They'll make a lot less money per player. That means they have less money to market/advertise/reward players. This would probably work if everyone did it, but when it's possible for one site to "cheat" and run off the current model, they will do so and they will do much better due to their higher revenues. Recreational players don't know what rake is.

I like this post a lot. Subscription models as a regressive tax.

Though let's also consider that Bodog have effectively gone broke.

p.s, sorry for lots of posts. !

Most players don't cash out even if they win, they simply move up.

Thus meaning they rake more than before.

Lowering the rake to capped at 1bb per pot (for all levels) would allow more people to move up and hence rake more at higher levels.

The current pool of players are mainly 50nl and below, due to near insurmountable rake structure at those limits. However, if they change the rake to 1bb cap per pot the average stake would be nearer to 400nl and sites would be raking more per pot.

Obv poker sites have no incentive to do this right now as they are making billions per year.

Maybe some smart people can see a gap in the market and develop an alternative model

If you consider the poker economy as a pyramid then it matters a lot. New players start low and even if they deposit more if they like it (rather than win and move up) then you need to keep them alive for longer at the lowest stakes.

And while your fantasizing about **** that will never happen add ****ing mila kunis to the list

Sites aren't going to you you a lisense to print money for peanuts and they sure aren't going to do it while drying up their own games in the process

Lol how dumb do you think the sites are
They have regs that take money off the site by winning which is more fish the sites need to find to keep pumping money into the poker economy
How does letting them play rake free help the site at all?
Regs take the fishes money which in turn is less rake the fish can create in the future by having games built around them so let them do it for free ?in a thread filled with stupid hypocritical ideas this one takes the cake

Basically most of the complaining in this thread is derp derp I don't care about the long term game quality I just want the sites to let me print money now!followed by the pot calling the kettle black (players calling sites greedy) and suggestions the sites should just light money on fire

Look at yourselves in the mirror (as well as the us govt) if you want to know why the games suck

People on here kept bitching about bodog and tried to compare them to stars and tilt forgetting they were a sports book and not a poker room
Their customer service employees are also ******ed which didn't help

Frankly I'm amazed they ever let me or anyone else only use their poker room and win money from people who would have dumped it to them in the sports book and casino

Are you intentionally being dense? I'm not sure I see what the problem is with doing something like removing rakeback entirely and instead capping peoples rake paid in some way each month. It'd be an alternative to the format now, have no effective impact on casual players who generally don't have rakeback anyway, and encourage people to put in a lot more volume on the site.

I can see the potential of an idea like this, why can't you? Who said I want the site to light money on fire, or that I thought they were greedy or that I'm trying to be greedy?

There HAS to be a better model out there for everyone than the one in place now. And when I say everyone, I don't just mean the reg whores. Fish, sites, long term game health etc etc all come to mind.

As far as my comment about rake paid, I'm sorry but 5k+ rake a month for the moderately heavy grinding I did (100k+ hands easily most months, thank you Rush how I miss thee) seems a bit excessive overall considering my normal stake level was only NL100.

But hey, if you want to be some asshat negative nancy who can do nothing but criticize people who want to talk about something and try to think up what might feel like reasonable solutions, welp, go forth and be dickish good sir. Personally, I love hearing about other peoples ideas on how to do things. If you don't, don't read the thread. I'm not sure why that's so hard for you.

This is already in place

These extreme rake cuts will never happen because they just give no incentive to sites, but there is a case to put sites that there is tipping point in rake reduction that makes poker games self-sustainable from its natural variance blurring edges which will also repair the serious damage that online pokers reputation is suffering in the forums and by word of mouth.

If say by cutting rake by 50%, rigged threads/rake threads/bumhunting reduced and will encourage industry growth, then this is VALID REASONING to use with the sites.

Its also important to shift these savings to the right players, no good if it just goes straight into winners pockets, the games still die.

Sorry if sounding like a scratched record, but these ideas need to bear in mind first and foremost that they need to be in the interest of the site to implement, otherwise they're falling at the first hurdle

Are there any poker voices of sensible, moral authority in here? I.e.

