In recent months we have seen many online poker rooms changing their software and services in a way that benefits the losing ''recreational'' players.

Every dollar raked by a poker room, or won by a winning player, has been deposited and lost by a recreational player first. Without recreational players, nobody wins.

Thus, attracting and servicing players who play poker solely for fun is of key importance for the poker rooms, but also for the professional players.

However, many poker rooms turn this principle upside down.

A recent example of this is the Everleaf network, which has started banning players who win more than €750 in a week from playing against losing players.

Some poker rooms seem to think: “if losing players are good, winning players must be bad.”

This conclusion could not be more wrong, for the following reasons:


1. Deposits

Discriminating against winning players does not cause losing players to deposit more. There is no evidence to support this. In fact, the opposite might be true due to reduced action and liquidity.


2. 'Deposit to Rake Conversion'

Apart from the total amount of deposits that are generated at a poker room, from the poker rooms’ point of view, there is another factor of key importance: the deposit-to-rake conversion.

A poker room that generates daily deposits of $1m but only coverts 20% of that into rake earns less money than a poker room that generates just $800k in deposits but converts 30% of that into rake.

Now, almost nobody in the poker industry knows that winning players play a hugely important role in increasing the deposit-to-rake conversion ratio. The reason for this is that the relative skill gap between two winning players is far smaller than the relative skill gap between two recreational players.

Having a healthy share of winning players “flattens” the average skill distribution of a poker room, thus increasing the deposit-to-rake conversion.

Consequently, by banning winning players you probably increase the total amount of cash-outs that happen in the poker ecosystem.


3. Winning Is Integral To Poker

Poker is much less appealing to everyone – recreational players and professionals alike – if players get the impression that winners are not welcome.

In fact, before I first played poker in 2004, I was extremely sceptical due to the saying that in gambling, the operator will never want you to win. This of course holds true for games such as Roulette or Slots.

However, one of the key reasons for the success of poker in the past is that the operator does not care if you win or lose – or at least, they won’t discriminate against you if you do win.

If poker rooms move away from this principle, if they start discriminating against winners, the image of poker as a whole will suffer tremendously - to the detriment of players and operators alike.

In particular, it is often the recreational players who think that poker rooms are rigged or won’t allow you to win. Do not scare them away by discriminating against winners.

There is a line that should never be crossed, and this is when poker rooms treat players worse because they are winning too much.

I fully support and encourage supporting recreational players more. This also means that I don’t mind if a poker room changes from dealt to weighted contributed rake, for example. This makes logical sense and is still fair and balanced to everybody.

However, there is a line that should never be crossed, and this is when poker rooms treat players worse because they are winning or winning too much.

I am very concerned with the latest trends in the poker industry when it comes to treating winning players well. I think that, especially after tough events post-Black Friday, people need a break.

For the benefit of all, it’s very important that this disturbing trend of discriminating against winning players is stopped before it gains ground.

Best regards,
Dominik Kofert
CEO, PokerStrategy.com

Yeah

st 2 months

I'm not sure people argue that it causes losing players to deposit more, but most would say that it causes losing players to lose more slowly, letting the house rake more and giving them more enjoyment for their $.
I'm still not following how you got to your conclusion. Can you state it another way or explain it further?

Totally agree. This is against the spirit of poker and it's going to derail online poker in the long run. What do you think is going to happen when top players tell their friends "i don't play on [site] anymore, they ban you if you do well?" The word will spread to everyone eventually, even recreational players want to think they could make a huge run and the idea of getting banned will scare them. This is an example of trying to maximize short term profits at the expense of long term sustainability.

Overall, interesting post, looking forward to seeing what comes from it. Thanks for posting.

great post OP, especially the 3rd part.

I didn't know everleaf was doing that. That seems so weird. I thought bodog was the worst it could get recently.

These sites should be spammed to hell for doing this. I suggest OP write a template email and add relevant site support email addresses so that people can just copy and paste to the sites that need to hear players on this..

wow

Korn, are you Dominik Kofert or is this simply a copy and paste of his article?

*

Edit/MH: It is he.

OP,

You are right. From a winning player's perspective deposits are what matters. There are two thing that are important to the site though:

1.) Deposits

2.) The conversion of deposits into rake.

The more the site can spread money around the more of that money becomes rake. Ideally the site would like to convert all the money to rake.

For some reason lately there have been a lot of people who believe that things that make the second thing happen are actually good for games.

The concept seems to be "If the site keeps the fish playing longer that is good, right?".

The problem is the sites are just trying to make you play longer and pay more rake to win the same amount of money from the fish. It amazes me how many people don't understand that netting less over a longer period of time is bad for winning players!

