cliff notes: Pokerstars just wants your money, and will charge as much as they dare and you have no option other than to accept it. Useless player meeting conferences where nothing happens are a nice way of excusing Pokerstars from going into discussion, which it no mind can win.

Btw. Regarding your live and online rake comparison.. did u know that online has 98% less overhead costs? and that Pokerstars is a money making machine, raking in billions of your and my money?

Normally once the business matures the profits go down, but not in Online Poker world. 100bb/100 rake and kicking.. and only giving in on average 20-25% in rakeback, when other sites have been giving 60% or even sometimes over 100%.

Pokerstars new slogan could be : Pokerstars - raking 100bb/100

With all this negativaty , i would like to emphasis that we really appreciate pokerstars. Your software is awesome, and there is a reason you stand out in comparison to the competition.

That being said, not commenting on rake at all is pretty ignorant. I used to advice kids new to poker/plo proper bankrollmanagent and start low and try to build up a bankroll. Nowadays i advice to take big risks and start as high as possible, if you want a serious shot at being a winning plo player. Low stake plo is just raked too hard.

+1, Ive already stated that a few times.

But please less Nick (he is provocative plus uninformed it seems) and less dodging rake discussion, more being awesome for the PLO community please



Edit: InterpolMiikka have som points.

Nick, I think I speak for most of us here when I say that we are tilted about that link to Steve's earlier post on rake. People here weren't satisfied with those arguments, raised points of our own and started mobilizing the community to demand lower rake.

And now we get a link to those same arguments we rejected???

fact: PLO economy isn't sustainable with the current rake structure
conclusion: something has to be done about the rake

I don't care how you do it, but please listen to the warnings of this community and don't kill the game we love

Let's all unite and self exclude ourselves for 24 hours every week. If you want to be heard we should hurt star's bottom line.

Play fewer tables and less hours. All this talk will amount to nothing if stars keeps raking the money in.

If you all really are serious we should do something for stars to notice.

What kind of argument is "Rake is higher because more action" anyway? There's more action because equities run closer together, so its correct to fold less ---- its not like if it was NLHE where you'd obviously be super happy if someone only folded to 20% of your 3bets...

Seems like a really disingenous argument from someone who I'd expect to know better :/

There is more action is hyper turbos sng than in regular ones. Why is the rake much lower for those?

Sustainable winrates are lower for hypers, so rake has to be lower. Fwiw rake in bb/100 is of course bigger in hypers as they end many times faster, so the action argument kind of applies to bb/100 hyper rake, but that doesn't account for much stricter BRM. What matters for determining whether rake is high is how fast bankrolls of good players can grow with it.

Like someone said above, the problem with PLO is that its softness has fallen more dramatically than NLHE's over the last several years - PLO is now in 'the Harrington phase', so, unless PLO rake is lowered, it will soon be more profitable to play two-card poker again, despite its toughness.

+1 to this.

The argument is just silly and doesn't sound like it's coming from someone who knows what he's talking about. A big pot doesn't mean the best hand has a sky-high return on investment, PLO equities being what they are.

My earlier reply here, which is still valid.

Since I'm a stubborn bonehead, I'll keep hammering on things that I believe are wrong.

Pokerstars provides an exchange for players to trade probabitilies, and players do this to the best of their skills. Much like securities exchanges. Securities exchanges charge a higher fee for derivatives because of higher fixed costs, not because they are more exciting and for higher profit potential. It's not up to exchange to decide their pricing based on these characteristics. Excitement for one, is subjective. And with higher profit potential comes higher risk, which really doesn't justify higher profits for the counterparty (Pokerstars) which bears no risk whatsoever with the money that is on the play. (Regulatory risk is another issue, players should not be paying for that.) It's the players who carry all the risk, both positive and negative.

This brings me to the fact that raking one game 2x more than the other on same platform where both games are played at, is ludicrous.

If these graphs strike as "just fine, since the winrates are close to each other post-rake" (or similar), I really don't know what to tell you. This is PLO100 where you start to see first players who get majority of their income via poker so the competition gets tougher fast.

Based on this, Pokerstars rakes PLO10 games 19.5 bb/100 per average player, so roughly 117 bb/100 for an average 6max table. It was mentioned that 2/3 players are 1-tabling, 1/3 playing more tables at once. Let's assume that the 1-tablers get rakeback equivalent of 15% (which might be optimistic since I doubt everyone even knows about VIP store let alone use them 100% or get best value) and 24% for the rest. Based on these assumptions Pokerstars still banks in ~95 bb/100 at on average PLO10 table, after giving the players their bonuses/points. That means almost one full 100bb buy-in disappears from the table every 100 hands!

No wonder they want faster games.

