Poker Stars has now thrown their hat into the ring along with other sites like Full Tilt Poker and Cake Poker by starting to crack down on the trash poker players on their website that are infamous for sitting at a table with a very short stack, going all in, winning a big pot and then fleeing from the table as quickly as they came.

The Poker Stars approach is a bit different however as they start by dividing all of their cash games into one of three different groups based on the general stakes that are involved with the game. Any tables that end up in the highest stake group will have a 100 big blind minimum buy-in for anyone that sits at the table and a default buy-in of 200 blinds. Similarly, the middle group will have a 40 big blind minimum and an 80 big blind default while the lowest group will have a 20 big blind minimum and a 40 big blind default.

At the same time, players that have left a particular table at Poker Stars will have to wait for a full hour before they can return to that table, forcing players that go for the all in and dash strategy to continually switch tables at which point they will eventually run out of tables to frequent for the strategy.

Poker Stars has kept a relatively low buy-in minimum of 20 big blinds at the lower levels and that essentially means that players will still get a chance to employ this strategy when they are playing for pennies or a few dollars per hand. However, for the larger amounts of money, Poker Stars new rules will have an immediate effect by eliminating the undue influence that small stack trash players have had over the years.

The move is undoubtedly going to be welcomed by most serious online poker players as those players have been bemoaning their short stacked counterparts for quite some time now. They were quick to praise Full Tilt Poker when it became the first website to do something serious to curtail the activity and now that Poker Stars has followed, serious players on that site can be happy once again.