If a business makes a profit, they are still paying out for expenses in order to make that profit. You do realise that right? What you're trying to suggest is that if an entity/person makes money as a result of some activity, that they can't be paying anything out in the process of that activity, and that is ******ed sir.

Just like Dusty Schmidt says; Treat Your Poker Like A Business, because playing poker is a bit like running a (simple) business operation.

lol I didn't suggest that at all

What I suggested was that if someone pays expenses in order to make money at something, that their expenses are actually being paid by the entity that they make profit off of. For, without someone/something to make profit of off, you would never pay the expense.

So this is your basic argument:

I, as a profitable player, am the one who pays rake to the site because I am giving up money to the site in order to obtain a profit.

The other side argues this

I, as a losing player, am the one who pays rake because I am giving up money to both the site and a winning player in order to play poker.

You walk away with more money in your pocket than you had before you came, even after you paid all your expenses. You made a profit.

The losing player walks away with less money than he had before he came, regardless of who got what.

You're saying that the winning player is somehow losing more to the site than the losing player is.

How?

Other posters have tried to tell you why you are wrong.

I'll be more direct.

You are an idiot.

Yes, this is very possible, because there are only a few winning players, so each of them can lose lots of dollars to the sites.

There are lots of losing players and each individual one can lose very little to the site.

This can and does happen. Therefore it is worse for a poker site to lose say 6 winning players as customers than if it were to lose say 40 losing players, since those 40 losing players collectively give the site less in revenue.

Now do you see the light?

What happened to sites not distinguishing at all between winning and losing players? If it is worse for them to lose winning players, I would say a distinguishment has been made.

Do you see how it's hard for people to take you seriously when you've directly contradicted yourself?

No, there is not a true contradiction as I can clear that up immediately. To be 100% accurate the sites actually prefer not to lose 6 of their best customers and would rather lose 40 of their worst customers; but those 6 best customers tend to be winning players and the 40 worst customers tend to be losing players, so that is why I mentioned it like that. A site would not want to lose 6 of it's best customers even if 3 of those 6 were losing players that played poker a lot. So the site is not distinguishing here.

I didn't realise that you would nit-pick to that extent sir.

So the apparent slip up that you tried to latch on to has been nullified, so again, back to you.

No, it's been on you the entire time, lol. I just have a bad habit of arguing with people who aren't capable of understanding the subject we're arguing about.

Guy Laliberte is probably the helpful way to illustrate.
He deposited millions and lost it all. While he played and lost, those hands were raked.
However, the money that he lost allowed the nosebleeds to continue running without Guy as they were effectively passing his money back and forth between them. More rake was taken from this action than was taken from the original hands that Guy lost with.

Without Guy, this whole cycle would never have happened. Therefore Guy was far more valuable.

Hope that helps you BJ.

No, I understand perfectly sir.

Stars would rather keep 6 Supernova VIP's (whether they be winners or losers) than 40 Silver Star VIP's (whether they be winners or losers).

What does 'VIP' mean again? Ah yeah, that's right, people that are very important to the site.

Doofus, why do you think the best deposit bonuses are for first time deposits?

Sure, it's another simple analogy to show why losing players are in fact the one's paying the rake, but we've had lots of those and he tries to refute each one with the same fallacious argument:

"People who play poker are the ones who pay the rake, and since winning players play more than losing players they must pay more rake"

Doesn't high stakes make up a smidgen of a site's revenue?

Obviously if Guy had a high VIP tier, then he would have been important. If he did not have a high VIP tier then he would have been irrelevant, so essentially it is all dependent on how much rake he personally paid to the site.

To get new players to the site. Hopefully 100% of all these new players attracted, manage to get Supernova or better. That would be perfect for PokerStars.

Yes, this sentence sums everything up perfectly, and I believe it's 100% correct.

Yes. That would be good for them.

However, what you are saying doesn't contradict the idea that it would be even better for them if all of those new players achieved supernova while always depositing and never withdrawing.

