Solid analogy right there.

LOL.

None of them want your business and the writing has been on the wall for quite sometime now. Online poker is not a recognised profession and rakeback whores are dying slowly but surely.

Expect this sort of explanation from Stars..

Hello:

Thank you for contacting PokerStars.

In recent weeks, PokerStars has made several changes which have upset some players. We are grateful for the passion that you have for the PokerStars brand, and also for giving us the benefit of your point of view. We hear your feedback and appreciate that you do not like higher costs.

However, our growth initiatives require significant investments in areas of marketing, promotions and product innovation. Most of that funding has to come from the income we derive from providing the best online poker platform in the world. Our goal is to grow the poker community, and we have a number of initiatives around making the game more attractive to recreational players, supporting the introduction of more locally regulated online poker licensing regimes, and innovating with new products.

Finally, while we realize that the rake increases are not welcome news, in every game type in which rake was increased, our prices remain competitive with other major online poker sites.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Regards,

PokerStars Support Team

It's so funny that their rake is like other sites now, while their network still is full with way better players than any other site.

its pretty simple really, if there were a shop where my fav ice cream was the lowest price around and i been there for years. all of a sudden they raise the price, im not gonna go into the shop and cry about it, id find a new ice cream, shop some where else or just pay the new price, no amount of sooking is going to change nothing, they made their decision, they would of expected backlash, put up with it, move on, or perhaps get a business loan and become a competitor...

Everybody wants regs business because they contribute most to the rake - simple.

However as with EVERY industry in the modern world, regulation drives up costs & this is ALWAYS passed to the consumer that regulation is supposed to protect.

If an industry is successful every government wants their cut through taxation.

Whilst these changes are certainly not good, without developing the product, marketing it & attracting new money to the pool, poker will die.

The only way they can possibly maintain/reduce the rake on an ongoing basis is by significantly increasing the player pool - which surely means the US, which inevitably means up front cost.

and then there was the raked rebuys...

PokerStars main driver for profit is the number of games being played.

For a rake increase of 20% game volume would have to decline by more than 17% for the rake increase to be -ev for the site.

IMO this is very unlikely happen particularly as there are no real alternatives for us.

As with a few people you've misunderstood how the system works I think. All money deposited is held in an account which the company cannot touch. Gaming licenses depend on poker rooms holding all this money that's floating around between player accounts, within a single segregated place so that if every player emptied their accounts 10 seconds from now it would all be paid out directly from this place. Therefore the money that flows in and out of this segregated account has absolutely no link to the companies profits at all. Their profits are rake, and only rake. Deposits are not their money to access.

If someone very knowledgeable about such matters insists I'm wrong perhaps I am, but I'm quite sure this is the case. If my memory is correct then FullTilts owners allegedly dipping into this segregated money was the reason they were shut down.

If my memory is correct, Full Tilt never actually segregated the money in the first place as it wasn't a requirement of their gaming license. Their french site (or italian?) was supposed to be segregated as per that license, but they didn't do that either.

I could never agree more

YES EVERYONE GETS THIS RESPONSE ITS AUTOMATED! ****ing scums bags.
Keep emailing them demand a human respond, annoy them, abuse them, frustrate them.

Hello:

Thank you for contacting PokerStars.

In recent weeks, PokerStars has made several changes which have upset some players. We are grateful for the passion that you have for the PokerStars brand, and also for giving us the benefit of your point of view. We hear your feedback and appreciate that you do not like higher costs.

However, our growth initiatives require significant investments in areas of marketing, promotions and product innovation. Most of that funding has to come from the income we derive from providing the best online poker platform in the world. Our goal is to grow the poker community, and we have a number of initiatives around making the game more attractive to recreational players, supporting the introduction of more locally regulated online poker licensing regimes, and innovating with new products.

Finally, while we realize that the rake increases are not welcome news, in every game type in which rake was increased, our prices remain competitive with other major online poker sites.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Regards,

PokerStars Support Team

Dear Amaya Owners and Amaya CEOs,

please take back your recent changes. Your profits are healthy and fine yet! But they will not be, if you continue your recent profit maximizing policy.

We the PokerPlayer like poker, because we belive, there is a chance of making a decent profit now or in the future... if that belive is gone we have no reason to play...

You stealing the small profits or the hope for profits of thouhsands of players just to make a very small bunch of people more weahlty then they already are... - you dont need to belive in karma to come to the conclusion that this is a very very bad idea!

You giving your cash-cow some anabolica to drink to produce more milk. You think you know it all because you took some semesters in harvard and milked some other cash-cows. MORONS - YOU ARE KILLING THIS ****ING COW!!!

