Wamy, I don't claim to know exactly how losing players would respond to a rake exclusively targeted towards winning players - all we can do is intelligently speculate. But what I do know is that the current system certainly isn't keeping them around. So it's not like we're comparing an alternative system to a baseline of 0. We're comparing an alternative system to a system that's already bleeding players at an alarming rate.

I do agree that most casual players think online poker is rigged. Actually pretty much anybody who has an opinion online poker seems to believe it's rigged. I think that is a horrific for the popularity of health of online poker. Even on 2+2, one of the largest threads on this site is the rigged thread (http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...on-255990-new/). That thread has more than 50,000 posts and nearly 2million views! Anecdotally speaking, one of the homegames I used to regularly attend was made up primarily of other grads from a top tier university. Many of these guys had heavy backgrounds (or degrees) in areas such as mathematics. In spite of that damn near every one of them who had an opinion on online poker felt or alluded to the sites being rigged.

The reason I mention that is that its important to realize these people who think online poker is rigged aren't just tin foil hatters or "rigtards." There are plenty of smart and otherwise perfectly normal individuals who think online poker is rigged and are avoiding it for that reason. That's actually one of the things that got me vested in trying to figure out why that was since that is just horrible for online poker. And I really do think there's a very strong case to be made the cause is the current system of high per hand rake - the system that turns a huge percent of potential pre-rake winners or roughly breakeven players into losing and even big losing players. I'd add that it would be rather odd to suggest a site is rigged when the way they make their profit is through winning players, any winning players. Right now there is a huge incentive for the sites to rig the games to make sure nobody walks away a winner and that is certainly only adding fuel to the rigged fire.

The whole idea of this system is not to focus on degenerates - the players who just want to gamble and will do it at the roulette wheel where they can face a 2.7% 'handicap' versus online poker where they might see an x% rake on winnings as a simple x% handicap. The idea of this is to start keeping more normal players; those who lose a little or win a little - the vast majority of players in any zero sum game. The players the current system invariably turns into big losers and seems to be chasing off faster than ever before. The current system relies so heavily on degenerates because the per-hand rake is high and they worked to subsidize it. When the sites are raking up to 20bb/100, you need players losing at -50bb/100 even -100bb/100 to keep he gears turning and other players playing to convert that money into rake. As Dominik Kofert (the CEO of PokerStrategy) stated, the sites have become addicted to addicts and the current system of rake is a large part of the reason why. When the sites are no longer able to attract (and keep!) enough of those degenerates the entire system starts to fall apart from the bottom up - and I think that's what we're seeing happen right before our eyes.

So basically I do agree with you in a number of ways. I'm also not particularly thrilled with the suggested profit model myself and others have proposed. It makes the rake much more visible and that's undoubtedly going to turn away some players, ironically even some losing players who would pay much less and play longer in the long run under the proposed system than they do right now. But the current profit model is not working, and I do think the proposed alternative is one that, even if flawed, is likely to end up working better for all parties (including the sites) than the current.

The reason they think it is rigged is because fish are hunted down so heavily in online poker nowadays. Fish sits in table instantly fills in,fish sit out whole table sit out. So they feel hunted/think that the other players works for the site etc.


Do it right you miss one key point in your analysis. Every reg would agree to your ideas but there are also sites/affiliates that care about their profit too. Even at this point many sites (e.g. bwin,bodog/bovada) do everything to discourage players from playing poker ,they want fish to play casino games/bet on sports instead where their profit is way higher.

So basically sites only care about deposit/profit ratio. If there would be more withdrawing winners their profits from poker would be crushed. They would simply stop offering poker.

The one thing that literally killed poker is the rev share model. It created sites like pokerstrategy.com that educated tousands of regs. The problem is that model without fish is unsutainable.
Lets be honest currently even at small stakes tables won't run without the fish so basically the only way to increase traffic/number of tables is by increasing the amount of fish. The problem is that sites won't promote poker instead of casino games/betting just because of the difference in the deposit/profit conversion ratio.

Hey Do It Right, I'm a fan.

