Sounds like a challenge in the making...

I bet I could get 3.75BB/100 win rate for 100k hands at 100PLO 6m. What are my odds? Any takers?

Seriously, these games are not hard. And Stars is not going to make less money. The higher stakes games are already struggling miserably to get action. The solution is to get better. The rake is not the problem.

Get a 60% rakeback deal for Ipoker and grind there until you can play minimum 2/4 - don't give Stars your business if you're just trying to make money and don't care about worse software and worse customer service

right now u can get 80-90% on a very reputable ipoker skin

60% rakeback on iPoker is almost equivalent to 40% rakeback on Stars. This depends a little bit on what games you play and how you play. However, as Doorbread pointed out, you can get more than that at which point it makes sense to do as you proposed, since the effective rake becomes very competitive.

I'm only rolled to play PLO50 Hu and problem with Ipoker is there is hardly any games going at at that level, so PS or other sites?

the cap at HU is only 50c on stars so it's no big deal.

Yeah I did calcs on plo 25c/50c on stars.es (spanish) and it was around 12 bb/100 which obviously is huuuge. Ipoker at the same level charged more but not that much more at 13.2 bb/100.

I would also recommend to play other sites until you get up till like 2/4$ and dont be afraid to combine different networks if you dont feel that the games are enough. I personally play 6 networks ATM and once I have recupered (spelling) some of my old roll back I will go back to play 10-12 networks using placemint to tile them all (its freeware).

Btw, insane rake is not limited to PLO, FLHE is a lot worse and has been for awhile (ive raked 2700$ in one day) but i guess we never were as big of a group for sites to listen, hence now the game is dead (plus the fact that there was 1000 russian grinders playing nitfestpoker.

Do you have any more information available on this?

I'd be interested too.

Me too !

id be interested too! currently playing on ipoker with 60%

i can recommand playing the micros on new networks with prob deals, but never leave more than u need online

me too

2% rake without rakeback or 3% rake with rakeback is the only thing that would make a PLO market "fair" to play at.

It's just ridiculous that even the most successful players rake at least 25% of their winnings.

Rake shouldn't be abused to cut the strongest player's winnings, it should be used to make "some" good profit. (which would be even the case with 0.5% rake)

Even though pokerstars has a lot of employees, it's just never that expensive, people running the site make 10-100x more than players...

Quoting blopp here:

One of the ideas to achieve lower rake that is going around is the idea of some collective bargaining. A group of grinders who get together and negotiate lower rake for all of them from different sites.

If we get together a big enough group of grinders, say $1m rake worth a month, I'll approach sites who already have decent volume and ask for a rake discount in exchange for us playing on that site. Initially it will probably be a month at a time to see how it goes, see if we can collect more players who are willing to join us. Is there interest in this from many players? I know $1m a rake a month sounds like a lot but given the amount of rake we are all paying it isn't really, is anyone else interested?

I rake about 15-20k a month playing 70-80k hands of 500zoom.

I think this is a short sighted approach (though the idea is good for the individuals involved in the collective bargaining).

The problem with PLO is not whether some regs can individually make money with high rakeback deals, but whether the economy is sustainable if it is being overraked and so many players are playing in a rake trap.

Also it improves the user experience of recreationals if their money takes them farther.

I agree it would be an improvement, but not necessarily a solution. Btw, we do already have this to some extent with affiliates. Essentially, an affiliate says "My players will make $1m rake.", "Can we have this exclusive promotion?" etc. So I think you also need to be careful to not just be proposing some type of affiliate deal, which we already have.

First of all:

PokerStars is a terrible company, I hate PokerStars/Amaya, the way they are doing its really bad for all customers (fishs, regs, pros, tournamnets, cash game, nl , plo etc etc) and their ''reason'' , what they tell public its even worst with that stupid bull**** ''to make the game great experience for new players, to make a exiciting game'', saying this they show us they don't respect our inteligence... would be better if they just say ''we are increasing the rake and reduce rewards because we have the biggest share in this market and you can't do anything about it'', because its obvious this is the reason, everyone knows, why they try hide this... its so stupid when you lye about something that other part will see. I wouldn't like anyway if they say this, but Id acept and be ok because its bussiness.

Second of all:

How only 2 players were making more than 5bb in 2012/2013 when game was very very soft with tons of money flying, thats sick .

What blows my mind is the fact that many players put the reason they weren't winning at rake problems and not realizing they were playing very bad (or terrible unlucky for a long period), either way, most of the reason they don't win is ''rake rake rake''. I guess there were good playing making 15 or 20bb/100 but they moved up fast, and other good players running really bad and making only small winrate. again: rake is HUGE and not fair, I agree, Im just saying, it wasn't the reason you weren't winning, especially in 2012.

By the way, Im not trying to say someone is a donkey or X player is a loser for not realizing they were playing wrong. Its ok not beating poker, even if you can't beat plo100, doens't means you are stupid/donkey, it just means your brain doens't fit plo (or poker) The most sucessfull people I have ever met in my life are terrible at poker and very smart/sucessfull in other areas.

Not winning at poker, ok, but thinking its rake problems... WTF.


My 2016 plo100 tables on Stars.

All games should have a similar rake structure which it has not. Like playing fixed limit holdem without rakeback is insane unless you get very high. It should be something like 0,25% of the pot, uncapped. Or x% of each cashout of profit gets taken away. When I played high limit fixed holdem at a lot of tables (too many) I believe the highest rake I paid on one day was around 2400 dollar while the monthly rake was 15 000 - 25 000 while the average profit was max 5000 that is not a fair rake structure.

However, when I was playing a lot until the 2013 or so, I kept on saying that it is very bad if pokerstars gets a monopoly. They were acting better but of course now when they have something like 80% of all traffic, they stop caring.