Quote:
Originally Posted by IsaacAsimov
if you want Stars to reduce rake in PLO, you need to come at it it from the right angle. That angle would be convincing Stars that it is in their best interest to do so.
It seems we have a lot of qualified and willing number crunchers in this thread that may be able to present such an argument in a convincing manner, but first of all we will need the data, which is probably the biggest challenge, because no matter how hard we try there will always likely be asymmetry between what information we have and what information Stars has (I'm thinking primarily of net deposits here). Stars is not very likely to hand over their data for us to analyze.
Quote:
Originally Posted by IsaacAsimov
Do you have any data to support the claim that SSPLO is dying and or that death is immanent? I know you mentioned that you are in favour of people with a solid background in statistical analysis providing documented proof of this, but until that has been done your statement is speculative and in no way obvious.
Yes, this. Now, the question is how can one convince stars that reducing rake (or changing the rake structure entirely) is in their best interest. This is a business-type question, related to item pricing, and it's a question that management and business people have been working on for ever. I should point out that it's not a stats question per se: statistics will be useful in answering this question, but it is a question that is far outside my skill set. Maybe we can look for someone who has experience in this type of thing?
In short, I feel the right way to think of this question is that right now each player is paying a certain amount of rake, as a "tax" on playing on pokerstars. I feel that thinking of this tax as rake, which is taken per-hand as a percentage, hides the actual point. So I'll call it tax from now on, and will ignore its current structure. I feel that the right questions to ask are:
- is pokerstars taking too much overall tax (=rake) from the PLO games, "morally speaking" (whatever that means)
- if pokerstars decides to take less overall tax from small- and micro-stakes PLO, will this increase their earnings in the long run?
- is the particular partition of the overall tax among players "fair"?
- if pokerstars keeps the current overall tax on small-stakes PLO, but changes its partition on different players, will that improve their earnings in the long run?
By looking at these questions as a question of allocating tax, we keep the field free to figure out what's the right way to tax players, both for the overall long-term growth of the games, and for "what's fair". Once we figure out some reasonable answers to these questions, we can work on figuring out how the rake can be structured to produce such a tax distribution.
So far the only thing we know is the current tax distribution (in fact, we don't even know that because we don't know how much rakeback each player is getting, but we can estimate it reasonably well). We also know how much rake was currently paid on each hand, so for any other system to distribute rake, we can know how much total rake it would generate, and how much tax each player would pay.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Adversity
Its all about showing how PLO being raked in the way it is reduces the player base in the present moment and kills the games quicker in the long term.
Yes. I think a good starting point is to figure out how the poker economy works. Does money propagate up, and if so, how? If we figure out a reasonable model for this, we can go from there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sauce123
El Dodo, Neptune, Joeri- I spoke with PokerStars Steve today regarding "number crunching." After signing NDAs, the players attending Stars' meetings will have access to a lot of confidential data. I think it would be very advantageous to the meetings to have one of you three go and provide some quantitative analysis of the data.
The goal of our arguments is to show that lowering rake will increase Stars' profits over either the short or longterm. To show this we need to show that lowering rake increases volume enough to offset Stars' decreased rake per hand. I have no idea what Stars' methodology is for setting their rake structure, but it's certainly in our best interest to review that methodology and see if it's flawed in the direction of high rake.
I think that someone should indeed go represent the PLO community. gui is going in this meeting (and is doing fantastic prep work), and Mexican_Natis also said he's willing to represent the PLO player's case, and for the next meeting we can run someone of our own and prep them very well beforehand, including have a team of people with management and stats background to work on the numbers. Ideally, I'd want that person to have:
1. a solid standing in the PLO community
2. understanding stats well enough to be able to understand the numbers deeply
3. enough management/business understanding to understand issues of pricing (since rake is about pricing after all).
4. communication/political skills
5. good ability to communicate and organize the player community
I don't know who has all these skills, but I'm sure someone must be out there. I'm pretty sure I have only #2, so I don't think I'm an appropriate candidate. joeri sounds good to me. That person should have backing of professionals in all these topics during the prep-up to the meeting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TopPair2Pair
IMO you guys should be putting a strong admin team of 4-6 together to support GUI, or whoever goes and arm them with a chitload of conclusions and visual imagery based on your methodology... to force the objective across.
This too. Someone should probably step up to organize this effort. Maybe set up a skype discussion group or google group, including some people with math/business/politics background who are interesting in helping to mount this case.
