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

[sexyjesus]

In my opinion there should be no rake at all.
There are other ways to collect money such as:
- taking an administrative fee when creating new accounts
- maybe a monthly fee (not too expensive) where you could play the amount of time you wish during that money.
- a monthly fee for everyone that wants a table with their name with the reserved seat
- a fee for private tournaments
- and as I mentioned before the donations

Keep in mind that fees or other payments should be cheap as the goal is to attract as many players as possible. If the number of players go up fees should go down.

[Invertible]

The fee's method is alot less attractive to fish. No fish will want to join a site where they have to pay $20 when they can play on Pokerstars "for free"

Rake is a great thing in online poker in that casual players do not know it's there. Why would you want to advertise that they do actually have to pay to play.

The rake free method is a great dream but its been tried before and it failed, a site needs to generate income to be successful, you need casual players, theres no doubt about it, casual players are happy to play and lose, they just want to gamble and have fun. The problem with playing on a site of bad regs is that regs want to win. They are decent at poker and they know when they are getting crushed and will leave as soon as they realise they are not winning.

I think the community should be pushing for a reduction in rake, rather than a one off fee or no rake at all. Even if you could get a site running on half the rake which is currently standard, the community would be happy to back it.

[iopq]

no administrative fee for new accounts, no monthly fee

take vindictus - it's a free MMO that makes money on vanity items like underwear, sunglasses, bunny ears

so sell a personalized avatar for players where an artist will draw their likeness
sell gold plated name tags that signify you're a donator to a site
sell PREMIUM client skins for $3 each something
etc.

[VanDerMeyde]

This is a very good idea !!

Also, when its controlled by players, we can make some changes to the game that poker sites are not willing to do, but are wanted from the community. (And is done in most other sports/games)

I can think about 2 things:
- Limiting HU tables in some way that gives players that are wanting to play and give action (like Isildur) an advantage, and are giving a disadvantage to players that are just there to bumhunt
- Banning professional shortstacking

[genjix]

Originally Posted by iopq

no administrative fee for new accounts, no monthly fee

take vindictus - it's a free MMO that makes money on vanity items like underwear, sunglasses, bunny ears

so sell a personalized avatar for players where an artist will draw their likeness
sell gold plated name tags that signify you're a donator to a site
sell PREMIUM client skins for $3 each something
etc.

Funny, because sexyjesus just joined our channel and proposed this. I think that's a great idea- probably the best one so far.

- Personalised table names.
- Pay to create private tables.
- Bidding on waiting lists for top spots.
- Special avatar icons or nick highlighting for donators.

It's like the SuperNova stars on PS. Fish would love to donate because having a bold-fonted nickname or a special icon makes them feel special. Like a good player.

[jchysk]

Originally Posted by Invertible

The fee's method is alot less attractive to fish. No fish will want to join a site where they have to pay $20 when they can play on Pokerstars "for free"

Rake is a great thing in online poker in that casual players do not know it's there. Why would you want to advertise that they do actually have to pay to play.

The rake free method is a great dream but its been tried before and it failed, a site needs to generate income to be successful, you need casual players, theres no doubt about it, casual players are happy to play and lose, they just want to gamble and have fun. The problem with playing on a site of bad regs is that regs want to win. They are decent at poker and they know when they are getting crushed and will leave as soon as they realise they are not winning.

I think the community should be pushing for a reduction in rake, rather than a one off fee or no rake at all. Even if you could get a site running on half the rake which is currently standard, the community would be happy to back it.

A company can create it's own poker room based on this software spending nothing to set up. They can focus their resources on advertising and marketing and rake the games (although much less than existing sites). With any kind of threatening player base they'll either be bought out or create a form of competition with the other rooms. The software will be better and with lower rake other sites may need to focus more of their resources on improving their own software and lowering their rake which reduces the amount of money they can spend on their own marketing.
Either way I don't see how a project like this can be bad for the poker community whether it ends up a success or not.

