Recently, PokerStars has changed the way rake is displayed in the tournament lobbies. While before, you could see it in the top-right corner of a tournament lobby (for example, $200+$15), now it shows this:



The ONLY mention of rake is now hidden in the structure tab, you even have to scroll to it.



In my opinion, there is absolute no reason to change this. It decreases transparency to players who may not be as attentive of such things and I am certain no one has ever looked at the lobby and said: "You know what, this number really bothers me!"

Instead, I believe that this is step 1 to more sneaky & shady rake increases. They hope that if people cannot immediately see it, the backlash will not be as severe as it'd be otherwise.

I have asked PokerStars for an official statement in their Discord channel and have gotten no response.

Please be very cautious in the future and regularly check how much rake exactly you are paying!

Alternatively, please consider switching sites, taking (a part of) your action elsewhere to discourage what many consider borderline scummy behaviour.



Greetings

Recently, PokerStars has changed the way rake is displayed in the tournament lobbies. While before, you could see it in the top-right corner of a tournament lobby (for example, $200+$15), now it shows this:



The ONLY mention of rake is now hidden in the structure tab, you even have to scroll to it.



In my opinion, there is absolute no reason to change this. It decreases transparency to players who may not be as attentive of such things and I am certain no one has ever looked at the lobby and said: "You know what, this number really bothers me!"

Instead, I believe that this is step 1 to more sneaky & shady rake increases. They hope that if people cannot immediately see it, the backlash will not be as severe as it'd be otherwise.

I have asked PokerStars for an official statement in their Discord channel and have gotten no response.

Please be very cautious in the future and regularly check how much rake exactly you are paying!

Alternatively, please consider switching sites, taking (a part of) your action elsewhere to discourage what many consider borderline scummy behaviour.



Greetings

I don't think it's borderline scummy.

The rake is the price the customer is paying for the service. Burying it like that is straight scummy. especially as not all the buyins/rakes are rounded amounts which can also be misleading. e.g. hyper is not $80+2, but $78.10 + $3.90 (5% rake lol).

If Greedstars cared about their customers and reputation they would restore transparency rather than continuing to reduce it further. We can only assume hiding the rake is the pre-cursor to yet more rake rises.

Yes, absolutely. Now I think the Power Up rake is going to be 11-16% (making it more than 16% wouldn't sit well with players as the 1st place prize would be less than 2.5 BIs).

Amaya is a profit-oriented company, and its objective is surely to collect more rake overall. The problem for Amaya is that it's barely possible to turn 90-100% of poker deposits into rake because people wouldn't deposit if they felt as if the house were the only winner in the game. So Amaya has had to resort to subtler methods of not scaring potential depositors away, such as this way of hiding the rake data into fine print.

That said, this measure will increase the deposit flow, as new players will be less intimidated, and strong players will get hands on a modest part of this surplus as poker is still a game of skill. This won't offset the rake increases totally, but at least it will mitigate them somewhat.

And it's not like Amaya isn't trying to make its games more exciting so that people get enough pleasure for their rake. Sometimes it fails - Beat The Clock is boring and overpriced, and the customers have already voted with their feet: BTC hardly ever runs above the $5 level; but meanwhile, super-KO SNGs (which are also highly raked) are thriving, and so are PKO MTTs, and Party has acknowledged with a delay that PKOs are attractive to recs.

greedy, short-sided decisions like that continuosly convinve me that this isn't just some aggressive buisness strategy, but rather that Stars Group is is managed by incompetent, shady individuals

I forgot my tinfoil hat but I hope I can join in anyway.

All three of you are being ridiculous. The 200+15 was confusing to recreational players and led to ambiguity. Now there is none - 'Stars have taken the step to write in plain English exactly where that $15 goes and makes the buy-in total amount clear as daylight. 'Stars understands that it is infuriating for a consumer of a product to face additional costs scattered around; consumers want to know one number and one number only - the total they are required to pay.

'Stars not only has award-winning software (in my humble opinion the best in the business), the fastest support response times, the widest selection of games and recently became the site with the most-engaging reward program targeted towards the casual gamer. To add to that list they are now raising the bar by making tournaments more accessible to the average, "everyday" gamer.

If they feel the need to hide rake info it makes you wonder what's coming. Stars pride themselves on rake increases, it's their whole identity... wtf do they have planned this time?

Decent troll but too transparent, needs to be more believable.

just preparing for the end of year 100% rake bonanza! No one will notice the rake change if they display the buy in values as a whole leading up to THE PURGE!

My mom has played poker for almost 10 years online casually. I asked her what she thought about Stars rake change, she didn't know what rake was. She said she almost never looks at the added fee. I think her mindset is the average player, they just don't care.

Scummy move for sure and after few months the tournament fees will go up for sure. I wonder when they will stop showing the rake taken from the pot in cashgames when you hover the cursor over the pot.

Has rake gone up? I'm not a fan of this move, but think it would be infinitely worse if they hid the rake and sometime in the not so distant future they increased rake. Many would not notice this subtle hike.

Not yet, the implication is that they will.

I am pretty sure it is exactly that way. I am also pretty sure the majority of players who buy into a $1000 WSOP event have no idea how much of that goes into the price pool.

More transparency is always better though.

I play low/micro stakes and I don't think this is typical at all. Players are on average quite sophisticated, many use HUDs, trackers and employ some complicated strategies in their game.

I'd probably take even money bet that $215 buy-in will be $193,5+21,5 before 2018

Why hide the rake? What do they have to fear ?

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why do you update?

Scummy.

That people will stop playing when they increase the tournament fees. Like mtt was that 200+15 if sry when amaya makes it 193.5+21.5 people might stop playing that when they see the increase from the lobby. When it only shows the total sum people might think it's still the same.

This is the reason for the change IMO. They can just bump the rake and keep the total BI the same.

Amaya makes slimey decisions on the reg, continously.

The regs maybe. On average nope. You must be playing in some tough micro mtts if over half the field knows what they are doing.

****ing disgusting. But as many have said, it's unsurprising at this point.
More slimy and shadiness. And obviously more transparency is better.
I hope that everyone's suspicions of the future won't be correct.

Stopped playing on Stars a while ago (after 10+ years). I don't trust Amaya and won't play on any site where I don't trust the owners (I was one of the first to check-out of UB and warned others to do so, well before the scandals were outed).

wait, they didn't change anything but text and people are upset?