This is obviously a ridiculous idea.

why?

There has already been a fair amount of reactions along the lines of 'oh, I'll take my action somewhere else' and 'I'll go play on sites where I get a lot of rake back', just like yours now. These are obviously understandable reactions if you want to try to build a bankroll and hadn't been aware of the rake problem. However, from stars' perspective these players don't hurt their bottom line that much. As long as the fish like playing on their site (and obviously they do since stars has an extremely good software, lots of games etc.) there will always be a bunch of games running.

If the majority of small stakes players, including the fish were playing on smaller sites with good rakeback deals and moved to PS once they play mid stakes (400plo +), there would be no problem. The rake/stakes ratio at Star's midstakes is still incredibly high, but not close to being as bad as at ssplo.

However, unfortunately this is not the case and as a market leader/monopoly, Stars has a majority of the ssplo games running and their rake structure significantly impacts the whole PLO-ecosystem on ALL sites and a sticky is obviously not going to fix where the fishies like to play. So the only way to get the whole plo-system to become sustainable, which should be in PS interest is to reduce the crazy rake.

of course the only way to fix the problem is that pokerstars lowers the rake but to achieve that they need to see that we can get organized against them and hurt their income. The only reason they get through with this is because most players dont know / care about this issue and are disorganized. Fish look at 2+2 too sometimes so we need to organize ourself and put pressure on them until they fix this. Im not saying what i proposed is necessarily the right way to do this but something has to be done.

Ok.
Yes. I only gave one suggestion because that is the most important suggestion. There are 3 essential steps every union needs to achieve before it can really have any impact. Discussing anything else doesn't accomplish anything until these 3 steps are completed.

#1 Organize - PLO/Poker players are doing a decent job of this ITT (could always do better of course). It seems like we have a decent amount of players together.

#2 Unite - Every member of the organization must be entirely devoted to the union. One of the first tactics to destroy a union is to try and split it up and create groups within the union who are willing to fight with each other.

#3 Focus - Initially, the demands must be very focused and defined. Overly, I think the goal for most of us is to create a healthy PLO eco-system. Currently I feel the largest problem is the rake and should be the single focus. When meat packing plants in the US were treating their workers like **** and paying them wages so low a full time worker couldn't feed a family of 4 with even bread and water the workers united. They didn't ask for HR departments to guarantee equal opportunity, they didn't ask for health insurance, they didn't ask for a non-abusive work environment... they asked for a higher wage. Eventually, AFTER achieving a higher wage, these unions have since been able to achieve all the a fore mentioned improvements along with many more. But they didn't START there. They started with ONE single goal. The one they thought was the most important. You guys are in this thread talking about MTT's, TV promo's, and a bunch of other stuff which allowed a PS rep to come in and address all of the less important issues and completely skate over the major issue.

We have a little organization but aren't united or focused. What we are doing is comparable to production workers who can't feed their families with their wages asking for higher wages, nicer bathrooms and better work uniforms... what ends up happening? They get a bathroom renovation and a new shirt while their wages stay the same.

This is probably my last post on this matter as they seem unappreciated and I feel like a bathroom renovation and a new shirt is better than nothing but I hate to see some of you put so much time and energy into this and achieve so little when I feel like you would actually at least give yourself a chance if you would put your time and effort in the right direction.

A good indicator is how many small games like 0.25/0.5 run compared to lets say 2/4. In holdem the ratio is at least 10:1 and money can move up (pyramid system). In PLO this ratio is more like 1:1.

Please just reread what I wrote.

PS as a business is obviously trying to maximise its earnings. Every dollar that is cashed in is raked multiple times, with a relatively small percentage of players taking significant amounts of money out of the system. So from PS' point of view their earning depend on

1) rake
2) the amount of cash outs/the time a $ stays in the system

Obviously PS is more inclined to change #2 than 1. I'm sure they've been seeing the same problem we have.

But intuitively they want to change #2, because it doesn't hurt their immediate bottom line. All the things that have been tried recently by PS have gone in that direction (reducing a reg's edge), because if reg's win more slowly, fish lose more slowly, thus increasing the amount of time/hands that $$$ that have been cashed in stay in PS accounts before getting cashed out.

