the online poker industry has become exceptionally competitive in the last few years and it is no longer very easy to make a living playing online poker. Negreanu has been practicing his game with his poker coaches and wanted to take the lessons he learned and test them out playing online poker.
He focused on playing $50/$100 six-max games at PokerStars and played close to 500 hands spread across two sessions. Negreanu wasn’t very impressed with his online poker experience because he felt targeted and complained in his video rant that seated scripts were being used to target unsuspecting players.
Negreanu Believes Seated Scripts Were Used
Negreanu says that he deliberately sat down at empty tables during both of his sessions on the PokerStars network. It usually takes more than a couple of minutes for other players to book a seat at the table and for the table to fill up. However on both occasions, Negreanu claims that the remaining seats were filled within the fraction of a second, which to his suggests that seated scripts were used.
Seated scripts are software programs that online poker players use to gain an unfair advantage over the rest of the playing field. These seated script programs search and find the most profitable tables and seat their players at tables where they can end up making the most money. Negreanu ended up winning nearly $40,000 during his two sessions at PokerStars but he had to work extra hard to beat his competitors. He believes that players using seated scripts targeted amateur and recreational poker players as they know they are easy to beat and there is money for the taking.
Poker Operators Trying To Weed Out Seated Scripts
Online poker operators such as PokerStars are aware that seated scripts are being used in their poker rooms. PokerStars has wanted to ban seated scripts from 2014 but has so far not been able to come up with an effective procedure to ban seated scripts.
Negreanu claims that while he won $40,000 during his two sessions, he had no fun during his online poker experience. He knows as an ambassador of PokerStars that this is detrimental to online poker as amateur and recreational players will not be very keen to keep playing online poker when they are being manipulated with seated scripts. Negreanu has called on PokerStars to issue a ban on any player found to be using seated scripts.
In a statement, Negreanu said “Ban them entirely, and if you find people are using them, you can temporarily ban their accounts, fully ban their accounts. Just the threat of it will alleviate the situation”
His views were shared by poker pro Jack Ingram who called termed poker players using seated scripts as ‘parasitical’. Ingram also wanted poker operator to ban players using seated scripts but also put forward an alternative. Ingram said poker operators could segregate their online poker player rooms and allow poker players using seated scripts to play in one room and regular poker players to play in another room.
PokerStars Experimenting With Seat Me System
PokerStars has been experimenting with a new ‘Seat Me’ system which seats players at tables in a similar manner to which live poker tables operate. PokerStars has rolled this out for its European market and Negreanu believes that PokerStars might have to roll out the Seat Me system across all platforms in order to address the issues that seated scripts are creating.