Daniel Negreanu Attacks Online Seating Scripts

Not only is Daniel Negreanu the highest earning tournament player in the world, but he is also the chief sponsored pro and frontman for PokerStars. While the Canadian pro mostly spends his time helping to promote the site, in an unusual departure from his usual stance this week Negreanu actually launched a verbal attack on his employer by criticising the cardrooms’s monitoring of seating scripts, and allowing of players to use such systems to find profitable tables where they can then prey on weaker opponents.
As part of his experiment, Negreanu sat down on two separate occasions at an empty $50/$100 six-max cash table on PokerStar, and both times saw all the seats filled within mere seconds. According to Negreanu, these players likely used seating scripts to identify his whereabout, and while he still managed to win $40,000 over 500 hands, he complained of a frustrating online poker experience which provided little by way of entertainment.
Negreanu’s accusation comes despite PokerStars a few years ago announcing its intention to ban players using seating scripts following an outcry from many of its customers. Likewise, Negreanu sees the use of such software programs as a threat to an ecosystem which tries to entice recreational players into the game, and as the Canadian pro subsequently explained in a statement:
“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.”
It didn’t take long for Negreanu’s comment to attract the attention of other like-minded players, including Joe Ingram, who soon after released a vlog pressing PokerStars to “fix high stakes poker.”
Meanwhile, PokerStars, which recently became the first online poker site to start combining player pools between certain European countries, has now incorporated a new “Seat Me” system on its site. Encouragingly, the program enables a player to request a table based only upon a particular game or stake, and nothing else, therefore keeping individual players anonymous and free from being targeted.