PS is a business and it's their perogative to charge however much they like and customers have to decide whether to play there.

I just believe that both, PS and our interest align on this issue. Tackling #1 could make especially ssplo games profitable again while making the plo ecosystem as a whole more sustainable, increasing EV for us and creating value fro PS from a business POV.

Great posts after Roy's long post. You proved him wrong!

While people were rejoicing when they shut down PTR, they had just as much incentive to do it for themselves as for the players.

I dont think you can call yourself Switzerland when you are a Pokerstars affiliate.

But I understand, you gotta secure and maintain that Pokerstars Pro status.

Amen. It would be entertaining to see that 99% of SS Plo players are destined to lose.

And that 1% includes Stars.

Is there really still need for proof? I think there have already been lots of calculations, logical arguments and individual examples over decent sample sizes. Why is Roy still trying to make us sound disillusioned?

Paradise would be if a new software opens tomorrow, with just half the rake and the money to promote the site. I m sure with half the money for all games (including nlh) they´d still make a ****load of money.

Thanks for this Hoopman.

Been thinking about this and a few questions arise:

-should organize a PLO players association and get perhaps 200-300 members, how would that have more effect on poker sites than a 2p2 thread, where everyone can voice their opinion?

-if the association wants to take action against a site, for whatever reason, in the form of boycott for example in serious cases, how would we make sure that everyone commits to it? would be unreasonable for SNE grinders on Pokerstars or rakeback grinders on smaller sites. There would always be plenty of people breaking the pact, making the whole thing ineffective.

-...basically I'm asking how could we form a strong enough alliance that has more power than a semi-connected 2p2 audience. Here we have lots of people that wouldn't join the association but voice their opinions here.

Now please don't get me wrong, I'm very much behind your idea. I just would like these questions answered before putting hundreds of working hours into it.

Also, it seems to me that 2p2 is rather united in the case of PLO rake, plenty of people have voiced their opinions on the dedicated rake thread.

I think you misread my post. I think the 2+2 thread is a decent job of getting organized already... and I said that. I wasn't pushing for a PLO players association.

I also am not in favor of a boycott.

I think you are under the illusion that we have to do something to have an extremely powerful movement immediately. That simply isn't how things work in these situations.

We already achieved a response from PS with your thread. Unfortunately, it was wasted on lesser topics because of how many other options the PS rep was given by issues unrelated to rake suggested in various posts ITT.

Like I said I'm not willing to put the time and effort into this that you are so I fully understand you doing it your way with your strategy. I really don't want to kill the positive atmosphere in this thread with more posts if no one appreciates them so please just move on. Thank you :-)

Nah I didn't misread anything, but thanks for the clarification.

And some sort of organized thing for PLO players would definitely not be a bad idea, and the boycott was just an extreme example on my part, didn't want to indicate that you wanted that.

Many thanks for your tips and contribution though, we can discuss elsewhere if we wanna organize something.

Peace out and cheers.

I did some small time studying of my hem db earlier. Filtered for players over 50k hands.

That led to roughly 13 million combined hands and a pre-rake loss for those players of $44k, all at PLO100.

Once you start bringing in players with fewer hands, the pre-rake loss is a lot larger. It's not a huge sample size, but it does show that "regulars" are seeing huge win rates. In fact the biggest losing players lost more than the corresponding winning players.

Just wondering: If I´d want to start micro PLO again, is there any site better than stars? Did a little research and came up with: NO. true?

Unless you can reach 200k+ VPPs at PS, almost any other site/network is better than PS for micros in high rake games like PLO. Most bigger networks have enough traffic at micros, so it's pretty hard to justify playing on 20-30% rakeback (and marginally better rake structure) than 60%+ rakeback at smaller networks.

edit:
actually looking at rake structure and VPP multipliers, pokerstars isn't that bad at plo2-plo5 because rake structure is better than most sites and you have higher VPP multiplier at those stakes. But around PLO10-PLO50 PokerStars isn't really a good option, unless you play really high volume. Just make the calculations for your stakes/volume and see what's the best. Also if you play a lot outside the peak hours, make you sure the site(s) you play on offer enough traffic at your stakes.

