Rake-Free & Open Poker Room, Run By the Poker Community?

[genjix]

Originally Posted by duh

Thanks for this. Just for added clarification, will each site have it's own playerpool, or will this be a one network/multiple skins situation (or both?)

Each Poker site can run on one or multiple servers. From the point of view of the user, it is one Poker site. Because anyone can modify the client then you use whichever one you want (like MSN Messenger, Pidgin, trillian for chatting on MSN). The website for that Poker site will offer their own branded client to download though- however you can still use your own client.

A skin is just a different client software for playing at the site. Anybody can make or modify their client however they want.

Anybody can setup their own Poker site, but the playerpools will be separate.

If two sites agree to share their playerpool then they can connect each other together. But they must trust the other side not to be a scam.

[sdrf]

Apart from siteowners, brick and mortar casinos and affiliates can we agree that everyone else is in favor of a 'rakefree' site if it works?

Thought so.

Does not matter if you are SNE on Stars or playing an hour of micro every day on some small site. If a rakefree site could be made to work it would be good for all players.

There's a ton of problems, thus this thread and all other discussions, but even if every other problem is solved the big one is still how to build enough traffic. You have to be around long enough for word of mouth and all the other avenues used to find new players to work.

So how about trying to get ALL current online poker players to promise that they will play at least 10% of their hands on this site? Everyone should be willing to invest that little. It won't really cost you as a player anything and it could be the defining factor in making a site like this a success.

So as you come closer to launching try to get all players aware and make them wanna participate. 10% of their hands. Could even be on much lower levels than normal so you could add tables while playing your regular site without risking much. The important thing to give this a shot is to have traffic on the site at all times. If you could get say 25% of all players to play at least 10% of their hands for a number of months it would give the site time to grow and for there to always be plenty of tables when new players check it out.

[duh]

OK, I'm on board with this. I've seen a ton of idiotic ideas similar to this, but this is the first one that could actually work (despite some idealistic maths).

However, it seems like bit coins are still in their infancy and buying them is anything but straightforward. What is an honest and realistic timeframe for having easy and instant bitcoin purchases?

Will a bitcoin trading entity need to be setup to by the community,or will each individual site buy & sell bitcoins? I guess what I'm saying is (if the former), if this takes off, online poker/gambling could easily be what takes the bitcoin mainstream. In order to take off though, a suitable trading site will need to be created and I'm wondering if this is something that we, as a community should be working on in parallel. It would suck to put all of this time and energy making this awsome software, but then realize there is no bitcoin infrastructure to support it. I apologize if I am misunderstanding how bitcoins work.

[pankwindu]

I don't see the problem with charging a very small rake instead of going rake-free. It doesn't make sense to go rake-free and then put in a lot of unnecessary effort trying to figure out how to scrape up piddling alternative revenue sources (donations, vanity tables, etc.) when you have a built-in revenue mechanism that can be as large or as small as needed to cover expenses.

Other companies resort to these "freemium" models because of the difficulty in getting people to pony up the money upfront. That significant hurdle is completely absent in online poker. They've already crossed that bridge and sent you money to play on the site. You don't have to hook anyone like a free MMO or make any heartfelt pleas like wikipedia, you already have the money. Just take a small amount of rake, don't nickel-and-dime them with additional donation requests or premium purchases or whatever.

For example, if a typical rake is 5% with $3 max, say you take 0.5% with $0.30 max. That's an immediate 90% rake reduction, no sign-up restrictions, no volume requirements, no tiered vip crap, etc. Anyone who's rake-aware enough to be attracted to a rake-free site is going to be just as interested in this, and this way you still have some guaranteed revenues to apply toward expenses. Whether it's enough is another question, but even this tiny rake probably brings in more than a freemium system would.

Either way you still have the way-more-important WSEX/Paynorake/etc. problem of how to attract players in a competitive market with a limited budget, why add the stress and financial burden of an uncertain revenue model on top of that?

[PKS Ace]

Originally Posted by duh

OK, I'm on board with this. I've seen a ton of idiotic ideas similar to this, but this is the first one that could actually work (despite some idealistic maths).

However, it seems like bit coins are still in their infancy and buying them is anything but straightforward. What is an honest and realistic timeframe for having easy and instant bitcoin purchases?

Will a bitcoin trading entity need to be setup to by the community,or will each individual site buy & sell bitcoins? I guess what I'm saying is (if the former), if this takes off, online poker/gambling could easily be what takes the bitcoin mainstream. In order to take off though, a suitable trading site will need to be created and I'm wondering if this is something that we, as a community should be working on in parallel. It would suck to put all of this time and energy making this awsome software, but then realize there is no bitcoin infrastructure to support it. I apologize if I am misunderstanding how bitcoins work.

The way I understand it, it doesn't really matter what medium you play in or hold players' account balances in. If somehow someone discovered a way to set up a payment processor that handled USD transactions with US poker players with minimal costs that wouldn't be harrassed by the DOJ, you could simply use USD as your currency; but if that were easy to set up, I doubt the effective rake would be so high at current sites.

[fluffysheap]

I think if this has any intention of being serious it needs to be a little less idealistic and a lot more pragmatic.

Right now you are saying it is going to be free to play and no rake and no advertising and open source and public servers and no bots and no ptr and use bitcoin and cater to grinders and have lots of fish and there will be a pony. It is just not going to happen this way. You have to decide what is important and not worry about things that conflict with that.

If any substantial part of the system is open source you are going to be swarming with bots and dataminers. You are probably going to have that anyway, most sites already put a lot of effort into bothunting and they can't keep the bots out.

