For live tourney players The Hendon Mob has become a peerless online record of poker tournament results. Tournaments right across the world feed their results into the every-growing THM database, allowing players to track their own results as well as those of friends, rivals and famous faces.
The same essentially used to be true of the PocketFives website, only with the focus on online tournament results. Elite players were able to track their progress up and down the rankings, collecting badges, chasing triple crowns and competing with the best in the world in an arena that all could see.
Times change: PocketFives became PokerStake, began to focus more on offering staking packages than tracking online results, and was acquired by the online poker platform GGPoker. Then, last week, players logged on as usual only to find the rankings were gone, seemingly for good.
ACR pro and longtime online grinder Chris Moorman was one of the first to raise the alarm.
Fellow online legend Patrick Leonard was quick to support the cause, as were many others for whom the thrill of competition extended beyond the tournaments themselves and onto the online leaderboards.
With GGPoker already offering a staking option, there are rumors that the online giant has removed PokerStake’s results features as a precursor to fusing the site to its client, adding more staking functionality to a tab within its app or desktop software.
A recent Reddit post from GGPoker claimed that the operator aims to ‘have PokerStake as our main staking platform, with all stats and relevant player info contained right there’.
PokerOrg caught up with Chris Moorman to find out what this move means for him, and potentially other longtime online pros.
Were the PocketFives online rankings a big part of your motivation to get to where you are now?
When I first started playing tournaments seriously I would message other players who were close to me in the rankings to see if they wanted to discuss poker strategy. In addition to using my own strategies, I tried to take the best parts of other peoples’ games and develop them into my overall gameplan.
As I moved up the rankings I found myself discussing strategy with more and more accomplished players, and I was really able to take my game to the next level.
What do you think is behind this decision?
I’ve no idea, to be honest, as this happened overnight one day last week, and there was no statement made – almost like they were trying to sweep it under the rug. It looks like GGPoker took over PokerStake and decided to abolish the online rankings for some reason, although me saying why would be pure speculation at this point in time.
What does this mean to you personally?
For me, I’ve already noticed myself being less motivated to grind tournaments.
When I first got into online poker tournaments I loved the community aspect of it. That has deteriorated over time with a lot of my original poker friends no longer grinding tournaments full-time like they used to. I would use the rankings as a way of keeping score and building a legacy, and still having those records that I could show my parents and family. Without that I will have to adjust once again and find a new way of keeping my motivation to grind online tournaments at a high level.
What would you like to see happen?
I’d love to see it brought back to a similar formula that it was before. The system doesn’t include profit and loss and you have to opt into it to be actually tracked, so I don’t really see the harm – or potential harm – of keeping the system/database in place.
PokerOrg has reached out to GGPoker for comment.