The latest move in the PokerStars strategy to make recreational poker an enjoyable and fair experience was launched this week on PokerStars.es in the form of Seat Me, software designed to shield casual players from being preyed upon by far more experienced and well-equipped professional players…a practice known in the poker community as “bum hunting.”
If the addition works well and proves effective, it will be rolled out across other sites in the months ahead.
In simple terms, Seat Me makes it more difficult for the pros to seek out seats that bring them into competition with less experienced and therefore vulnerable casual players. It also simplifies the game selection process, ends seating script add-ons, ensures that seat draws are random, imposes penalties on players who steal blinds or switch tables, and ends the ability to watch the action on other tables.
Seat Me follows other initiatives by the operator to create a more recreational player-friendly atmosphere, including a halt to the ability to harvest hands for advanced data mining. PokerStars is reportedly currently testing the practicality of implementing an anonymous heads-up table system which matches competitors randomly.