This is a very solid post, +1.

I know some highstake reg always say how blessed he was to run hot at micros(!) so he could move up to a place the rake wasn't that harsh.

yes.

Yep, I'm a 2* (soon to be 3*) and current SNE and perennially stuck at small stakes PLO. I play better than 90% of the player pool at my stakes and honestly don't think I'm deluded in saying that. Unfortunately I have enough leaks (tilt, playing drunk, never table select etc.) or have never been blessed with enough rungood to ever make it permanently to midstakes or higher...

Fortunately I'm not just some kid out of college and also have other skills so have been doing more and more 'proper' work recently and will be concentrating on this next year. Stars will be losing approximately 80% of their income from me.

Don't get me wrong, I don't for a minute think I have any kind of right to make a living playing a card game but the cost of playing really pisses me off.

Steve's reply in this thread really shows huge shortsightedness IMO. I'm probably in the top 500 players that have played all-time most hands on Stars, and if I feel like this then god knows how the fish feel...

to pokerstars steve:

im sure you have all the data available from the sites cash games. i think you should take a look at the players on each limit who have played 100k hands this year and see what % of them are winning pre rakeback and what the overall winrates of those players is. im guessing its either negative or pretty low at anything under 2/4

wow, i knew it was high, but this is absurd

we should have an internet world-wide sitout on all site

rake is a ****ing joke everywhere (cash sng and mtt) but plo its even worse. I paid 2 ****ing thousand worth of rake this month just like that. all the other months ; always 1500~4000$. It's more than my rent you thieves

You somehow have to take into account the huge selection bias in this approach. People playing 100k hands in a very high rake environment are likely the ones running way above average, because running bad or average will result in dropping out in a lot of cases.

I would suggust looking at the result of players that have played >250k hands last year, and assume that these are good players. How did this group do this year?

Just forget mass sit outs or strikes. Doesn't work.

Unfortunately there's not much we can do.

Players should organize and do something on our own. Like that american organization (PPA I believe?) but on a world wide level. Lobby for recognition of poker as a game of skill and form an international federation of poker that standardizes and even have its own site where the all world (eventually) could play there for a veeeryyyyy small fee or even for free.

FYP.

This is a serious discussion and there are a lot of tangibles that go into why PLO's rake is higher in BB/100Hnds then other games.

For example PLO charges more bb/100hnds then say FRLHE but LHE is a more profitable game for them. Sounds strange right?

The reason being is losing players have the potential to go bust much more quickly in PLO then FRLHE on a hands played basis. Not all of these players are going to redeposit so there is no additional revenue. A game like FRLHE it takes losing players many more hands to go bust and each one is raked along the way.

In conclusion I think that PLO should be raked in BB higher then say FRLHE... but not as high as it currently is. A slight drop is needed to regain the players that they have lost.

Where Pstars has gone totally bonkers is they don't charge HU games higher rake. Where bumhunters winrates are astronomical. I'd go so far that these games should be done away with entirely. The rake that they get from these games does not compensate for the lost rake if one of the victims of this game were to choose another format even 25% of the time to lose their bankrolls. (rough guess)

Well, the rake at small stakes PLO is the reason I wouldn't even consider playing on Stars, prior pokerstars.eu I was concerned about paying taxes too,
I played a bit higher some of years back

Instead I pay s**t loads of rake on Ipoker, but getting more than 60% of it back, with no pressure what so ever to play a certain amount of hands to reach or maintain some über status.

Great software Steve, would like to play there, but I can't afford the rake.

If a meaningful change happened to the PLO rake at stars I would permanently move all my play there and never look back.

In my opinion, immense rake kills poker in an even more severe fashion than UIGEA/Black Friday. However, it is analogous to how when people take 20 years to die slowly from a chemical it is not regulated, but if it causes them to drop dead it would be regulated.

In the current situation, the vast majority of money deposited simply goes to the site. The people at small stakes who would have became winners either via skill or heater, moved up, and continued playing and continue paying rake stop playing because whether they ran poorly or simply weren't _that_ good at that time, their money, which is their hope, their chance, is gone mostly to the rake, and some to the other players. This happens imperceptibly and affects all levels of poker substantially.