Hi GreenPlastic,

1) I would not say anybody argues this, however, it - irrationally - seems that people who think that "more losing players" = good seem to then infer that "less winning players" = good as well. This could really only be true if "less winning players" would imply more deposits from losing players, which is - in my view - very clearly not the case.

2) This is due to the fact that the skill distribution in poker is somewhat logarithmic. What do I mean? The relative skill difference between 2 fish can be huge - there are -5bb players, -10bb players but even -30bb or higher players (the theoretical maximum for how bad you could be if you really tried is probably much higher again) whereas for winners, the relative skill differences are much smaller. Emprical evidence for this is the excessive bum-hunting at some sites.

Now, if the above is true, then a site with "100% fish" will have a significant skill difference between them, i.e. the delta between the biggest winners and losers will be huge (think of PartyPoker in 2005). A high delta however means that the percentage of deposits that is converted into rake is going to be low, as most of the money will end up in cash-outs.

If you mix in a lot of grinding "sharks", then the relative skill difference is likely to decrease as more and more sharks will be in hands against each other. [of course, if you would just add 1 shark, or very few sharks, to the mix, it would increase, the point is that after some line is crossed, more sharks will decrease the relative skill differences across the poker rooms]

Again, using your poker gut feel (or even looking at HM data), you would oberve that at "sharky" sites players seem far more evenly matched on average than at highly "fishy" sites.

It would be absolutely stunning of course if somebody had access to the data to observe this "in action", i.e. whether the relative win-rates (the delta) on sites that move against winning players actually increases - if so, it's of course good for the remaining sharks, however, for the poker room, it means less earnings despite the same daily deposits coming in.

This one is also highly interesting in its own right, because here many poker rooms seem to think that "higher rake" = more profit where I honestly do not think it's true. Ironically, lower rake, in particular at the low stakes, could give rise to a better player experience and higher profits for the poker room. (though, to be fair, this does assume - in my mind, realistically - that recreational players will play more / invest more in a low rake environment as they will be and feel more successful and last longer)

What percentage of losing players' money goes to the house and what percentage goes to winning players? anybody care to venture a guess?

The ONLY reason I started playing online poker was because I watched Gus Hansen win a WPT event and thought he was cool. (and thus turned into a fish reg)

If sites start "going against" winning players...they might accidently crush the hopes and dreams of many "fish regs" causing them to stop pursuing/playing online poker.

Think of how many losing players claim to be on a downswing. Or how many losing players think, "I'm a losing player now, but I'm learning, and some day I'll be a pro."

If there's no real benefit to becoming a pro, the sites will kill off all of the breakeven/slight losing fish regs.

And if those players are gone, the player pool will become heavily polarized. With complete fish on one side, and long term career poker players on the other. The games will break so quickly because once the fish goes broke, we all leave. Whereas nowadays, I'll still stay at tables with all "regs"...because a fair amount of them are actually "fish regs."



If the sites don't turn course, they're going to be responsible for killing online poker. Things to save online poker:

1.) Focus on having "fun"....even mass tabling regs play more when it's fun. (and the fish obviously play more when it's fun)

2.) Kill off shortstacking. There's a reason why short stacking doesn't exist in live play, and NO ONE would ever invite a short stacking ratholer to a home game.

3.) Speed up cashouts. Even fish go on heaters and want to cash out and buy a new necklace for their wife. A LOT of fish always talk about their big score to their partner, but forget the constant $100 reloads. It's because of those "big scores" that their partners let them keep playing. Even fish need to be able to access their money, not just the regs.

4.) Stop huds. I'm a multitabling reg that uses a hud. I've even been using tracking software for so long, that back when I started, pokertracker didn't even have a "hud" componet. I used to manually look up people, and then write their stats manually in the notes section.

No fish does this, and reg fish are reg fish because they fail to expoit all of these legal edges. Get rid of it, and the games won't break as quickly (it takes a while for an all reg table to realize everyone is solid when there's no tracking software) And it will decrease regs edges, causing the fish to lose slower.

5.) KILL OFF PTR! I don't care if you have to buy the site and then just end it. Ban the site. Insta ban people for using it, or what you have to do. But NO ONE likes to be "forced into admitting their actual skill level." I have met so many "breakeven" players that are on downswings, but when confronted with 100,000's of their hands, they can't deny the fact that they're actually a losing player anymore.

EVERYONE thinks they're a winning player, or on a downswing. PTR kills that "delusion." If a live player plays online, and then sees on PTR over a huge same he's actually losing. He'll just say, but since "I win in live poker" (which he actually doesn't, there just isn't a site that proves it) and I lose online, online poker must be rigged. Therefore I'm going to only play live from here on out.

