Same here

I think the question has shifted a bit, originally it was should PLO and NLHE be treated the same? Which I take to mean raked the same, given the same buy-in structure, given the same timing for decisions, etc. I think the emphasis now is that the net rake is too high for long term sustainable games in PLO, and is particularly tough on msplo.

Another one bites the dust.

Makes me sick to my stomach to read these.

Pokerstars, time to meet players halfway?

Goodbye SSPLO :'(

Here are some numbers from a PLO reg at stars. He started with 22/14 at PLO10 and playing around 30/22 at PLO100:

PLO10 - 83.774 hands - 23 bb/100 rake
PLO25 - 57.290 hands - 17 bb/100 rake
PLO50 - 29.0000 hands - 14 bb/100 rake
PLO100 - 431.924 hands - 10 bb/100 rake

microstakes plo is worse than a casinogame atm, msplo is getting there.

Was doing some analysis and luckily i looked on the Rake BB/100.

Situation: Raised preflop & called a 3bet:


Look at how insane the rake gets in certain spots. The Rake at 0.05/0.10 is freaking 57 times higher than on 25/50.


Situation: Faced Steal in BB & either called or 3bet:


Note how the BB/100 and Rake BB/100 behave? Basically if this situation occurs it's an autolose unless you're playing HSPLO. The rake is so damn unfair that some situations are simply -EV as a standard because of it. Didn't have enough of a sample for 0.05/0.10 sadly.


I don't think there are more than a handful of players who beat microstakes w/o running insanely hot. Obviously some midstakes or highstakes players might be able to beat it pre rb, but what kind of "learning curve" is that for the beginners who are actually playing there? We have to see it from their point of view, not if some NOSEBLEED guy can win at damn MICROSTAKES... what a joke.
The ecosystem is so terrible in PLO, people can't move up because they are getting obliterated by rake so badly, it's depressing.

Micro & SS PLO Rake:



HSPLO Rake:



Ok so get this, the other day i was playing poker...


...nvm guess i wasn't.

Sick rake.

Imagine hosting a home game with this kind of rake. Your friends wouldnt tolerate that robbery.

played 37694 hands at .02/.05 in january and paid $364 rake

thread seems to be dying slowly, 1 weak responce from stars that made no sense just as expected.
also no reply from pokerfuse on my mail.

well who cares, i like getting raped on a daily basis

gg everyone

Do you pay 60% less rake because you're short stacking now?

stake me and i will fullstack! :P

rake is about the same for shorties fwiw

Stars is sponsoring some shortstackers, such as Godlikeroy, so maybe they will sponsor and thus stake you?

Sponsorship will also solve the rake problem for you. 100% rb.

PLO rake needs to be reduced. +1

So bad they motivated this kind of play, shortstack player is like the worst feeling to have near you, its an annoying all in no thinker player that play his predetermined charts of hands whenever you open slighly too big or loose, I just quit any table whenever I have one of them at my left, I prefer to play flop turn and river poker

I PM'd Pokerstars Baard and Steve in hopes of an open, honest reply in this thread and also to acknowledge the tournament thread. Let's see if we get a spot from them.

I'd love to redeposit on stars and play more zoomPLO10/25 but it ain't gonna happen when I check HEM after every session just to see that I broke even but paid five buyins in rake. Ridiculous. Instead I'm stuck on the ****tiest software ever on SvenskaSpel because their rake actually isn't mindbreaking.

There is no reply coming from Pokerstars in this thread, they stand by their earlier replies. They are not planning to change rake nor is it under any consideration.

I just pray it backfires for them and hopefully very soon.
Justice will be served someday .

I will not play a hand at stars ever again until something is done. If they do not plan any changes, i don't either.

Given the high rake of PLO @ Stars the game can not be called a +EV skill game, its more of a casino game.

Ty stars.

While we PLO players FEEL like that we could try to PROVE it. Suggested below is

a FORMAL MATHEMATICAL PROCEDURE to determine MAXIMUM REASONABLE RAKE %
for a pot-limit/non-limit poker game, particularly for NLH and PLO.

The results are expected to clearly demonstrate that:

+ for NLH maximum reasonable rake is significantly higher than for PLO, and

+ current typical 4.5% rake for PLO is too close (if not beyond) to the point when poker game is effectively converted into bingo/roulette: a game with certainly negative EV for all players at the table no matter which strategy they use.

General idea

PokerStars representatives like to repeat that poker for them is about sport and competition. Similar argument is frequently used to distinguish between poker and other forms of gambling when legal status of poker is considered (currently in the US for example).

It is true that in a long run skilled poker player will be a winner when playing against mindless gamblers... for as long as the game is not raked. It is obvious however that when rake % exceeds some certain threshold even a perfect player will not be able to win. Let us denote this threshold as maximum reasonable rake. Now we need to get an estimate for this value depending on the game type.

The procedure

To calculate a maximum reasonable rake we need first to determine a strategy for our "mindless gamblers": neither they should donate money nor should they intentionally play for a positive EV. For the simplicity of calculations and clearness of the results let us first assume that our gamblers simply go all-in with every hand. (If someone thinks this model is far from reality he/she should try playing $0.5 zoom PLO on Saturday or Sunday evening.)

So we have from 3 to 5 all-in gamblers at the table and our Hero -- a perfect player able to construct the best counter-strategy for any given set of opponents' strategies. Now we only need to determine maximum rake % that will still allow our Hero to win money.