Over 118,801 hands of mostly $25 and a bit of $50 PLO, I have paid $5,581.31 in rake. I have paid more in rake than my monthly living expenses cost. I have paid more in rake per month than I used to bring home from my college-diploma born job.

When people deposit on Pokerstars, Full Tilt, et al., they are not doing it to make a donation to multi-billionaires. They are doing it to have some fun and take a shot, to take their chance, and their success or failure determines whether or not they continue playing and continue paying rake.

Rake needs to be commensurate for the service provided. Sites are the secured venue to gamble at, and that, indeed, is a service that one can monetize. However, it is monetized in the most exploitative fashion and serves to slowly degenerate and destroy a game that is already disintegrating.

To be frank, the rake issue is something that must be resolved. Poker sites take too much of the money that exists in the game. They are, hands down, the biggest winners in the game of all time.

Many people imperceptibly lost their careers to the rake, and in the long term, which is all that matters, whether poker can exist in the world or not relies on this rake issue being solved. Thus, Stars must lead the vanguard in rectifying this issue with the greatest haste.

Failure to do so will amount to history recording the poker sites, and specifically Stars and FTP, as responsible for the destruction of poker in the world.

Considering switching to ipoker after looking at results this month.

Trying to move up to PLO50 but winrate drops and rake is still massive.

I had a brief conversation via PM with Stars rep and I was left under the impression that they will not comment on this thread. However, they didn't rule it out either so keep your posts, questions, ideas coming. Please do it in a respectful manner, this is not a zoo after all (pun intended).

There's no doubt they will keep on reading this thread and should we come up with something that works, I'm sure they'll take it into account. Furthermore, as Pokerstars Steve said, they are happy to discuss these issues face-to-face in the upcoming Pokerstars-2p2 meetings.

I encourage you to keep on sharing your thoughts regarding the topic at hand.

Thanks

Oh please. Show me the winrates of the top PLO10/PLO25 players over 100k+ hands. Seriously, show me. Post rake, their winrate. I'm guessing you actually don't know their winrate but that you assume stuff (more likely that you've seen the top winrates of PLO50+ players skewed by HU bumhunting and not six figure+ hands of micro 6max), so I'll just suggest to you that you look up the (again) top 10 or so PLO10/PLO25 players who have over 100k hands played (and on top of that, do I have to mention that the wild variance of PLO will mean that the top 10 winners of 100k hands can even be LOSING players in reality?). You say that they have a larger winrate than NLHE players, so you must have the data to prove it.

I've put in probably close to a million hands of micro stakes PLO and paid five figures+ in rake. At micro stakes poker. I'm not at all claiming to be a good (or even winning) player, but the juice you guys charge for me to click buttons at these stakes is absurd and I'm frankly not sure that I feel like keeping up with it. It's not that much fun you know. And while PLO generates more flops and action than NLHE does, the edges when the money actually goes in are for sure not very high (I'd be clapping my hands with extraordinary joy if I could average 55%+ equity in all-ins) compared to NLHE and other games, so the fact that as you pointed out, that PLO generates more action, is just a negative thing since the equities run so much closer (=more action, more allins, CLOSER equities, thus even more rake again).

You've created rake structures designed for texas hold'em games, and then wildly apply them to completely different games (hold'em omaha). It's absolutely absurd thinking and a failure to reason logically from pokerstars' side.

edit:

I'm just going to leave this here. It's PTR-mined stats of the top 50 winners at NLHE and their winrates compared to the rake they paid. Note again; TOP 50 WINNERS SITE WIDE at these stakes. The fifty people who crush their stakes the absolutely hardest and not until NL200 they even win at a higher rate than they are raked. I don't even want to imagine what the equivalent graphic looks like for micro PLO players (well, we already know for a fact that the rake paid is at least twice as high for PLO10+PLO25. Wouldn't surprise me if the winrates are lower than for NLHE)
Thank you for caring about us little grinders, stars. Thank you.

