Because WPN prefer to fund their promotions with additional player money. Imagine how small the GTD for the Punta Cana Poker Classic would be without The Beast fees or how much they would have to add from their own pockets to reach the $500000 GTD?

Pretty much this!

How many Bb/100 are the micros beatable for with the beast? Can you even beat 25nl? How much do they rake?

This idea is pretty flawed... I thought it was correct in one of my previous posts, but thought about it for a while, and decided the idea doesn't hold any water.

A player who contributes to a pot and loses, will lose the same amount of money, with or without "The Beast".

A player who contributes to a pot and wins, will lose $0.25 that would have otherwise been theirs.

Thus the winner is the only one who has actually contributed anything to "The Beast". The other players just contributed to the pot, losing the same money as they'd have lost if the pot was played on another site.

Rake works exactly the same way - only the winner has paid it.

I'm up $450 over about 20,000 hands, including a Beast payout of around $150 and roughly $100 deposit bonus... a small-ish sample, yes... but this isn't my first rodeo. I've won over much larger samples elsewhere. I guess that's about 4bb/100 ... but I know I've had some tilty/spewy sessions in there as well, so if you can avoid that and are skilled enough, it's quite beatable.

Well, if it's not popular without giving away a ton of tickets to it... why are they running it at all? Nothing is saying they must run that promotion, they should adapt for what will bring in players.

frankly i find it profoundly discouraging that it's the 16th, the new leaderboard is up and not 1 change has been made to the beast mamacooj appreciation fund

seriously, if i'm not going to be able to reach the top 3 in the leaderboard, i would like to know what is my incentive to play this? 2 people in the top 100 of last month's reported their official contributions vs their rewards and both had laughable losses on it. it's fair to assume the vast majority of the rest have had the same thing. so i'm expected to multitable games that are both terrible in quality and terrible in rake/beast? nice of you to give a guy 12k every 2 weeks to play 40 tables and do his part in making the games spectacularly unprofitable without rake races prizes and somehow even more spectacularly unprofitable WITH the rake race prizes but without any changes made to it i don't intend on continuing to lose money contributing to it

xposted from the other beast thread:

was running through some numbers extrapolating my stats to try to establish how many hands i would need to project to play to achieve x y or z on the beast, so i put my numbers against the points and prizes of the top 25 from the first 2 weeks of october and this is what i came up with (now this is only an estimate based on my own personal numbers so the actual numbers WILL vary, but frankly, there's no conceivable way the numbers vary by enough to dispute the general theme of what this demonstrates):



i have to play 78 thousand hands in 15 days to LOSE $120?

ha ha ha ohhhhhhh wowwwwwwwwww

now, while this DOES ignore VIP bonuses, this also ignores that not many, if even any, of the players who are achieving profit on the beast are achieving a profitable winrate from the tables

I would speculate that outside of low-volume head-hunters, there isn't a single player at 25nl with a winrate over any decent sample of hands (I have no 25nl data of my own - I'm basing this off of experience, what people have posted, and rake calculations). that player would have to beat grinders for what...10-15BBs/100(?) (or more based on some reported numbers) to break even with the rake and Beast? I don't believe that is possible. while 14/12, 12/10 and 10/8 players are beatable, they're not beatable by that margin.

The 25nl grinders I think can only show profit from Beast/VIP so long as the Beast/VIP payouts are greater than their loss in the two rakes (standard rake and Beast rake). That's a bad situation for "normal" players at those stakes.

The picture gets better at higher stakes - but that has always been true when evaluating stakes vs rakes. Tbh, I don't quite understand why 25nl is such a prime grinder spot...I'd think they'd rather do it at 200nl or higher where a grinder would find an easier time generating a winrate (pre-rewards programs) due to the huge mitigation of the rake. Even if they weren't able to beat the players as much, the drop in rake in terms of BB/100 is going to be more than the drop in BB/100 winrate as best as I can tell (that speculation is based on the difference in rake combined with the general winrates of the 14/12 - 10/8 crowd in my databases).

And conceptually...

A player-funded rake race... We pay an extra rake (Beast rake) so that if we play more tables (and pay more standard rake) we might get a % of the extra rake back. That % return will be <100% of the extra money we paid for the privilege of doing it (this is true for all but the top 3% of players or so). And, as an afterthought, part of that extra money we're paying in to fund our own promotion is also raked. And another part of it goes to a satellite for an out-of-the-country tournament that not everyone wants to play (instead of a cash-prize tournament where people could then choose to purchase a package to the out-of-the-country tournament or not...the cash-prize tournament could still be as evenly distributed as a satellite...)


