The string/black hole transition in anti de Sitter space

String stars, or Horowitz-Polchinski solutions, are string theory saddles with normalizable condensates of thermal-winding strings. In the past, string stars were offered as a possible description of stringy (Euclidean) black holes in asymptotically flat spacetime, close to the Hagedorn temperature. I will discuss the thermodynamic properties of string stars in asymptotically (thermal) anti-de Sitter background (including AdS3 with NS-NS flux), their possible connection to small black holes in AdS, and their implications for holography. I will also present new “winding-string gas” saddles for confining holographic backgrounds such as the Witten model, and their relation to the deconfined phase of 3+1 pure Yang-Mills.