Obviously maximum reasonable rake thus defined will depend on the number of players a the table, but I would not expect this dependence to be strong for 4-6 players. The result will also depend on the stack size chosen for the calculations, but we may use minimum buy-in as it is set by PokerStars for PLO, 40-50bb. The most important is that maximum reasonable rake thus determined will differ dramatically depending on the game type, namely NLH or PLO.

Calculations

The calculation scheme is rather straightforward, I would suggest using direct enumeration for Hero's hands and Monte-Carlo calculations to find approximate EV of each hand vs. X all-in'ers. I can go into further details if someone is interested.

===

If calculations described above were conducted and we had the results, we then could ask PokerStras the following questions:

+ Are you aware that current 4.5% rake allows 3+ gamblers at the table to voluntarily convert a PLO game into a bingo/roulette (-EV) game?

+ How this fact coexists with your statement that you treat poker as kind of sport and competition?

Personally I think such position would be stronger than reference to ill-defined "rake in bb/100" stat or complains about someone being unable to beat the game (sorry, napsus). However we need first the necessary calculations to be conducted.

Is anyone interested in developing this idea further?

nice post. stars don't wanna participate in this discussion nor are they considering any rake changes...so these things need to be brought up by the people who attend the stars meeting which is supposed to take place in april (is this happening btw?).
no need to apologize, the more and better ideas we come up with, the better. i dont care for which argument the rake comes down as long as it comes down.

You need to film a session video to prove that because Zoom currently can't be observed. Maybe Zoom 50 is softer that Rush 25 (though it's unlikely as P* and FTP are communicating vessels, and Zoom 50 is prone to harsher nit-infestation because FTP has no analogues of SN/SNE). An average table I saw during ~9K hands of Rush 25 had, besides me, a fullstack fish (not always aggro), a 50 bb gambler, 3 nits and a good reg - on every day of the week (maybe with 1 nit replaced by 1 more fish at weekends). I'm sure a good Zoom strategy involves exploiting nits as well.

The model you proposed is close to the way Daniel 'bachfan' Hutchings - the founder of ProPokerTools - defined playable hands: in the simulations he used to construct the starting hand chart, two players automatically went all-in preflop and four other called with playable hands (~15% of all) and folded bad ones, independently of each other's behaviour.

Let's find what rake still makes 'nits' stacking off with 15% of hands winners (that's of course a dumb sim as irl we and the nits change behaviour basing on the numbers all-ins before us, but that's how bachfan defined good hands and so it's the only way to get a semblance of an answer on my own, without PMing him ).

When two fishes shove and we call, there are 3 reg callers behind us ~3% of the time (0.15*0.15*0.15=0.03375, but I can't account for card removal precisely) and then we have ~17.3% equity (see the sim results in the spoiler). There are exactly 2 more reg callers ~6% of the time (3 ways to choose the folding reg, 3*0.15*0.15*0.85=0.057375) and then we have ~21.5% equity. There is exactly one more reg caller ~33% of the time (3*0.15*0.85*0.85=0.325125) and then we have ~28.3% equity. We're the only callers ~61% of the time and have ~42.3% equity then.

Without rake, we'd invest 1 stack to win ~0.03*0.173*6+0.06*0.215*5+0.33*0.283*4+0.61*0.423 *3~1.24 stacks back 15% of the time. With rake r, we get only (1-r)*1.24 stacks back. Also, we post 0.25 bb/hand and have to give the blinds up 85% of the time (in this model), so we lose 0.2125 stacks per hand due to that, resulting in a net win of ~((1-r)*1.24-1)*0.15-0.21. As you see, such a strategy never wins, we need to defend blinds looser!

This model is of course inaccurate, as PLO is a postflop positional game, so additional edges can be gained - if you can find a game full of whales nowadays. I've faced 4-5 fishes per table only on very few occasions, not every weekend like you wrote

Bottom line: the model is too simplistic to be true, but it doesn't change the fact that Supernova rewards suck

Sim results:

Thanks for fast response, coon74. You seem to have shown that even 2 gambling "terrorists" are able to ruin a PLO table. However it is not the result I am expecting...

The model is not for calculating player's possible edge in a real game, it is intended 1) to demonstrate the difference between NLH and PLO, and 2) to obtain an upper estimate for reasonable rake %.

I think simplicity and transparency of the model is more important than its relation to reality. Let me remind you that the model once proposed by Sklansky (small blind goes all-in and shows his hand) was not even close to how actual game is played; nonetheless once Karlson did the calculations it resulted in the most useful rating of NLH starting hands.

As of the reality,...

Zoom isn't exactly "softer" than Rush but there are way more preflop 3bets; and a lot of people tend to call for 1/3 of their stack with something like 8862(rainbow).

It might be counter-intuitive but the presence of reasonable players (unwilling to make -EV calls) is the only reason that actual $0.5 PLO (including zoom) is still beatable even with 4.5% rake.

Oops, I did it again (i.e. made a math blunder).

1 BI = 100 bb, so we lose 0.0021 BI/hand in folded blinds

So the inequality is ((1-r)*1.24-1)*0.15-0.0021>0 <=> (1-r)*1.24-1>0.0021/0.15=0.014 <=> 1-r>1.014/1.24 <=> 1-r~0.82 <=> r~18%

That's why the wildest live games are beatable even with 10% rake

PLO edges need more investigation, most likely involving PTR

P.S. PS should grant me SNE for life for this propaganda to make me consider playing there