+1000 to Napsus for his great effort and all others supporting the thread with their views, ideas, research and suggestions. If so many PLO regs from all stakes unite something is up and needs to be done.
@ Roy
I'm very amazed by your previous posts expanding on the matter and your convince me with hard data and Switzerland attitude. So amazed that I'm writing this post right now.
(i'm not good with pasting quotes and links 2+2 style so i'm typing them myself)
Lets start with your question: 'what is a sustainable poker ecosystem/economy' or maybe easier, what is not.
To start with some hard data plz check out this link of the PTR country leaderboard
http://www.pokertableratings.com/top-countries
Total amount of winning countries in $ (roughly): $12.5M
Total amount of losing countries in $ (roughly): 1B
The difference = RAKE (plz note that only Party and FTP are included in this data)
I'm not sure what the market share of PS has been over this period, but i can image Party and FTP combined or more. So now we have an idea what has been taken out of the poker economy.
Back in the day where every month resulted in more deposits than the month before and poker was booming, rake structures we have nowadays were introduced and never changed.
Compare it to a plant: if it grows 10 leaves a day and you cut 5 it still grows pretty fast. But in the present, deposits have gone down drastically and the plant doesn't grow that fast anymore, but we keep on cutting it at the same pace. Obv result plant dies.
Heh, but there are still enough players playing micro/small stakes and depositing. It's not that poker died completely, but nevertheless almost no players are able to move up, games get tougher and tougher (also for players developing skill faster then the average player pool) even good regs who used to crush the games are moving down. Indicators enough that the industry is cutting this plant to fast.
Therefore I think that the rake taken should have a relation with the total amount of deposits to sustain a healthy poker economy.
Then the question: what is beating the games/rake?
What kind of winrate should one have when you beat the games or the rake for that matter and since we're talking about PLO here are some rake figures for different stakes on PS (source PTR) :
PLO2: 25bb/100
PLO5: 22.6/100
PLO10: 19.5/100
PLO25: 18.4/100
PLO50: 15.9/100
PLO100: 12.8/100
PLO200: 9.4/100
PLO400: 6.2/100
PLO600: 4.8/100
PLO1k: 2.9/100
PLO2K: 1.4/100
So to make clear at plo2: 1.5 full buyin is taken off the table every 100 hands
When you see these figures it's kinda obv why 'no money is flowing up' and games are drying out. But back to the question what is needed to beat the games. Well for plo2, you need a monster crushers winrate to b/e before rakeback. How many people have had a 25bb+/100 winrate at any given stake they played for 'decent sample size'. Only the superstars we know now is my best guess. Then we are only b/e, no roll building yet which is required to move up obv.
Roy you mentioned:
I played a couple of hours of PLO 0.05/0.10 today and the games seemed incredulously soft. I draw no conclusions from that fact, but it was interesting to see the games first hand.
You do not seem to realize that you are a 'PLO superstar' in the top 0.00001% of the total playerpool, having played millions of hands, I cannot believe you wanted to 'see this first hand' like your perception of what you see has anything to do with people not able to move up or beating the rake.
Also you wrote '
Furthermore, if someone can prove that it actually IS impossible to beat the games (as so many people are saying), I think that would do a lot more for any argument than just stating over and over "with rake that high the games can't be beat".
Roy c'mon, ofc it's possible to beat the rake (positive winrate after rake), but that would require WAY to much skill for that stake
I'll give you a story of my own life. I tried to explain my father that i payed 180K in rake last year while not winning anything remotely close. Since i'm paying around 10bb/100 i would need to crush the games with a 20bb/100 winrate to win as much as i pay (before rb obv). I am by no means a superstar on my stakes, but def in the higher region of the playerpool. Try to explain this to anyone outside of poker and you'll see how ridic it is.
Also: Do you think its simply fair that SSPLO is raked twice as SSNLHE in bb/100?
"I really don't have an answer for this without knowing more information and giving the issue more thought"
Rake = cost of playing that simple.
I understand that less hands/hour get dealt at a PLO table compared to a NLH table. What is the service? The hands we get dealt or the hours we sit a table. (obv sofware,security etc, but those are constant factors) Can think of arguments for both sides, but since NLH tables don't get twice as many hands dealt this should be an ez question.
The pokerstars rep answer about this are to ridic to respond to imo.
Roy, you have been signed to the Team Online congratz on that achievement, this is one of the reasons I wrote this reply, since you 'had to be convinced' and maybe can change things from the inside.
Cheers Elglado