Today, out of interest, I asked to recreational players at work what they thought of rake at Stars. One, who has lost at least 5k this year played SSNLHE and PLO said that he "didn't notice" that rake was even taken at Stars. The other said he never really thought about it, but seemed like it's only a tiny % and not worth worrying about.

I'd say that these views are not uncommon with rec players, since they loose anyway it doesn't matter to them

I haven't read the replies yet but will take the time to sometime. I do think the rake should decrease, ESPECIALLY at smaller/micro stakes where it's just absurd (20+bb/100 at 10PLO?) but encourage you guys to be a bit more realistic and compromise with demands.. There is NO way they will match the rake at PLO with NLHE, and tbh I think that is fair enough given that PLO edges are bigger, and also you are playing way more flops/100 hands than NLHE (same with the average fish etc). You can't really compare the two in terms of rake directly. Plus the decrease would just be way too big.

Good luck to PLO players

Actually it worked quite well last year when they made the change to contributed rake and increased rake at the same time.
I'm pretty sure it would have taken a few more months if there was no strike.

Not saying a strike is the best thing but a bit of moaning might give a 0.5bb reduction in 4 months or so. Stars will milk as hard and for as long as they can.

They are quite close, plo has just a far higher std dev.

100k hand sample size would be pretty much meaningless, since many high volume regs have 100k sample sizes with both negative winrates and >10/100 winrates. Even in unbeatable game, we'd for sure see some >10bb/100 over 100k hands winners in a player pool as big as PS has.

That's why I hate the "PLO has better winrates" argument so much, when there's really just a few players with big enough sample size at micro/smallstakes to make even halfway decent estimations of achievable longterm winrates. Big (EV over >500k hand) sample sizes I've seen don't suggest PLO has any higher bb/100 winrates than NLHE has.


OMGClayDol:
I kinda agree with you, I think it's fair that NLHE has slightly lower rake measured in bb/100 due to different nature of games and the fact that there's more hands/hour at NLHE. However, both using the same method for counting rake (when no flop no drop is such a huge thing for NLHE, yet almost meaningless for PLO) seems really unfair to me. I think the right compromise would be something where both games would have roughly the same hourly rake at same stakes, but currently at microstakes hourly rake is probably around 50% higher in PLO than in NLHE.

There are ways for the sites to hide time/flat rake as well. For instance you can simply add a very small amount to the blinds. The exact figure would be:

total fee = (big_blind_size * rake_per_100) / (100 / seated_players)
small blind fee = total fee * .33
big blind fee = total fee * .67

Let's say a site wants to charge a flat 5bb/100 to play $200NL and the table is 5-handed.

total fee = ($2 * 5) / (100 / 5) = $10 / 20 = $0.50
small blind fee = $0.16
big blind fee = $0.34

So the blinds would be ($1 + $0.16) / ($2 + $0.34) or $1.16/$2.34 I assume the sites would display it as to further hide the rake from players, as they now do in SNGs. The cool thing about this is that the rake figure would automagically adjust using the above formula as the table became short handed. For instance assume the same stats as above but the table was heads up. So you get now:

total fee = ($2 * 5) / (100 / 2) = $10/50 = $0.20
small blind fee = $0.07
big blind fee = $0.13

So it would be $1.07/$2.13

The site would collect the same amount of rake, but the rake per hand would be lowered encouraging short handed play and table starting. All without those nasty complex tables and other stuff the sites have to use to explain the current system.

All this said it feels disgusting that being able to hide the rake to deceive players about how much they are actually paying is a requisite for any new system to be realistically considered. Alas, the current state of online poker. I obviously don't condone it but if that's what it takes to start to get a more sustainable system than we have today then I guess there's no option but to play the sites' little game.

Interesting idea, I must say...

I appreciate the diplomatic stance you're taking but sometimes it's better to call things as they are. These meetings are absolutely terrible for players. We've been having them for about a year now. The only thing that's happened is that Stars has been able to ignore the increasingly large percentage of disgruntled and dissatisfied players by instead promising to discuss their issues as the next meeting in however many months. Then, after being constantly treated and wine-and-dined by Stars, the reps come back wearing something that make rose colored glasses seem like an understatement and absolutely nothing is accomplished besides Stars getting to delay responding to anything indefinitely - because they'll just discuss it at the next meeting!

