Quote:
Originally Posted by Howard Beale
The increase at Talking Stick is reasonable given that it's been $7 for so long but it seems to me that adding $4-5K/yr as a fixed cost might make some think of moving.
If you're winning +1 BB/hr at 20/40 over 2,000-2,500 hours/year, this is a 5% loss. I'm pretty sure the games have gotten more than 5% worse since the rake was last bumped up. I'd also guess the number of hours per year that a game is running has gone down by more than 5% too. You definitely can't statistically separate a 5% gain/loss from no change over that time period. ****, even inflation over the past few years has eaten away more than 5%.
Obviously if you can avoid losing 5% it's better than losing 5%, but I think rake increases are nothing more than lightning rods. People whine about modest, inflation-appropriate rake increases like they're forever entitled to whatever the rake was when they first started playing and everything else is pure corporate greed.
It's way easier for a pro to actively promote a game and buy an extra 20 minutes a day of game time than it is to fight a reasonable rake increase. Especially when the rake increase is even out of management's control and has been set by local minimum wage ordinances or whatever.
People who have been playing for a long time should be happy that for many years the rake increases were sub-inflation. When people poured into poker it was easy to overlook lost income when YOY numbers were stellar.