[genjix]

Originally Posted by VanDerMeyde

This is a very good idea !!
- Banning professional shortstacking (Some etiquette rule?)

How do you feel if players could create their own tables rather than the site assigning them?

Like you make a game with minbuyin to be 20bb, max to be 500bb and sb/bb = X with the table name = dkddskdsk and a description saying "hello join our table"

[VanDerMeyde]

Originally Posted by genjix

How do you feel if players could create their own tables rather than the site assigning them?

Like you make a game with minbuyin to be 20bb, max to be 500bb and sb/bb = X with the table name = dkddskdsk and a description saying "hello join our table"

I like it, thou it was tried from pokerstars and it wasnt really a success. But i like more general rules based on wishes from the poker community as a whole.
You guys can set it up, and if there happens to be a lot of shortstackers joining, there will probably be wishes from the poker community that they werent there.
Same with HU, if there is 30 people opening 12 tables each HU with the intention of bumhunting, a good change would be to limit the HU tables to favour players giving action. For example 30 HU games total for 1-2 NL (if there is big traffic). If you sit out for a certain time you get banned from that table for X amount of time or something. Many solutions here...

[genjix]

ok. Put something out there. Respond quickly and make changes.

Give people a blank canvas. Minimal interference for people to design their own systems.

[ph2133868789]

TL;DR ... didn't second life gambling get shut down for legal reasons? what makes the bitcoin different?

[Hood]

Originally Posted by genjix

H
Everyday 200k play on PokerStars. After the day's end, PokerStars has netted a nice $1.34 million. They give themselves a nice pat on the back while the players have been exploited.

It's not exploitation to pay for a service.

Running a Poker site is not a high-cost expense.

Couldn't disagree more.

Rake distorts the games. Without rake, a losing player might be breakeven, a breakeven player a solid winner and a winner is a MASSIVE winner. People move up faster leading to more fish at higher stakes benefiting the whole Poker economy.

There are just so many inaccuracies here.

Even with the huge sums taken out of the games by the sites, they still offer shoddy service in return. PokerStars gives you a couple of TV tournaments and a piecemeal updates to their software.

Like 50% of what they rake is returned directly to the consumer in terms of bonuses and promotions, overlays and other bonuses. A lot else is returned in terms of advertising, signings.

Yes, Pokerstars have very big profit margins. They are a very successful company.

We're proposing a community run Poker room. The software will be completely free/open so anyone can inspect it to make improvements. Because eyes of the whole Poker community will be fixed on it, flaws & security problems very quickly disappear. And if you wish to make your own Poker room then you can! As the server code is also free & open.

This federated approach has serious security implications. I've been following the idea of bitcoin poker for a while, I've seen these security issues raised in the forums, and I haven't seen it properly dealt with. What's to stop me distributing my own client software that sends hole card information to me? Or to track hands (one of your stated goals is no PTR; how can you attempt to control that if players to write and distrute their own clients?). What about a poker room that allows bots? What about me easily writing a bot that interfaces directly with the client API?

Originally Posted by reverie

Regarding the "rake pays to attract fish" argument. without rake you don't need fish. you just need to be slightly better than average. rake is massive. its changing the proportion of winning players on a site from ~18% (an estimate i've seen for pokerstars) to 50%.

This is ludicrous. 0 rake doesn't mean 50% winners and 50% losers. Winners want to make an order of magnitude more money than losers are willing to lose.

Originally Posted by hepzebah

+1

And fish don't really care about rake. They care about security, and depositing easily, and branding, and customer support.

This.

An extra from your FAQ:

Fish Pay Rake

Fish understand they pay rake and that they don't care seems to be a myth. Occasionally players go on tilt and play irresponsibly with their money or extremely poorly at the tables. Do they care about the money or their bad play? Would extra money help them?