The absolute #1 thing you need to do is maintain security. Open source works for security in the Linux world, this resembles something like Counterstrike or WoW more closely, how good is their security? Not very, and it isn't because of closed or open source. It is because their architecture depends on running code on untrusted systems. With poker (as it is currently) the untrusted code is limited to output a decision of how much to bet so the damage is limited. Nevertheless it is enough for bots and PTR to be a huge problem. Don't trust the user. Don't trust the user! What I'm reading here so far is, there is a lot of trusting the user going on.

This whole no-rake business is just not worth getting into. Seriously there are just going to be a ton of expenses to pay for, so just collect the rake. If you want casual players to play, you need your site to be polished. It needs to look nice and seem professional or they will not trust you with their money. Joe Fish doesn't care how Bitcoin works, he's just happy if it makes depositing easier, but he does care that the site looks smooth. That means you have to hire graphic designers and web developers, if your site looks like it just beamed in from 1995, no one will play.

You only need to be the best in one area to succeed. Bitcoin is an obvious choice because no one else is doing it and the potential is huge. It is not like an e-wallet. E-wallets are like Napster and Bitcoin is like BitTorrent. The RIAA/MPAA killed Napster but they can't kill BitTorrent, because there is just not anything to shut down.

If major sites start taking Bitcoin then you might look at competing on rake, or you could just say, hey, we achieved our goal, let's play some poker.

OK, so I've got a magic file on my hard disc that may be worth many thousands of dollars - or more - and if I don't back it up and my hard drive goes up in smoke I lose it all. So I back it up, and make really sure I don't have any spyware allowing it to be stolen. I'm now worried because I've got lots of cash lying around (basically) in my study, and my house hasn't got a smoke alarm and I am worried about power spikes on my electric and of course there is the risk of burglars taking my PC, but I'll get over that because of the rake-free poker.

This is pretty much true. Bitcoin is same as cash. You don't keep thousands of dollars of cash sitting around on your desk (well some people do but not many), so you shouldn't keep thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin either.

You would use a Bitcoin exchange to convert it to your real-world currency of choice, or, if Bitcoin becomes popular enough, there will be Bitcoin banks that specialize in dealing with this stuff.

[HeadsUpLoser]

+1 to the idea of an open source pokerroom. Also more faith ppl, wtf. It's been proved open source is more secure than closed source in many aspects (linux vs windows for servers - best example). Stop talking about it being not secure if it's properly done. Open your eyes. Tons of big companies run unix/linux and guess what - it's open source. So please accept this obvious fact and don't say a word about security if u have no idea what you're talking about. Just start thinking and connect simple facts. Have faith in ppl not socialism. It's like saying European Union is great (according to all great governments) without seeing that country after country is going bankrupt there or beliving in American dream and thinking everything is ok nowadays but it's never been worse in reality.. yet ppl still think government cares about ppl and deny obvious facts.

[fluffysheap]

Open source isn't a magic solution to security.

Open source works for security when you are securing the computer on behalf of the user.

To prevent cheating in a game, you need to secure the computer against the user. It is the totally opposite problem and unsurprisingly, open source not only doesn't help, it makes the problem much harder, possibly unsolvable. Any poker site with open-source client code will have undetectable bots and dataminers, period. The only way it wouldn't is if there are not enough players to make it worthwhile.

Open source code on the server side might help prevent attacks because again the security is going in the "right" direction - for the system owner against outside attackers - but even this only works if enough people actually look at the code.

[HeadsUpLoser]

If we donated even tiny % of the rake to the programmers who look at the code we'd get super decent platform imho. Don't know how much money was donated to linux development but let's donate daily (genjix said what 1mln or sth $) rake to the developers and they're going crazy ;0.

As for datamining/bots, whatever. Bot's wouldn't be able to play for rake and datamining isn't that big of a deal. It also helps in discovering scandals (AP scandal etc.) I don't want to go into it more though, cause it's a different topic. Minor problems overall imho (not to mention they exist in closed source sites now, lol).

[Hood]

Originally Posted by HeadsUpLoser

Stop talking about it being not secure if it's properly done. Open your eyes.

Quote a post that said that.

[genjix]

Anyone who wants to help in any way- testing, ideas or vision, send me your email

http://www.kartludox.org/

If you look on the right there's a box called 'Topic Central'. Read your favourite articles, make any additions where you see fit OR click the Discussion tab at the top of the page and start a debate.

On the left of the main page is a link titled 'Recent changes'. At the end of the day I'll check what you've written and respond to any discussions (and show others on the mailing list too).

[Tuff_Fish]

Just curious...

If bitcoins would work, why haven't the mainstream and even not so mainstream gambling sites started to use them?

Your problem is the same as their problem - access to the US banking system. I am still fuzzy as to how I make a real money transfer from my poker dedicated checking account to bitcoin and back again. And do it without my big name bank saying "no no".

Not to hijack this thread but I would think that bitcoin would be the answer to sports betting, casino games et al as well as poker.

The DOJ will try to shut you down just as quick as any online casino. If you can slide by, so can any casino.

Maybe a separate thread for bitcoin is warranted. Stars and FTP should seriously look into them. Maybe they have, I don't know.

Despite the fact that you seem to want to create grinder heaven with your poker site, I fully support and urge you to proceed forthwith.

I will log on (microstakes) as soon as you go operational. In my opinion, if you start with microstakes, folks will be less concerned about security. As you gain a solid reputation, you can increase your stakes.

Thank you for your efforts.

Tuff

[genjix]

Originally Posted by Tuff_Fish

I will log on (microstakes) as soon as you go operational. In my opinion, if you start with microstakes, folks will be less concerned about security. As you gain a solid reputation, you can increase your stakes.

Thank you for your efforts.

Thanks. Our thoughts exactly.

[caspermatic]

I'd rather play against people who aren't really in the "poker community"

[genjix]

Forums to debate topics:

http://poker.bitcoinvegas.com/