+1

I stopped playing PLO over a month ago due to the rake charges.

NLHE is very boring after having experienced PLO and even though I play for fun (I work full-time) I still want to show something for my time. When PS is making more from my efforts than I am then I know the game is not for me.

difficult for me to comments on the plo issue but the ratholing one could potentially be very good by the looks of it.

apparently he doesn't give a ****. just keep up appearances by posting and having meetings. i haven't played on stars since black friday but i'd like to at least see Stars have some kind of interest in keeping the plo economy ok.

Jeah i would certainly consider it, lets first see the dates/specifics.

About Ratholing; I think the line of thinking of PS is very promising. For PLO specific however, there are very very few 24 tabling shortstackers. Most people play like 6-8 tables simultaniously. By allowing 24 ratholes / 18 hour period, it is very hard to hit the limits for those players.... Maybe set the 24 ratholes lower for plo????

And how are Supernova LHE players doing?

You're being obtuse; I don't see how your equation has any bearing on anything being discussed. Steve said, as you quote:

Steve is saying using this metric alone is not the correct metric when comparing rake between games because it ignores other aspects. A higher BB/100 in PLO vs NL does not, Steve argues, necessarily mean the rake is "too high" in PLO, because, to give just a couple of examples, it ignores the number of players postflop and ignores average pot sizes.

He doesn't need to make a post disagreeing with your equation for his point to stand.

Debating any issue is going to be much more effective if you talk in the same terms, instead of throwing out things like your "mathematically correct equation" which do not further your argument.

joeri, I think that allowing 24 ratholes per 18 hours is not unreasonably high (although I think 12 ratholes, i.e. 12 "table identities", is a better limit).

Let's do the math on this:

Suppose the shortstacker takes 50 hands to double up and leave (I don't have data but I think this is on the high side for a 40bb shortstacker). This means the shortstacker would be able to play 1200 short-stacked hands per 18 hour period. If the short-stacker is making 2bb/100 post-rakeback (is this too low for a shortstacker?), this leaves him with a profit of 24bb per 18-hour period. Considering that these guys are playing with low edges and rely on volume to make their income, this seems to me to make shortstacking unviable as a profit-making strategy.

The shortstacker deserves some of this profit because he'd presumably make a profit even if he'd play full-stacked. So we're only interested in the part of this 24bb that he makes because he's exploiting the structural advantage of the short stack. I don't have a good estimate, but 12bb seems like a good ballpark. You can decide if this seems acceptable, but it seems to be in the right ballpark to me.

For the record, after thinking about it a while, I really like the anti-ratholing measures that Steve describes. Happily, I don't see any good way to game them without multi-accounting.

By the way, Steve: supposed I play full-stacked, I doubled up on all my tables, and I am now at 200bb on all my table identities. Does this mean I'll now have to buy in to standard tables at 200bb deep? Or can I always buy in for the table maximum? I'm not sure what I feel the answer should be, but one should be aware that if we're forcing people to buy in for 200bb then this puts every other player at an inherent advantage over them once there is another deep stack on the table.

Edit: also +1 to Hood's post. Hoopman20 is using shiny colors and getting a bunch of +1's, but I feel his posts are not leaving enough room for in-depth discussion of the issues.

Exactly. We want to understand and use the metrics PokerStars use, so we can evaluate the situation from their point of view and be able to present a solution of mutual interest. But Steve does not provide those metrics, all he says is that what we use is not viable. It's his way to dismiss the hard cold facts that the community could provide and to keep the discussion in a more foggy area.

I'm pretty confident that any metrics used will show results closer to our concerns than to Steve's "just fine" stats. It doesn't take to be a statistician to see that the current situation is not fine and it's getting worse by the day.

Yep, this.

Steve, what is the correct way to compare rake between games? You've told us multiple times that bb/100 is not the right metric, but you haven't provided an alternative.

Rake is charged by the hand, so it is logical to measure it by the hand. It's the only way that makes any mathematical sense. Perhaps you're saying that it should be measured by the hour? If that's the case, why doesn't Stars charge rake by the hour?

This is good news, and I think it shows that at least you're taking the problem seriously. Thanks for yours and the reps time for making these meetings happen.

Quite the contrary, I can explicitly clarify that PLO compares reasonably down through small and micro stakes.

One of the player representatives brought with him a large sample of hands and some good analysis he had done on them. He looked at winning players at $0.50/$1.00 PLO who had put in a reasonable number of hands over one period of time and then reviewed their results in a similar time period immediately after.

As would be expected, their average winnings were lower in the second period. Variance happens, especially in PLO. However, they were still net winners as a group before rewards and making some rough conservative estimates of hands per hour and rewards percentages, the average hourly rate of the group in the second period seemed reasonable to me for an average winning player at these stakes.

We also had our own quite substantial data. The numbers aligned quite nicely with the ones brought by the player. If anything, our numbers showed winrates that weren't quite as high.

We charge the exact same rake for PLO as we do for NLHE. The % is the same and the cap is the same for every stakes.

I like the stack identities idea. However, does it apply to people who have left the table with more than the maximum buy in for that table?

ie. If I join 24 tables and the lowest I leave with is 140BB, then when I go to a new table (40-100BB) am I required to buy in for 140BB?

But isn't this exactly what happens at player meetings? Seems clear to me the metric PokerStars believes is a better comparative is looking at the proportion of winning players compared to other games both pre and post rakeback.