You state that fish not caring about rake is a myth then provide some irrelevant example. The rest of the FAQ you at least provide some citations. Why do you think this is a myth? I can provide loads of examples supporting it (e.g. hundreds of games running right now at stakes which are unbeatable due to the rake)

Most regs are break-even/slightly losing rakeback chasers. I'd happily play against them with no-rake rather than a high-rake site like PokerStars. Would they manage to keep their heads above water without the steady influx of recreational players?

what what what?!! this is the strangest thing read yet. Regs who are "rakeback chasers" choose this multi-tabling approaching because they get rakeback and it's profitable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't do it. You are saying there won't be a 'steady influx of recreational players'? I thought you just said fish care about rake (so will be attracted to your games). So you lose 'most regs' who are break-even because now they are losing. You lose the fish (as you state, no steady influx of recreational players). So who is left?


Regarding the bitcoin thing - it's interesting and something to follow closely. I'm sure if it ever becomes a viable deposit/cashout method, stars/FT will be first in line to implement it.

[reverie]

Originally Posted by Hood

This is ludicrous. 0 rake doesn't mean 50% winners and 50% losers.

Why not?

Winners want to make an order of magnitude more money than losers are willing to lose.

if this were true there would be no poker economy.

[theskillzdatklls]

very interesting read genjix. I wish you the best of luck and I'm excited to see where this one goes. Like everyone else has mentioned repeatedly, put a good deal of thought into the poker economy and ways of getting fish to the site.

[genjix]

Originally Posted by Hood

This federated approach has serious security implications.

No it doesn't.

What's to stop me distributing my own client software that sends hole card information to me?

The only info sent to a client is YOUR holecards. The holecards of other players is sent only to them.

Or to track hands (one of your stated goals is no PTR; how can you attempt to control that if players to write and distrute their own clients?).

No table observers. You can see who's seated, their stacks but you can't see the action. Simple.

What about a poker room that allows bots? What about me easily writing a bot that interfaces directly with the client API?

Preventing cheaters is still a much discussed issue. I'll quote my earlier post:
But how about botters/colluders? Say the community finds that player A is a cheater. We ban them, they make a new account and continue. If there was a fee (i.e rake until reach monthly $10) then player A would pay fee, get banned, make new account, pay fee .etc <- They would be paying a tax for cheating and it would favour legit players.

Then others argue why stop botting? Is it really a problem? There was enormous resistance to computer trading when it first started happening on the stock market. It's come and the computers only make small fractional profits, and traders still trade stocks. It didn't kill the stock market. Maybe the free tables would be bot infested.

These are just throwaway ideas. This is still an ongoing unsolved topic which requires talk to figure out.
------------------

This is ludicrous. 0 rake doesn't mean 50% winners and 50% losers. Winners want to make an order of magnitude more money than losers are willing to lose.

People will win more money. I don't see why it's hard to say that a breakeven player would be a solid winner without rake.

You state that fish not caring about rake is a myth then provide some irrelevant example.

I state it's my opinion because of how frustrated fish get when the lose money and go on tilt- they obviously do also care about money too.

what what what?!! this is the strangest thing read yet. Regs who are "rakeback chasers" choose this multi-tabling approaching because they get rakeback and it's profitable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't do it. You are saying there won't be a 'steady influx of recreational players'? I thought you just said fish care about rake (so will be attracted to your games). So you lose 'most regs' who are break-even because now they are losing. You lose the fish (as you state, no steady influx of recreational players). So who is left?

Maybe I should reword that. It's stating that our initial target would be the multitabling rakeback grinders. That lets build the software with them in mind first and foremost.

[genjix]

Originally Posted by theskillzdatklls

very interesting read genjix. I wish you the best of luck and I'm excited to see where this one goes. Like everyone else has mentioned repeatedly, put a good deal of thought into the poker economy and ways of getting fish to the site.

yes, it's nice the massive feedback of ideas we got from our online chatroom today. Lots of very inventive (surprising) ideas came out.

My favourite was the scheme where you offer special 'stripes' for players that've donated -> great idea.