It's a great talking point but these meetings are undoubtedly the single worst thing to ever happen to players' chances of actually seeing any sort of real change. It's not even just the indefinite stalling but the complete lack of accountability. Who knows what's being said behind closed doors? The Stars employees can in no way be held accountable for what they say. If one of the reps dared quote them, he could risk facing a lawsuit for breaking the rather draconian NDA they are forced to sign. It's terrible.

Even beyond that as well is the issue of number play. Saying x% of players are winners at PLO over 50k hands (the sample size they used) is about as meaningless a stat as possible. Getting the expected number of winners expected purely due to variance would be incredibly complex and that's something you need to even begin to put that number into context. Not to mention survivorship and other such biases. If you're losing a ton of money you're probably not going to play 50k hands in the first place! Most people don't understand that or wouldn't consider it on the spot. Once again an issue with 'face-to-face' conversations and lack of accountability. As long as Stars can come up with reasonable sounding arguments, that will be more than enough to make sure the reps don't hound them too hard.

That of course segues naturally into the reps personal interests. Most of the reps last time were high stakes tournament players - people who have basically 0 unified interest with the other 99.9% of players. Are they going to be more interested in doing whatever they can to get a sponsorship from Stars or are they going to be working to figure out/expose flaws in Stars thinking and numbers or more generally to try to help improve the quality of games that have 0 direct impact on them? The problem is most people we'd actually want to represent us at these meetings can see they're a farce and thus are the last people that would ever even consider going!

Pokerstars doesnt care about you. They just want your money.

They want these kind of threads silenced, so that they can continue ripping the community off. The (temporilary) ban protesters.

I haven't read any posts but I'll give my opinion very quickly.

Even though I'm not playing micro stakes any more, I really think something should be done for grinders who play lower than Plo 200. The rake is way too high and I don't think it's fair for Plo 10-25-50 regulars to have to pay that much, and get so little back (unless they play an insane amount, it's hard for them to be supernova, even platinum for some of them).

When I read the line of thinking of pokerstars and the trip reports, i frequently encounter “the best plo players are still able to grind nice winrates” or “larger winrates for plo players compared to nlh”. I really doubt this and fear I think there is a huge error in analyzing the data.

I feel like Stars presents a list of the biggest winners on PLO over x hands, to show people still win. Below I show you 10 runs of 100k hands with an expected PTBB/100 van -3BB (bruin straight line) and a standard Dev/100 of 175. I think these settings are very realistic if you play 100bb deep tables (although based on player styles, pokerstars will have a lot of players with a way higher stdev, increasing the likelihood of a large win).

As you can see, even in this 10 runs, you have 2 decent size winners. So at 100 plo you expect to be town $6.000,-, but two of these players are up about $15.000,-. I think the above is a huge UNDERESTIMATION of variance because:
- It assumes a normal distribution, which is very unlikely if you take into account tilt and varying stacksizes (Winning or loosing those 3 >1000bb pots you play in this sample is a huge effect on your winnings)
- It assumes a fixed expected winrate. However your winrate over 100k hands itself shows huge variance. I’ve personally had 100k samples with a winrate of <-5bb and >10bb. Its such a huge effect if you flop good in 3 / 4 bet pots or hit your draws often or not.

Another important issue is that players running good are way more likely to grind out a large sample size, compared to players running bad (they simple bust halfway). So selecting on sample size is a huge selection bias in itself.

If you analyse the amount of data that Pokerstars will have, you will easily find many outliers of players performing very well and I hope you did’t base any Isle of Man discussions on data like this?

What should be done is that you select 2 sample periods. In the first period you determine a group of players, most likely to be very good players. In the second period you check how they do.
For example, an analysis I would really like to see can be constructed like this:
Select the 100 biggest winners on plo 0,25-0,50$ 6-max games during Jan-Jul (makes it likely these are mostly good players). See what the average winrate is of these persons on PLO 0,25-0,50 6-max games during Aug-Nov. I would be very curious to this and if these guys have a positive winrate, I think rake is not too high atm.