i played some limit today and got annoyed by other players at my 6max table.
so i decided to play some hu, but after a few hands it was clear to me that the rake was insane
i payed almost 4$ in 5min or so.
how could u beat 1$/2$ hu limit with that rake??
why is it so high??
which level does make sense to play?

At 10/20 the rake starts to get non-horrible.

in the faq

so no more hu till i get my br healthy for the big limits....
that is sad i like hu much more

i dont understand why the rake is so high..makes the game totally crap and unplayble

what i can tell you is how most graphs will look in games with 4BB rake and more. You are a small winner for 15000 hands with +1BB and then you run bad like hell against some showdown monkeys and overaggro 3betting freaks who rake you to death and on the other hand catch everything, and you drop 500BB in a few thousand hands. that would be no problem, if you would have similar upswings, but with this rake it is impossible. What i mean...if you run good you will only win pennies, but if you run bad you will bust all your (reduced by 4BB) winnings from 30k hands within 3000 hands...graphs will look as if the games were rigged because of the rake.

well pay rake and you will get paid by fishes lol .. like mentioned above 10/20 is getting lighter on it

This is really not how it works. If your edge is very small (like it is in high rake games) your upswings and downswings will look almost identical on average.

If that's not the case then you can blame randomness of variance, or you could possibly be doing something wrong that makes your upswings more even but small and your downswings wilder. Maybe tilting when you run bad.

maybe we are talking about two differerent things. What i mean is when you are running good your upswings (and i dont mean only a few hundred hands) will be decreased a lot by the rake. If you run bad it will be a 100% downswing.

What often happens in games with 4.5BB rake is that you win 250BB when you run hot and lose 400-500BB when you run terrible over a few thousand hands, because 200BB are raked to death. I am only talking about high rake games against guys with not enough fold equity against them (games you should quit imo).

Although 500BB swings happen frequently in my charts (which may be normal with my aggressive approach)

players at 2/4 and 3/6 are usually so bad that its still a very profitable game...even with the rake

this is really site and player dependend. I know a lot of sites where you are getting good competition at 2/4, because in 50% you will play a bored 10/20 player who is waiting for opponents. Often these players then think they can run over you and start reraising 50%, which makes it even more difficult (big pots , big rake, less fold equity).

I agree with you against fit or fold guys and maniacs.

Which leads to the single most important poker skill, game selection

If you play 2/4 or 3/6 and not aware of all 5/10 and 10/20 regs so you can quit them right away when they become bored and come play you, make some homework and get to know them. It shouldn't be hard. When I don't play myself I sometimes browse empty tables 2-3 limits above mine and mark regs who sit there waiting for action, especially if this is a new site I chose to play on.

No we're talking about the same thing as long as we're both assuming that we are beating the rake. There is no way that the rake can make your average downswing bigger than your average upswing as long as you are a breakeven or better player (after the rake).

Let's take your game as an example. Let's say you beat it for exactly 4.5BB before the rake. That means that after the rake you are exactly a breakeven player with a 0BB winrate. An average standard deviation for huhu is about 25BB/100 so that would mean that in a 100 hand sample there is about a 67% chance that you would be up/down 25 big bets with both being equally likely.

Of course, as soon as you stop being a winner because of the rake then it will effectively increase your downswings vs your upswings. But as long as you are a winner after the rake, your upswings will be bigger than your downswings.

So that is always the question we should be looking for. Are we +EV or not after the rake. If not, we should immediately quit the game unless we like losing money or the intrinsic value of playing is high enough to cover the losses (for entertainment or education purposes).

Edit:

I just realized that you never stated that we were beating the rake, so maybe we aren't talking about the same thing.

But in that case it's obvious that we shouldn't be playing the game. We're -EV so we don't play, end of story.

Yes OP, the rake disgusts me too. It makes me so angry that the sites have gone for a maximum exploitation business model but it's the way of the world I guess. My first 2 years of play were from 1/2 - 3/6 with no rb and I basically broke even, yet my database reports I earned around $20 000 for the site, how is that remotely fair?

In my opinion a far better idea is to have a system that is sustainable, protection for the fish and profit for any winning player. A business model my friend and I have discussed is one where only the winning players get raked at the end of the month at say 20-30% with a cap of $x k for the higher stakes guys. What this would translate to is equivalent of 100% rakeback for a losing player and a nice high % for a winning player.

This way you dont have to be world class to escape the low limit raketrap, if you win, you win, full stop. The fish are happier cos they are losing half what they would be on a normal site so they stick around longer and the moderate winners get a chance to have some profit at the end of the month. Unfortunately the fish don't have any knowledge of what rake even is (it took me nearly a year to discover how devastating it is), so it's pretty tough to market this idea.

Of course I don't know if this model is enough to cover expenses but I think the billionaire Party poker founder is proof that the sites profit margins are outrageously high with the current model.

Now if I could just find $500k to start this site...

What about the 7-game heads up tables on FTP they made the rake super small specifically for these table. Like the .10/.20 3 cent max rake

20/.40 4 cent max rake, this is pretty good right?

Whatcha talking 'bout Willis?
Bigger pots do not mean bigger rake as most sites have capped rake. So don't get angry when they 3b! you preflop 50% of the time -> adapt!

that has nothing to do with what i said

The thing that bugs me the most is the rake is less if u play on a 6 or ten man table on Pstars if your playing 2-4 then if u were to sit in on a HU table. They take only 50c when the pot hits 20 bux compared to 50c when it gets to 10 bux. Something has got to give here....The Heads up tables are the most profitable for the site....yet they all seem to exploit the low stakes grinders.

You said the overaggro 3betting freaks are raking you to death!
That is simply not true. I was just trying to point out to you that 3betting freaks cannot rake you more than "normal" opponents, because the rake is capped.