- people who don't work for Stars/Tilt/any other site but have an intense inside knowledge of the poker business

- people who aren't merely being "OMG my profits are smaller so let's reduce more rake" about it

It'd be REALLY REALLY interesting to get proper auditors like PwC or KPMG to look at the whole online poker industry from an objective point of view. I mean, of course, they never would, unless someone independent would stump up the money.

But I really want to know whose interest the objective position would serve.

- Should sites be 100% focused on profit?
- Is the current way the best way for the sites to maximise their profit anyway?
- Should sites care about players who actually have the skill to win, or who want to win?

Competition should come into the equation somewhere. At the moment, there's simply no viable competition for the Stars/Tilt enterprise.

A new site, a major site, is needed.

Then why are the weakest players always on sites with sportsbooks?

The real reason PS wouldn't do this (right now at least) is that they want regulated poker in as many countries as possible and being a sportsbook too would make that harder. I could believe it if FTP opened a sportsbook though...

The problem with removing waitlist is that people then use autojoin scripts. Sites removing waitlists have to be ready for and deal with that, otherwise fish feel much worse and quit sooner.

I doubt there is anyone with serious inside knowledge of poker sites who don't already work for one, directly or no. If you are good at something, make sure someone is paying you for it.

But there is already reason for someone with inside knowledge to want to increase revenue. If you're wondering if there's a way to reduce rake and increase activity without increasing revenue, why would a site want to do that? If you want to decrease rake but increase activity and increase revenue - poker sites are interested in that too.

end vip and rakeback schemes.
drop rake
problem solved

winning regs enjoy bigger winrates and roi, low volume fish last longer.

However the sites obv use the the tiered vip/rakeback chains to keep players exclusively at their site rather than game selecting across networks. Which would be healthier and improve competition, but not gonna happen

Yeh, agree on your last point. It also makes it very hard for operators on a network to introduce some of these changes that have a shot at working - e.g, if you reward the weakest players then other operators can spend their money attracting the high volume players who still get to play against the weak ones. Standalone operators can do these things though.

so far no ideas are more superior than stars current business models

Is there anything that can be learned from Svenska Spel's business model? I believe they have 2.5% rake with no benefits.

Yes, government run companies don't care about profit/revenue. They don't need to compete for acquisition because they have huge brand appeal. It's a fairly strange legal situation in Sweden too. For example, players had to pay tax on PS/FTP but not on sites with Maltese licenses (or Svenska Spel)

not to be a 'negative asshat nancy' but you are literally suggesting the site light money on fire.

It also achieves the exact wrong thing by placing a larger share of (a diminished) rake on the recreational players, which isn't how you improve the ecology.

additionally it encourages exactly the kind of robotic mass-tabling that is killing the games, since there is a huge incentive to get past the max rake threshold.

Its brain dead for three reasons

1)the sites will make way less money so that's not gonna happen
2)why should fish who actually keep going pay more in rake to play the same amount of hands as a winning reg who pulls money off the sites does in a month just because they take lot longer to do it?
3)it would be terrible for the game quality
How does a bunch of multitablers playing rake free after a certain point help sustain the game quality?it just makes fish bust quicker and severely tightens up the games making fish not want to play anymore.

Call me an ass hat all you want but your idea is stupid and there is no merit to the potential in it.it is by far the most delusional idiotic idea anyone has suggested on this site.just ask starts to mail you five figure checks every month as that would make just as much sense from their standpoint.

This discussion would be a lot more productive if people started using basic logic and stopped acting like they care about long term game quality and that the sites are evil. Don't bitch about game quality when you do everything possible to hurt game quality and want to do even more like this idiotic notion of letting people take money off the site with zero benefitto the site.

Hey look it would be nice if warren buffet decided he loves poker and financed a rake free site and spent millions on advertising and we could just print money but I'm realistic.

You think that I'm gonna feel bad for someone who got to play 100,000 hands for 5,000 dollars from the comfort of their own homes?you chose to play those hands knowing the rake structure.
I played 150 hours live last month which is about 4500 hands.this cost me 1800 dollars in time charges,probably 1000 dollars in tips and dollar bad beat drop not to mention gas hotels tolls etc.boo hoo 5 cents a hand rake my heart bleeds for you.

Live poker is soft. Rake is not such a big issue. Online is not as easy as you think these days. We need lower rake to be able to win.