I understand the motivation for WPN here, obviously. More tables, more rake; more Beast players, more rake. Because of this I can't see the Beast ever going away so long as the profits continue to be generated (potential long-term effects of the Beast notwithstanding...). If/since it won't go away, the payouts absolutely have to be adjusted such that: 1) the Beast pool is not raked and 2) everyone on the leaderboard gets at least 100% back of their contribution. As a third item, the tournament should be a leaderboard-only, non-reentry, cash-prize tournament with either standard tournament prize distribution or a more even satellite-like distribution like is commonly done in freerolls (either is fine; the latter makes more sense for this).


As for me...the Beast represents a profitable situation (I've made the calcs and know what I need to do). Thus I'll be playing Beast tables even though I'm against the promotion. That's poker. That said, I truly don't see why anyone else would mess with it - are their VIP payments so good that the bottom-line $ is still worth it? Must be...(in which case, their bottom line would of course still be greater with an adjusted Beast). Or they just haven't done the math on it or don't care.

I feel like I'm just repeating myself on multiple threads now...I'll try to quit that

Solutions for WPN

I know you need to "keep" The Beast.

I know that it draws casual players - even if they don't know what it's about.

I also understand that you have regular players helping create considerable "prop" for all levels, as well as a steady revenue stream to keep things running - and both are important to a growing network.

The Beast, however, hurts the network in that that casual players end up losing much quicker - and that the games are so over-propped that the quality is not tolerable - especially to fish, who would like to see a turn card once in a while.

The solution? Lop 80% off of The Beast drop. Just make all of the numbers smaller.

You can still attract just as many new players with your promo - and it will hurt them much less.

There will still be game-propping regs grinding for it. That revenue stream will continue to help you grow. Games at all levels will run - but not quite as many - not to the point in which the quality is so poor that the casual players suffer so greatly.

Also perhaps consider making a beast for each level, so players can naturally play where they are comfortable. Again, all games will be propped and running, but you will maintain quality - more like the business model of your successful competitors.

Is their an archive of points kept somewhere from previous months? Just started grinding here instead of merge and wanted to see what the average points were to be one of the "middlemen" since the top seems out of reach.

lol @ ^^^

"middlemen" on the Beast promo sounds like an appropriate strategy to shoot for, right?! only problem is that 15 mins of reading this forum will tell you that only landing on the polarities of the Beast gets you profit! you win by contributing as little as possible while sucking maximum kickback or you shoot for the top ~5% and bleed everyone else.

the "middlemen" of the Beast is ground zero for worst return possible. at least those that foot the entire bill know they're not ponying up and can dictate their volume. those that shoot for top 15 but end up ~16-125 foot the bill, just like the fishes, but are actually putting in serious work. lol @ you guys!

Im asking so I know what min volume I need to play to reach the middle. I have read the forum and many of the posts been here quite awhile so I think I know what I am getting into. I can get higher than the middle no problem but looking for an estimated number as a start point. Guess I shouldn't expect anything big negativity from 90% of posters as of late.

post #83 should be all the info you need to estimate hand counts for a given finish in the Beast

Mirage, thank you for doing the math on all this and posting everything you have in this thread. It looks like I won't be staying on ACR much longer unless The Beast goes away.

Every other site I've played on with a rake race did not charge extra to participate. The jackpot always came out of the regular rake which is fine by me. Basically as I understand it everyone is being auto exploited by the top 3% of The Beast grinders just by playing at a beast table.

I would suggest playing at the regular non-JP tables except there are almost no games running to speak of. The beast tables are full of 16/10 mass multi-tablers that can't be exploited enough to compensate for the rake+.

I'm a medium volume LAG regular who likes to give action to recreational players. I start tables when I see the demand and can probably be an asset for a small poker site. Suffice it to say I won't be playing on this site much longer and am considering my option (Merge). Its sad because I really wanted to like ACR but this Beast promo is just hugely -EV for me.

it seems so stupid for have a top-heavy VIP system combined with a top-heavy promo like this EVERY month. If they need the extra money, they should at least vary it up so the same few people aren't walking away with the money EVERY month.

Unrelated, but does anyone know playing 6max approximately how much rake must you generate to accumulate 1,000 PP?

I'm going to name my lawn The Beast... cuz I'm about to rake the **** out of it!

So here's my results after first half of october:
I played almost 67k hands at nl25 and 2k at nl50, very little from it played at non JP tables ( I can't tell how many exactly but def no more then 1k)
I contributed in little less than 2952 beast hands which means beast took me $738.
I got almost 22k points which gave me 21st place for $560

You only contribute to The Beast in the pots you won, .25 each

If you saw a flop and folded or lost you did not contribute

by "I contributed" I meant pots, that were 4+ handed, saw flop, hero wins

Gotcha, from the first post sounded like you might be calculating it wrong

why?

Because less than three players dealt in does not qualify for the magnificent additional rake.