You have to play over a million hands at these stakes to reach 200K VPPs. You'll be long broke because of the rake before you achieve that. And even after that, if you've been extremely lucky not to go broke, you'll get only like 40% back.

You can get 60%+ at any European network right from the start, just look through the affiliates. And the opposition is softer.

What do you mean with "at these stakes"? PLO50 is probably where 200k vpp becomes reasonable goal for high volume players. If somebody feels they can reach that I think PS is definitely an option worth considering. There's so many other things in going PS's favor (RSA tokens, good traffic around the clock etc) that I could understand even a small sacrifice in effective rake to play at PS.

Or if you were referring to what I said about nanostakes, I was actually meaning that even as silver/goldstar the rake at PS is reasonable compared to other sites thanks to significant VPP multiplier boost and much better rake structures than most sites. (unlike micro-smallstakes where rake structure is almost similar to other major networks)

SNE should be awarded for time commitment and hands played on lower levels below 1/2, so that lowstakes players who grind 24/7 can also get reasonable rakeback deal.

My another 'novel' (re: Stars RB) will be not so related to PLO, but I want opinions of PLO players first

Cliffs: Stars affiliates shouldn't get 18% of ring-game SN's rake, it's fairer to give 5% to them and 13% to players in promos (preferably Omaha-only like at Ladbrokes in August 2012, though icwtdt ).

The problem is not that Stars don't have money to give 50% RB to SNs. It's just that they prefer to endorse a huge affiliate octopus, paying them up to 30% of net revenue, which (for SNs) is 18% of gross rake, and prohibit almost all affils from spending these commissions on rake-based promos, thus killing the competition and protecting affil margins.

They think that this way they entice affils to prefer to send traffic to Stars and not to Euro networks, where affil profit margins are way lower than 18% and even than the famous 6% gross FTP used to offer - everyone is happy with 3% on networks now, and there's even no warranty that their signups won't be poached in several months.

This works in a way because there are lots of affils who deal with Stars only or at least put them on the pedestal, do almost nothing to help players, only write low-quality poker-related articles at best. They follow the principle 'send players and forget about them'.

But, although Stars are the main force that entices non-poker people into poker, it turns out that many serious players quit Stars when they see that this policy hits their bottom line as effective rake on Euro networks is smaller; and Stars' business model is to make people serious about poker, isn't it?

And I can't say that other sites don't bring recreational value to poker: they advertise in the media as well and convert people to poker from sports betting or casinos, and note that they are generous enough to give good RB% to players.

So I'll say again that Stars should pay more attention to efforts that affils make to bring traffic, as well as its quality and lifetime (affils should help people to find strength to play more when bust, burnt out or hurt by the site in other ways), and adjust commissions accordingly. Anyway, I feel that a 18% margin is way too much, hardly anyone deserves it; I'm sure most of those who deserve it would continue working even it was cut to 5% (resulting in RB rise from 37% to 50% for new SNs ).

After all, Lock affils get 20% net, which is like 5% gross after numerous Lock promo payments are deducted, and they're still happy to help players with cashouts and other issues that are, sadly, far more abundant at Lock than Stars.

You're not very well acquainted to the affiliate business. I don't have time atm to give you a thorough response but I can tell you that your numbers are way, way, WAY off. Stars affiliates get 5% of gross at most because Stars deduct all their expenses from the MGR. And I mean all - rakeback, promo money, stuff sallaries, deposit fees, administrative fees and so on. There was a huge scandal about this with some big affiliates. You can Google it.

All affiliates prefer their players playing at the European networks because they get > 20% comission there. It can reach even 30%+ plus money for proprietary races if they bring big volume.

Let's not derail the thread with affiliate business matters.

I agree. If anyone wants to talk about this in more detail, I suggest creating a new thread or checking out these links where they discuss the predatory stuff Stars have done on their affiliates:

http://www.gpwa.org/forum/pokerstars...es-201676.html

http://www.pokeraffiliatelistings.co...-you-over.html

Nano-stakes gets a VPP boost? How big?

So if someone wants to play nano-PLO, stars is the place to go? Still gonna tell people not to play nano-PLO though, lol