Quote:
Originally Posted by Josem
This is kind of a nitpick, but if you play 100 HUSNGs and have an underlying winrate of 80%, your expected number of wins is 80, the variance is 16 and the standard deviation is 4. If your underlying winrate is 60% then the expected number of wins is 60, the variance is 24 and the standard deviation is 4.89 - so it's not correct that variance is unrelated to ROI from the point of view of the player.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Josem
The game of poker has substantially evolved even over the last fifteen years: with players choosing to play No Limit over Limit, then the demand for 100bb NLHE (anyone remember "the move of honour"??), through to the popularity of Rush (and then Zoom), and more recently things like Spin & Go's.
Your view here that recreational players are just "victims" of online poker marketing who are "corralled" is really quite extraordinary, and really demeaning of recreational players. If poker players just did what online poker sites told them to do, we'd be playing in Home Game satellites trying to qualify for The MONSTER.
When I log in to Pokerstars (I still drag my brother and father on there for a play-money home game every week) I get a load of "news" in language seeming aimed at the people who blow their benefits on scratch cards - the 5 current items are the "double jackpot", "Christmas Festival", "PCA 2016", "Casino Birthday Party" and "Poker School - Spin n Go's". So 4 out of 5 are basically aimed at a particular type of problem-gambler recreational players; it looks like a consultant told you to use the word "million" as often as possible and you've taken this to heart making it read like SEO spam for the keyword "million". There is nothing aimed at converting recreational players like my brother and father (businessman and retired MP respectively, also play chess and all kinds of other games) by offering something a bit classier. As for myself, I have a ton of emails about casino challenges and sports betting, but your system has not seen any reason to send anything try to tempt me back to MTTSNGs (which I played hundreds of per month before leaving).
So at Pokerstars you obviously believe that you can direct and influence what games people play.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I get that people aren't going to play my reg-speed MTTSNGs on their mobiles on the train, but you know 6-max cash is also good on a mobile device.
As for the more general point,
yes you need winners (if you're into sports betting now, well Betfair have had the biggest growth and that's with a winners welcome low overround model),
yes you need volume and liquidity,
yes some games are overraked without the rake-discounts - but you don't need liquidity to be provided by the same person on Sunday who provides it on Wednesday, so volume discounts for people playing full time make no sense.
Poker needs to be beatable - and I don't just mean in the same sense that you can be a lifetime winner at the lottery - but it needs to be potentially beatable for all players, not just for people willing to play it full-time and multi-table. Work out a sustainable level of rake and offer it to all of us. Then I may come back. The SNE changes are going along the right lines but I suspect it's the whole story because why wouldn't you announce positive stuff at the same time?
Last edited by LektorAJ; 11-19-2015 at 12:48 PM.
Reason: BTW I agree you need to be fair in the transition period for SNEs.