fyp

if you play any serious volume you'll work out quickly that low effective rake (whether it stems from a good structure or high rakeback, for both of which stars >>> ipoker now, given this change) is more important for your profits than having fish around

Do you really believe this?

^i do think rake eats into your BB/100 more than fish add to it, yeah. maybe i'm biased being a LHE player, it's more of an issue there. I played 500k hands on Party and all the best regs are ~breakeven on PTR as a result of of a high rake BB/100 (including jackpot rake), despite being nitty about table selection and having at least one 60/5 fish per 6max table. Players in the Merge threads say similar things about that site

Basically this:

If you have some huge edge on a bunch of recreational players that dwarfs the rake (and they're always around when you're playing, on each of your tables, continually depositing onto the site, and high rake + short-term variance + a huge resulting downswing won't bust you) then fine, fish will be more important to you longterm than a site's rake structure and loyalty program. but that's becoming less and less realistic in today's games, imho

feel free to dispute

An interesting theory. It's a shame that those who believe that weren't able to support sites like WSEX more.

I would hope you're playing on USD tables at Minted now.

Yep Everleaf's $1 rake cap promo is very promising, I've been supporting that over in the thread, hopefully it becomes permanent and traffic picks up over there. Most of my volume is at stars for the moment

with some fish you'll have a >10bb/100 edge shortterm, expect to stack them several times and pay minimal rake, but they're not around forever. arguably more consistent profits can be found from mediocre mass-tabling regs in a low-rake environment if you're playing high volume, not just bumhunting HU above rake-trap stakes for example

What jspill says is pretty much spot on. As edges get smaller and smaller, low rake is far more important than fish for the high volume player.

Sure the best scenario is a site full of fish and few sharks but this is never going to happen again and even if it does, it won't take long for the current status quo to return.

I would prefer to grind out a huge volume vs regs i have a small edge with low rake than have to bumhunt for fish in high rake games.

If i can win at 3bb/100 vs regs and have rake only take 1bb/100, i'd prefer that than winning 12bb/100 vs fish and have rake take 10bb/100. That fish is not going to be around for long and fish that bad are hard to replace. Weak regs with small loss rates are a dime a dozen and are far more likely to stick around. When they run out of money they can go and bumhunt the lower stakes and comeback again


I think tho the fact that jspill is a LHE player makes him more astute to this fact tho. The same is readily apparent when I play shortstacked or CAP NL games.

It is this very rake effect that makes 100NL CAP ridiculously difficult to beat at a decent winrate. (A very little known secret is that 200NL CAP is easier to beat than 100NL CAP, precisely due to the fact that the reduced rake is more important than the quality of players between these two stakes).

The reason non CAP or non LHE players won't realise it is because although edges in all forms of the game are rapidly decreasing, they are still big enough in 100bb poker to offset the rake by a significant amount. PLO, NL CAP and LHE however will no doubt be more likely to see the point jspill is trying to make.

If only they would create CAP tables i'd be playing there a lot more but despite numerous requests they haven't done anything so I just play there to practise some short handed / heads up full stack play, but nothing serious...

yeah I've said it time and time again, there is no way you can beat micro and small stakes without really good rakeback. And essence-like system will hit those nl50 players the hardest, no doubt.

The truth is, unfortunately, the sites do not care whether you can beat nl50. They actually want you to be within the break even zone of like -1bb to +2bb /100, so that you dont move up or down much, but keep grinding and paying rake.

In a sense, saying "I can barely beat the high rake", and understandably starting threads about that, is success for a from poker sites perspective.

where you lost credability.

lower rake is important......but saying lets all flock to stars is probably the worst possible thing to accomplish that.

stars are raking more and more aggresively too. They are also basically the only company in the industry at the moment who have the ability to lower the rake.

+1, plus downswings during inevitable run-bad are smaller with lower rake

yeah the SNE elite pursuit threads or wizardofahh's well/blog/site make really interesting reading if others are interested in this


erm, he said nothing about flocking to stars? he said he'd like to also play on minted (everleaf) if they would spread CAP? stars has the lowest rake online already, ainec. plus they have the highest rewards in the industry if you play at least a nominal amount of volume, driving effective rake down even further. and the VIP program improves every year. have you actually done any math?

This is a tongue-in-cheek comment but this is exactly what it is. When we rake $1, they will claim we have only raked $0.7

I may have to consider moving my business to the competition next year

I can see one advantage to the new system: turning losing bots that only make money through rakeback into losing bots that can't make up their losses with the rakeback they get but that's about it.

That might be true for NL50-100 but you can easily beat micros without rakeback.

"Easily"?

Easy for you or me. This is not true for the guy who is learning how to play and think the micros are hard. The first time I played poker I really thought 2NL was hard. Hard/easy is very relative: 400NL would be hard for me but is it hard for the nosebleed guy?

Rake is the biggest concern of the micro stake and small stake players. Have a look on PTR. The best mid stake players have winnings going well above their rake line. This is not the case for the best small/micro stake players.

(BTW, the rake is 6.67% on ipoker 10NL and below so players learning poker are better off playing on another site if they haven't got a good VIP deal.)

Sry if this has been asked but when does this take effect and is it winning players or high volume players that are going to be affected by the new rake calculations?

And what factors exactly are going to be used to calculate the new effective rake?