As Steve concludes in the summary, based on this metric he says there are the same proportion of winners at supernova+, but concedes that because a higher proportion of winnings comes from rewards, that there are fewer winners at lower VIP levels and that's an issue they want to address.

I believe is communicated pretty clearly in the OP, which i why Hoopman20's post just that everyone is +1ing seems to take a step backwards.

Online poker traffic is seasonal and we are well into the 'down' season. However, comparing year over year for the past few years, change in PLO traffic compares slightly favorably to NLHE and is consistently increasing. There are of course drops across all shared liquidity traffic at the points where Italian, French, and Spanish players moved to segregated liquidity.

I have a bit of a tight schedule the coming few months. I'm hoping we can make the week of June 24th-28th work, but the final dates will have to depend on availability of attendees. We probably won't get everyone we ask for any date, but hopefully we can find a date that works for enough people. I'll also be in Vancouver, Canada in the days leading up to the VIP Club: Live party there on July 13th. That might be more convenient for some players, at least those who attend WSOP and don't make day 4. Plus there's the party to attend on the 13th!

Players would not be able to get around buy-in maximums due to the new stack identities system. The most your stack identity could be saved as when leaving a table would be the table maximum. Buying in for the maximum initially wouldn't even involve using an identity at all.

That's not a metric, and what is appropriate for one game is not necessarily appropriate for another game.

I suspect this is inaccurate (but I'm not sure). I think that this rep, gui166 (from the PLO rake thread), did the analysis on the "winningest players" in the first period, i.e. the players with highest winrates in the first period. This is quite different than just looking at the set of all winning players. I hope that the reps and/or Steve will clarify this point.

From the data I've seen, if all these players are SN+, then their post-rakeback winrates indeed translate into a reasonable hourly. The questions we want to ask are:
1. what about the other winning players, who are not the winningest? If their winrates are still reasonable then great, but are they?
2. what about the players who play just as well but are not SN+?
3. how do we feel about games where the best players' pre-rakeback winrates are positive but very small, and that most of the winrate comes from rakeback, both from an ethical point of view and from a practical one (e.g. how does it effect the health of the games?)

So far Steve has been most explicit about point #2, and I'm content with that for now. An improvement in the rakeback system would be most welcome. This point should be considered vis-a-vis point 1, to make sure that enough players are winning, not just the toppest players. At some point we'll probably have to discuss point #3 as well.

I can see arguments being made for both 1 and 2, though these are a measurement of a combination of many things, not just rake. They're more a measurement of game conditions.

how does it deal with 100bb players doubling up and insta leaving the table , they are more annoying than the half stackers?.

How about having some sort of measure of what % of the time, players leave the table within 5 hands of doubling up or the number of hands that they play after doubling up.. If they break through a threshold level of say 10% or less than 3 hands their avatar gets replaced with a picture of a rat. Everyone then knows that the player is likely to clear off instead of continuing to play.They may then not play big pots against the player and and the ratholers will be shamed into changing their behaviour and other players can avoid giving them action.

I believe we are both correct, but you are most precise. It is winning players, but not all winning players, and I believe it was the most successful ones. I believe the rep picked the winningest players specifically because he was looking to show that they had won that much only because they had run good and that they would show results not as good in a subsequent period.

Regarding the Rake "solution" that you are thinking about -
it still misses an important point which is bumhunting... there is no point in playing regs from micro to even midstakes in PLO
almost no matter your edge, you always require fish to play, that is how bad the rake really is.
Only improving vpps/fpps for players without SN+ does nothing in that area.
You can't even blame people for sitting out when the fish sits out or leaves... why keep playing in a lineup when you know that you nor anyone else can win?

Stuff like that is not going to fix itself and it will only get worse over time.

I'd like to have PLO competitive where it's about playing better instead of selecting better.


Also following your arguments, you would have to change rake in every game so that winrates are going to be pretty much the same.
Meaning that if a 2-7 player has a higher winrate than a NLHE player you have to even that out... (yes I'm comparing FL to NLHE since you are comparing PL & NL as well).
Thing is that PLO rake is broken and you can't prove anything else.

Steve do you have ETA for the stack identities (antiratholing solution)?? I would love ot know that so could adjust my volume and start play more on P*.

this

So what you're saying is that PLO traffic is in relatively better shape compared to NLHE traffic. This is kinda obvious assumption because Black Friday hit the NLHE games a lot harder as it is the more popular game of the two in the US. Following the hit of the NLHE games, certain NLHE regulars switched to PLO. I guess this is where you get the boost of PLO traffic from.

Let's look at the number of new players who try PLO and stick to it compared to other games. And then I would like to take a look at the percentage of micro and small stakes players who were able to move upwards in stakes in PLO compared to NLHE. And lastly, this is where a big smile will shine on your face, let's look at the percentage of money raked by Stars compared to player winnings in the PLO games. I can see a huge increase on this one after the change to WC, much bigger than in the NLHE games.

I understand that seemingly increased traffic paired with lower winrates for winning players is your dream scenario hence your unwillingness to act on PLO. But you have to realize that this is a transitional period and the current situation is far from sustainable. You're just bleeding the games dry atm.

This is getting ridiculous. First you increased the min buy-in, then you increased the period of time in which you can sit at the same table with the min, then you increased it again, now this. Why not implement a rule to tar and feather short-stackers while you're at it?