+1

But the current Poker Room Manager of Full Tilt who worked for the old FT and posted as FTPDoug said they did.

You think they gain very little from having a VIP programme. Has it not crossed your tiny mind that players will put in hundreds of hours more playing time to reach supernova and supernova elite and all those thousands more games played = thousands more dollars in rake and thus bigger profits for the company? Seriously, the guys who used to run Pokerstars and decided to implement and keep this VIP programme knew how to build a billion dollar company better than you do, so clearly they knew it was generating enough action to turn bigger profits for them.

"The by-product of making games impossible to beat is not their concern". That wins the award I think. The most ******ed statement made in this entire thread thus far. Come up to the stage and collect your award sir.

As for how many SNE players actually turn a profit, their profit depends on how many tables they have running at once. Someone who is a very skilled poker player playing one table will make much better decisions than someone flicking between 20 tables. But they find the number of tables that generates the most $ profit per hour for them.

The way it works is, money flows around player accounts, round and round. The more of it there is and the faster its flowing, the more profits Pokerstars can skim off in rake. Good players don't skim off money by rake, they skim it off by their skill giving them small mathematical edge.
Lets say the most skilled 50% of players suddenly vanishes from online poker tomorrow. What happens now? Well the remaining 50% of players will now slowly divide into the most skilled 50% of them and the least skilled 50%....and the same cycle keeps on spinning. The only difference is that there is half as many players now which means much less rake being generated for Pokerstars to profit from.
It has nothing to do with anyone owing anyone employment. Its a system where the company profits rise based on how many players are playing and how much money is flowing between them. If half the player are turning a profit because theyre skilled, this drives them to play thousands of games each year, thus driving the money to keep flowing at a fast rate...thus increasing a key factor which determines that Pokerstars turn a healthy profit.

Rake comes from deposits,as soon as pot has been raked this money become PS profit and can be moved from segregated accounts to PS operational accounts.IF there's not enough deposits to cover the rake taken and withdrawals the company will go bankrupt.It's that simple. Honest companies will close their business before it to late and pay out everyone their balances,others.... well,have a look at lock poker

You sir are either a Shill or an idiot please take your pick. Why are you here are you not part of the poker community?

Games are built around fish. The idea from the sites pov is that the games wont run without fish, and that therefore that the site is competing indirectly with the regs for the fishes money. If stars can ensure that thry get a higher portion of the mugs money they win. They can do this by increasing rake, increasing variance or decreasing pros. The pros essentially dont contribute rake from that perspective.

Sites have to work hard to find and attract the fish, and doing that can be expensive for them. If you assume that this will not discourage fish, and that regs dont play regs, then it seems like a clear win for them to increase rake.

I think the initial guys point as pretty accurate although pergaps badly pgrased.

you have a drastically distorted reg to fish ratio due to mass multitabling, software etc. that is terrible for the long term health of the game. there will always be winners and losers but when you suck the fun out of the game fish stop depositing.

the games getting destroyed was obvious and inevitable years ago- they are thoroughly unsustainable. even before this rake increase people have complained about rake for years, even though rake was actually less on a her hand basis than it was before the stars vip program was introduced. the issue wasnt the lower rake (after rb/rewards) being too high-the issue was an unhealthy poker ecosystem.

while i can't blame anyone for doing what is best for themselves individually,regs through their own collective greed have greatly contributed to killing them games.stars may be doing the same thing with this rake increase but the hypocrisy of those calling stars greedy pigs,short sighted etc is comical.

Wrt filing a complaint because of monopoly abuse. Assuming stars could be considered a monopoly (which I'm skeptical about, but not enough informed to judge properly), what exactly is it that you would be arguing? "Stars used to be cheapest but now they raised their prices on par with the other websites"? How would that ever be illegal?

well wtf kind of response did you expect?

It's very simple.

Pokerstars offers people SNE with good rakeback, if they play enough games. These ensures that there are always games running. As for the difficulty of games, 16+ multi-tabling SNEs are way weaker than basically weaker players who might have only 1-4 tables open.

If PS didn't want players to 24-64 table, they would set a cap at 12 or 16 since they know that not playing in botmode is kinda impossible at some level.

Thanks for the clarification. The underlying point is correct then. They will be shutdown if they fail to follow the correct procedure in segregating player funds from company funds.
Which means for people saying players who withdraw and never deposit are damaging company profits. No, they aren't. It has no bearing on how much profit the company makes each year at all, because all the money being deposited, is not the company money. Nor is the money being withdrawn. They can't lawfully touch any of it.