Average Joe deposited money because he could play with people he knew from TV in a setting that seemed to be save and secure. Easy and fast deposit options is what a poker site needs to have to attract that clientele of players. As long as there is no digital currency that a 45 years old construction worker trusts, no poker site will be successful if they don't offer the possibilty of entering your credit card information and being able to play a minute later.

Timed games online sounds like an interesting idea, but I am pretty sure people at Pokerstars thought about that a long time ago and decided against it because they don't want to provide transparent costs to the players. But I would like for them to give it a try and see what happens.

The idea that you should fold some marginal hands because they aren't profitable due to rake is something that poker coaches talk about sometimes. But I think that most players don't give it a lot of thought.

I was trying to think of a worse alternative to your initial proposal, but I see you've found it. It would be bad enough seeing 5 cents taken every hand, but now instead players will finish their session and find their cashier is $50 short. And many fun players stick all their funds on their table(s) of course.

You say this like it magically makes regulatory and legal issues disappear. All this does is make it another pseudo-underground poker room that has little hope of attracting recreational players.

Exactly. And it also arguably becomes in the casinos interest to have slower dealers as less hands/hour leads to less players busting and keeps their hourly charge coming in.

Yeah. I guess it is a bit of a paradox.

Bobo, I think you speak too quickly. One of the business effects of "going bitcoin" is an immediate lowering of transaction costs, elimination of chargebacks, and quicker receipt of funds, both in and out.

This is a business issue, not a legal one. Using bitcoin does little, if anything, to affect the legality of operating an online poker business.

Whether there is market appeal in being a "pseudo-underground" playing experience is something else. (In light of the ability of the industry to skin different themes and pool players among them, I think an incremental gain may be had from any meaningful segmenting of the poker to appeal to as broad band as feasible.

There is nothing inherently "underground" about any business accepting bitcoin as payment to play a game, buy a service or purchase a product.

There are real issues to work out with presenting a competitive poker product that incorporates blockchain technology into the game experience. However, you speak to hastily if you assume that a competitive "decentralized" game experience is not possible. I consider it nearly impossible, but I also told the guy who at the time owned SatoshiDice basically it was the stupidest game ever and people would not play very long. (I also years earlier had told a friend not to hire that guy Bruce Springsteen we were checking out because no one would like him much.)

FWIW, consider BARGE, which I expect you'll attend next week; how long ago was online rec poker played without a central, massive operator ?

Aren't Bitcoin transactions quite slow currently?

In terms of a time interval between action and blockchain confirmation, compared to a maximum time allowed by the "poker market" to process an ingame action, ...glacial, currently.

The challenge would be to design around that shortcoming; perhaps trading reliance on blockchain confirmations of every ingame action for speed, in a manner acceptable to the poker market looking at a given range of products.

Personally, I do not have the answer, I am only an unfrozen caveman lawyer from a prior century, not a game designer or crypto-developer.

That was precisely my point.

Right. But if one is selling a product or service that is not permitted, using Bitcoin doesn't make the service any less underground than it would be with a fiat currency.

That's why I'm making no such assumption.

time rake is way fairer than pot rake

If by "fair", you mean more closely aligned with paying for the services provided, you are probably correct, at a first look.

However, why stop there:To quote Oscar Goldman, "We can rebuild the entire model. We have the technology".

Each aspect of service provided can be priced and charged for independently if you really want to be "fair":

1. Deposits cost a site X in processing, depending upon the method used by you to get your money into play.
2. The cost of dealing to each player in a given cash game hand is Yc, likely identical to each player. To keep it simple, lets let the Y cost figure cover the cost per player per hand, through the end of the hand.
3. Similar for each time you enter a given tournament, say a cost of Yt, and including dealing thru the end of the tournament.
4. Cashouts cost a site Z in processing, again depending upon the method used by you to get your money off the site.

So, X + Yc + Yt + Z = the direct costs to a site of your playing online. Add in O for overhead expense, such as licenses, offices, staff, server charges, etc. + M for marketing to maintain/grow liquidity (common good if there ever was one) and ROI for a reasonable rate of return on the invested capital and, you have a fair poker model.