Even though I agree with you, and I think a change would be a very good thing for professional players as well as casual players alike. I don't think it would be good for the sites, and the only way anything could change with rake structure is if someone who was in charge felt the same as you.

And don't be down on the idea of taxing winners 10% instead of rake. It's a genius idea in many ways.

The perspective of the sites may change significantly after we have regulated poker. In the past years we have had sites who were making the majority of their money operating directly at odds with the US government and others. So they all seem to have had a mentality to make as much as possible while they still can. If we get regulated poker in the US in a good way, the eventual top sites are probably going to actually think a bit more about the long term health of their player base.

Regulated poker will obviously now have 2 rakes and not one. I doubt reducing their leftover scraps will be a huge concern for some giant corporate CEO.

me 2

May article you look for find. More info about this have we will.

Running into the the top of every sharks range because they're playing 24 tables and nitting it up is way more of a downer than getting raked imo. For example, a fish playing a couple of tables who's patient enough to wait for Aq le'ts say-is gonna think it's a huge hand (it usually is on TV)- but on-line even a hand as strong as Aq (we're not talking A4o) is getting crushed by the mass tabler's range. The fish doesn't even have a hud to tell him exactly how tight the masstabler has been playing. So I think that having hard caps on # tables people are allowed to play would make the game a lot more fun for fish and give them a fighting chance. Rake is ridiculous too ofc.

Btw, I'm not advocating that sites prohibit mass tabling site-wide but perhaps just as Zoom restricts you to 4 tables, they could make an area where you can only sit if you're playing less than x # of tables. Call it the Aquarium, idc. I realize that sites like mass tablers as they generate rake and result in more tables, however, reducing the size of each fisherman's net if you will, could only help the poker ecosystem imo.

To me HUDs are not a big deal, they only serve to facilitate mass tabling but don't address the core issue which is that mass tabling serves to give sharks an exploitative advantage. This advantage is realized via the employment of a systematic brute force stategy where they play so many tables that their ranges crush the fish's. Not only that but these mass-tabling automatons slow down the game and make is at a far less social experience. It's obvious that these factors make the playing experience markedly worse for the fish and therefore they're less likely to redeposit.

Imagine that you are a fish playing live and the guy next to you is playing at 3 other tables so it takes him 45 secs to race back to your table, he's so busy that he never speaks to you or anyone else at the table, since he's playing at 4 tables he's playing tight and you're not sure why but he always seems to have a better hand than you. Now imagine that almost everyone at the table is doing the same thing but not the fish. It doesn't sound like much fun to me.

I think the rake factored into dealing with shady financial processors (who charge usurious fees to put money on and take it off) + gov seizures and potential indictments >>> legit corporations paying typical taxes on profits

look at stars .FR

the sites currently take the hit for those seizures etc. with regulation they can just point at the government and bang additional rake on top

.FR is an example of bad regulations that have killed their market, why would the big gaming corps in the US want that?

It's hard to imagine that the big gaming corps in France wanted that

A few things here.

First, when most guys sit down at a poker table, they're already assuming two things which probably aren't true (or, as true as they think): They're assuming they're smarter than average, and assuming that being smarter than average will translate into wins at the poker table.

Second, the human brain is always looking for patterns and has an extremely difficult time recognizing randomness. There's a basic (false) assumption that if something is truly random, it will be more or less evenly distributed.

So they sit down, and take 3-4 tough beats, or run into monster hands 3-4 times, and they're broke. It's not what they expected at all! They may assume they "got unlucky" but if they try it again and the same things happen, it will feel wrong to them somehow. When the brain can't intuitively understand the randomness of it and bias won't let a person admit they aren't as smart as they thought (or, at the very least, as good at poker as they thought), the only conclusion left is that there's some kind of cheating going on.

I agree that people subconsciously attempting to impose pattern recognition on to random data, selection bias and confirmation bias are the main reasons that many people think that online poker is rigged. They may even have thousands of hours of live play but the pace of the game is so different that it throws their mental adjustments out the window. Or they know they can request a deck change to get the shuffle fixed.

The effects of paying more rake than in their home game (but less than live in the casino) is not a major contributing factor.