I haven't thought about this enough, but you make very good points. Obviously you can't kill PTR, but you could potentially encourage the sites to not participate or block.

Nothing like having some arsehole at the table read off the PTR stats and his notes on a fish, scaring him off.

Pretty simple...don't ban winning players but rather just give them the ole doomswitch like most sites! Pretty simple to keep people from winning on your site too much when u repeatedly 2 and 3 out them.

WTF? Banning players who win more than a certain amount?

Did they give a reason?

Pretty sure that this is the dictionary definition of preaching to the converted.

It's a good way to vent though

I can't talk to anyone else about this (like parents, or wife) because they simply won't understand.

Plus there's a tiny (very tiny) chance that a site rep will read this and maybe implement/recommend one of the changes.

IS there an everleaf rep on 2p2?

This could be cleared up pretty quickly.

That Everleaf rule is just wow, never knew!

Nice post op

^there's a huge thread on it in the internet poker forum, it's confirmed

there's just a minted rep (a skin of everleaf) who apologised and said they are just following orders

Yes, though I would say with one important difference:

If players are seen to complain just because "something is taken away" from them, then it is very easy to dismiss as a poker room.

The key point I am making in the OP is that - even from a purely egoistic point of view - it's damaging and counter-productive for a poker room to discriminate against winning players. That holds true even if the winning players affected do not go crazy over it.

One problem I see with your reasoning is that there is no such theoretical "100% fish" pool. When the sharks leave, the breakeven and barely losing fish get promoted to sharks. Also because most players are losing, neither taking out the sharks or allowing them to stay will influence delta that much. Not only that but without the highest edge sharks many of the worst players become marginal as they are not exploited to the degree they would have and are not targeted or "bum hunted" to the degree they would have in a more shark infested site. It's not that there is this high delta pool that sharks go into and normalize by playing each other. The sharks cause the polarization. You can't take them out of the equation and expect the pool to remain in a static state which you then analyze to have a high delta.

What's the worst thing that can happen from the sites perspective? Someone deposits, sits down, loses their entire deposit in one hand to another player who cashes out that deposit.

Whats the best thing that can happen from the site's perspective. Two people deposit, sit down and push pots back and forth to each other until the rake grinds those deposits down to nothing.

I agree with you OP that the best way for a site to achieve the most rake is to equalize skill level. Part of the higher skill set is table selection however. There will never be a pool of highly skilled (relative to poker players at large) players who sit around and play each other though. So it is very beneficial to a site to get rid of winning players who game select. Like I said earlier this will create a new crop of winners but these will not be the bum hunting type and the money from the worst players will distribute more equally among the new pool. Not only will delta be lower in this new pool but the recreational players will go on longer lucky runs which, I theorize, would psychologically encourage them to redeposit after they are ground down. There could be different effects for different levels of losing players.

But I do agree that openly discouraging winners has effects on how all players view the fairness of the game.

The best thing the sites could do to get more rake is ban HUDS.

It seems like the people making decisions at Everleaf really don't understand what they're doing. Lowering the rake limit to $1 seems like something done to attract regulars. Recreational players don't pay very much attention to the rake at all. But then they are banning the regular players that you sough to attract with your lower rake to begin with.

I always thought that site was garbage anyway. Really bad software and traffic.

Everleaf clearly has cashflow problems. One of the reps even mentioned something about promoting "liquidity" in its explanation for the rule changes. Since it's very hard for the site to attract new (US) players, it's trying to restrict player profits to indirectly reduce the amount of cashing out. I think the scheme is designed to protect the site in case there is a "run on the bank". Unfortunately for Everleaf, I think the scheme is going to cause... a run on the bank.
Anyone with large amounts of cash on that network should probably get it off while they still can, as the next logical step for maintaining "liquidity" is to prevent cashing out altogether.

This is all just so true. It's amazing how completely out of touch with reality the sites seem to be. If you're playing at a table and go PTR your average TAG, they are losing players more often than not. Often times very big losing players. Why do they keep playing? Because they want to be good, they have a dream of crushing like the top players at their stake and making a living from the game. The sites now seem determined to make sure it becomes completely clear that dream is never going to happen.

Depositing players aren't just degens looking for their gambling fix. Get rid of winning players and you are simultaneously getting rid of many of your depositing players as well.

In many ways it's like the lottery. Imagine a lottery where either nobody ever won, or when they did win the prizes were mediocre at best. People play because they know people are winning and there is always the dream that one day that could be them. Getting rid of that possibility is the most backwards idea ever conceived. I only hope the sites realize that as their changes start to kill off poker that it's their actions that are killing the games, and not try to blame outside reasons.