It is this value, of a player who deposits and never withdraws, that you are failing to recognize in order to be able to keep thinking you're correct.

As with the Guy illustration, what allows the winning players to play more and therefore pay more rake? The losing players who made the winning players winning players.

So in taking guys millions from him, all the profitable HS players were made able to pay rake to stars.

Do you understand this causal chain?

Without guy's millions, a much smaller amount of poker would have been played. If less poker is played, stars makes less money. So, in depositing money onto stars and playing poker, Guy enabled pokerstars to make more money than if he wouldn't have ever deposited. Therefore Guy pays stars more than regulars.

The site cares more about whether those particular new players become Supernova's than whether those particular players deposit again or not, it makes no odds to the site which players deposit and which ones withdraw and so they do not use that criteria to value and rank customers.

A current winning player might deposit in the future if he goes through a losing streak, (and that losing streak could come about from only bad luck, or it could come about because now that player is a losing player and he has convinced himself that he only lost because he is going through a streak of bad luck).

According to the logic of the sentence in bold, the site would not care if no one ever made a deposit.

Do you see how this is not possible?

As for your 2nd paragraph here, you can't just ignore that there will always be winners and losers in the game. If you take away the current top 10% of winners, then the next best guys will become the top 10%. You will still have people who are distinguishable as losers whose deposits are necessary for winning players to want to play, and you need winning players to want to play to have a poker site that charges rake to be feasible.

Hang on, if Guy plays, loses his money and then quits, then future HS play between other players where Guy is not present, is not because of Guy, it's because the other players are choosing to still play and still pay rake, (as opposed to quitting poker and withdrawing their huge roll). Those HS players would have continued to play because they felt they had an edge on whoever they were playing in that second phase of games after Guy left, and so the 'fish' during the second phase of HS games were culpable and Guy deserves no credit for that.

Guy only gets credit for the games where he was specifically playing in. If he logged on for a few hours a month, dumped millions of dollars to other players in only 200 hands and then he quit, then he would have been eternally a Bronze star and therefore unimportant for the site.

Guy also dumped a lot of money to other players in live games. Should the poker site be grateful that he gave money to those players in a live setting and those players could now deposit that cash on the site? All the site cares about with respect to Guy was how much he paid in rake. If he paid b*gger all, then they don't care about him, he was a low value customer.

Stop ignoring the fact that the players who withdraw money and, according to you, pay more of the rake, would not play at all if there weren't a chance of chance of winning money. Where does this chance of winning money come from? The deposits of losing players. Therefore, no one pays rake without losing players making deposits. Thus, losing players who deposit more than they withdraw over their entire lifetime of play are the one's who pay the rake.

The site needs players to deposit and it values all customers, but it regards the highest rake payers as the most important customers, and the lowest rake payers as the least important, and that is what we are discussing.

Of course online poker needs deposits to happen. It needs players to own electronic devices with which to download the client on too. There is no need to switch the point of the argument here.

Yes, this is true. But where does rake come from?

Ah, here's our answer. Rake comes from deposits.

Since it's obvious that people who are winning players are not net depositors, they obviously can't pay any rake, because rake comes from deposits.

I know your ego is working really hard to defend you right now, and you just don't want to deal with the shame of so vehemently arguing for a point that is has been so thoroughly disproved, but just stop.

You are wholly incorrect, and you will not convince anyone otherwise.

While your overall argument is correct, BJ. Lines like this are what causes the thread to go back and forth.

''Therefore no one pays rake without losing players making deposits'' - Correct

''This losing players who deposit more than they withdraw over their entire lifetime of play are the one's who pay the rake'' - Incorrect. A simple example would show this to be so. A donk might deposit $100, then play 5 hands at $100NL and lose his entire stack. He would have lost $3.50 in rake and $96.50 to other winning and losing players, (the player pool essentially). The player pool can stop playing immediately and withdraw that money instantly if they want to and never play poker again and pay no more rake, or they can continue to play and pay rake with their own money which has now incidentally increased by $96.50 thanks to the donation from the donk.