At an average PLO100 table Pokerstars banks in ~58 bb/100, based on assumptions that 1-tabler gets 20% rakeback equivalent and that the "multitablerer" gets 30%. Again, "never assume anything, only leads to assumptions", but we don't have the numbers so we have to play an educated guessing game.

Sustainable PLO environment? Not in my opinion.

If PLO is a tiny part of the market, why kill it before it even gets really going?

+1

Software, security, support....wonderful job.

Being a market leader comes with responsilities regarding longevity and sustainability of the games.

You have to bake the cake before you can eat it. I feel like the PLO cake is not even in the oven yet and half of the dough is already eaten.

very good post napsus. after reading napsus post, especially seeing those 2 graphs, i got shocked.

we need do what nba, hockey and every group of players that wanted have better $ in their leagues. we need be a group, have couple president/representant (i will trown 2names in my head, napsus and bloop, but i think could be anyone who is active in comunity and want help) and take decisions togheter.

im in for anything that helps plo comunity.

ps: pokerstars, we love you. awesome software, security, support, but its unfair whats happens at omaha... just look at nl100 graph vs plo100 graph napsus posted.

I love guerilla marketing. Go play some Zoom PLO100 and share with the players that Stars is raking us 100bb/100 or $100 in 100 hands. It sparks a conversation.

At the lower stakes, the only villain on the table is Pokerstars.

"Killing the games softly.. with our rake"

"We dont really care about the poker economy - we just want all of your money"


Could someone please make a big poster or an avatar with these new Pokerstars slogans?

interpolMiikkaA, you are talking ****.

pokerstars help the poker comunity a LOT. we can't forget about this !!! for example, here in brazil they (stars) are making poker grow more and more. im not sure, but i guess all this ept mtt, nice advertasment on television, almost everything that pokerstars make, help the the comunity - ofc they don't do it because they are nice people, they do that because they will have more money doing this, its bussiness. good thing is that pokerstars win more if poker grow...

yes, they rape us w rake at plo, its really unfair, something has to be done, need change, but don't say pokerstars is villain, is bad etc.

Agree with urubu.

I agree you point but..

What does it matter if they recruit new players if they never let them advance from the small games? Raking 100bb/100 is equivalent to killing the games, and stopping anyone from creating a bankroll playing the small stakes. Its killing the omaha games in the Stars.

Ofc they need new players to get on the site, but all of their money is going into Pokerstars pockets, and there is no way any player can win any significant money at the lower stakes. They are killing the plo poker economy.

I will host a home game, plo100, and I will rake $100 in 100 hands. Will you play?

lets be realistic: rake is huge, we are getting raped, is not fair ! but this is not the reason players don't move up from plo100 to plo200. its not the reason micro/small players don't get at midstakes. don't want discuss this here ...

to answer your question, yes id play plo100 w $100 rake every 100hands IF the field was like plo100 at stars. its really soft field. side note: just because the field has lots of fishs, doesn't mean having a big rake is OK, as ps staff said here. btw reading ps staff saying that made me so tilted, its so ridiculous saying that.

I couldn't disagree more

When looking at napsus 100% rakeback graph, it seems really, really hard to agree with you at that one point urubu.

Also; I've kind of pointed this out before, but making Stars change their rake-structure for PLO first isnt the only way to go about it. If any other of the relatively large networks were to change first, and thereby gaining a lot of players, that is likely to nudge things in the right direction.

+1

napsus you are my hero! keep up the great work! hope you don't get tired and stop.

as for urubu111 comments. i don't really think that you understand how big the rake really is at plo10 or plo25. you keep on saying, that the fish there are so baad that you can still beat the rake.
i would love to see you try and climb up from plo10 cash games to plo100 with "normal" brm (say at least 40 buy ins to plo25). even if you succeed in it, try doing it again. I would say that the only way to climb up from plo10 or 25 is to run insainly hot and to manage to build a roll for plo50. in plo50 games you can actually win the fish and bad regs as the rake is not as big anymore (bb/100 wise).
i also belive that there are far more good fish at stakes over plo50 ( i mean with good fish, those that tend to loose a lot). if somebody wants to gamble it up and don't really give a **** if he loses. he certainly not will be playing plo10 or 25. he wil go straight to >100 games.

Great posts napsus! And we should really be united and act like a group like urubu said NHL players do
+500

Looking at it a little differently, aren't there more active tables at plo100 and 200 than any time in the past right now?

I only looked briefly at the tables during a recent trip to the UK, but it seemed to me that there was more activity now than back in 2009 when I was last allowed to play on stars.

If this is the case, it might be hard to convince Pokerstars that PLO is not sustainable, since I suspect their answer will be "we're getting bigger revenue now than ever before"

yea that could be kinda interesting