If a site ownership wants to spend funds on personal projects, (whether prestigious charity events or hookers and blow), that cost comes out of their share in net profits, not the fair pricing model described above.

Explain please about time rake. If you sit right before colect time are u charged that round. Or could u wait to sit right after collection time.

Very good, except that all deposits should be encouraged, but especially repeated ones. So should X be a negative term in your equation, perhaps with a frequency modifier?

Yc + Yt + Z - X - (f)X

"rebuild the entire model. We have the technology"

They use the current method not because it's the best, but because there isn't a slam dunk better method and they don't want to do anything to upset the terminally ill golden goose.

Innovation is often the role of the hungry competitor, not the established monopoly. But it can only succeed if it offers something that will cause sufficient numbers of people to take their business to the competitor. Currently, quantity has a quality all its own.

Unfortunately ignores the difference between cost and value, and the complexities of a platform economy.

Fair enough, this is the lite version and this is NVG. (I ran a poker network for 7+ years, and have been a gaming lawyer for 20+ years, I consult for a fee in such matters.) It completely ignores network platform issues.

Re "cost' v. "value"

I included the value ROI as a catch-all for the "value" to the operator/site.

As for "value" to players of any given poker experience, including the charge/cost of participation, that will be player specific. To be honest, for many losing players the value of participating eventually is perceived as -EV, i.e. expected Lo$$es > entertainment value, which is why they drop out or gravitate to tournament-only play, where Lo$$ is easily forecast.

True, liquidity has a quality of its own, which is why rakeback was created.

In the 2000s, competing on the basis of network/site liquidity was akin to climbing a burning rope. Posting double growth in active players meant little if competition grew their numbers 5x.

One of the interesting side effects of the WSOP sale to Caesars was that smaller, and later all US-facing sites, could not longer offer the BIG Event prize pool to power marketing during the first 1/2 of the year. Things went from commercials co-branding with the WSOP to petty squabbles over badges, hats, t-shirts, worn at the Las Vegas site.

Player valuation modelling has been around for 10+ years. I kept this simple because matters such as you raise are pretty complex for this context.

Take just the statement that "all deposits should be encouraged". At the extreme case, I would suggest considering the real life experience from 2001 of "the Thai guy", a credit card fraudster who single-handedly wiped out the first four months of profits of Party Poker due to chargebacks hitting in late 2001. (His deposits (and fraud) cost my business about $100,000, but undoubtedly boosted player participation because he was just giving it away.)

On the other extreme, where a regular player never deposits or cashes out for a year, his play still may have more value than 20 players who deposit $100 each and get blown out in 5 hands to someone who cashes the money out immediately ... i.e Processing cost of deposit+ cashout > revenue associated with that play/deposit.

There are aggro and loose games where one does not want to pay other players' rakes. It helps in some games to produce more action when it is folded to the SB (that in that case could be the button if you ask me).

To produce more action, the ante is used, but there could also be a smaller open, smaller 3b and smaller 4b.

No-rake works as time-pay in live games. In online games it hasn't been calculated to be good enough if there is no rake at the table, but it could be because it is not that necessary that the losing players pay up to any rake.

Of course, the rake is unnecessarily high online and at all countries but USA/LV live. Just take a look into other gaming and what they cost online and what kind of rake is enough in most lower economic countries.

But whatever, low rake has been tried online and it doesnt work because no one likes to play on a site with few to no players and as so it is a collective decision, that the rake is what we wanted it to be. And anyway, if it would actually build up by our hard work, they would increase the rake when the site builds up.

Once again, I am a day late, and a dollar short. Each player's calculated value to the site, based on deposits, withdrawals, operating costs, but also VPIP, aggression factors, types of games played, etc. Continuously updated. Throw in some personality classification instruments and they should know which rocks to turn over to find new and contributing players.

Sounds pretty routine, huh ?

Well, add that all to a mix where the same known players are also current or prospective customers of other gaming or entertainment channels aside from poker.

Gets even more difficult when trying to predict who among a general non-poker population or among self-selecting prospective new poker players would make "contributing players", whose participation either the site or other players might desire.

uh we already have this, it's called a sng

let's rent seats on a half hour basis and call it 'session fee'; also someone should start pre slicing bread i am sick of cutting my fingers while trying to saw through whole loaves