In my opinion there should be no rake at all.
There are other ways to collect money such as:
- taking an administrative fee when creating new accounts
- maybe a monthly fee (not too expensive) where you could play the amount of time you wish during that money.
- a monthly fee for everyone that wants a table with their name with the reserved seat
- a fee for private tournaments
- and as I mentioned before the donations

Keep in mind that fees or other payments should be cheap as the goal is to attract as many players as possible. If the number of players go up fees should go down.

The fee's method is alot less attractive to fish. No fish will want to join a site where they have to pay $20 when they can play on Pokerstars "for free"

Rake is a great thing in online poker in that casual players do not know it's there. Why would you want to advertise that they do actually have to pay to play.

The rake free method is a great dream but its been tried before and it failed, a site needs to generate income to be successful, you need casual players, theres no doubt about it, casual players are happy to play and lose, they just want to gamble and have fun. The problem with playing on a site of bad regs is that regs want to win. They are decent at poker and they know when they are getting crushed and will leave as soon as they realise they are not winning.

I think the community should be pushing for a reduction in rake, rather than a one off fee or no rake at all. Even if you could get a site running on half the rake which is currently standard, the community would be happy to back it.

no administrative fee for new accounts, no monthly fee

take vindictus - it's a free MMO that makes money on vanity items like underwear, sunglasses, bunny ears

so sell a personalized avatar for players where an artist will draw their likeness
sell gold plated name tags that signify you're a donator to a site
sell PREMIUM client skins for $3 each something
etc.

This is a very good idea !!

Also, when its controlled by players, we can make some changes to the game that poker sites are not willing to do, but are wanted from the community. (And is done in most other sports/games)

I can think about 2 things:
- Limiting HU tables in some way that gives players that are wanting to play and give action (like Isildur) an advantage, and are giving a disadvantage to players that are just there to bumhunt
- Banning professional shortstacking

Funny, because sexyjesus just joined our channel and proposed this. I think that's a great idea- probably the best one so far.

- Personalised table names.
- Pay to create private tables.
- Bidding on waiting lists for top spots.
- Special avatar icons or nick highlighting for donators.

It's like the SuperNova stars on PS. Fish would love to donate because having a bold-fonted nickname or a special icon makes them feel special. Like a good player.

A company can create it's own poker room based on this software spending nothing to set up. They can focus their resources on advertising and marketing and rake the games (although much less than existing sites). With any kind of threatening player base they'll either be bought out or create a form of competition with the other rooms. The software will be better and with lower rake other sites may need to focus more of their resources on improving their own software and lowering their rake which reduces the amount of money they can spend on their own marketing.
Either way I don't see how a project like this can be bad for the poker community whether it ends up a success or not.

How do you feel if players could create their own tables rather than the site assigning them?

Like you make a game with minbuyin to be 20bb, max to be 500bb and sb/bb = X with the table name = dkddskdsk and a description saying "hello join our table"

I like it, thou it was tried from pokerstars and it wasnt really a success. But i like more general rules based on wishes from the poker community as a whole.
You guys can set it up, and if there happens to be a lot of shortstackers joining, there will probably be wishes from the poker community that they werent there.
Same with HU, if there is 30 people opening 12 tables each HU with the intention of bumhunting, a good change would be to limit the HU tables to favour players giving action. For example 30 HU games total for 1-2 NL (if there is big traffic). If you sit out for a certain time you get banned from that table for X amount of time or something. Many solutions here...

ok. Put something out there. Respond quickly and make changes.

Give people a blank canvas. Minimal interference for people to design their own systems.

TL;DR ... didn't second life gambling get shut down for legal reasons? what makes the bitcoin different?

It's not exploitation to pay for a service.

Couldn't disagree more.

There are just so many inaccuracies here.

Like 50% of what they rake is returned directly to the consumer in terms of bonuses and promotions, overlays and other bonuses. A lot else is returned in terms of advertising, signings.

Yes, Pokerstars have very big profit margins. They are a very successful company.

This federated approach has serious security implications. I've been following the idea of bitcoin poker for a while, I've seen these security issues raised in the forums, and I haven't seen it properly dealt with. What's to stop me distributing my own client software that sends hole card information to me? Or to track hands (one of your stated goals is no PTR; how can you attempt to control that if players to write and distrute their own clients?). What about a poker room that allows bots? What about me easily writing a bot that interfaces directly with the client API?


This is ludicrous. 0 rake doesn't mean 50% winners and 50% losers. Winners want to make an order of magnitude more money than losers are willing to lose.


This.

An extra from your FAQ:

You state that fish not caring about rake is a myth then provide some irrelevant example. The rest of the FAQ you at least provide some citations. Why do you think this is a myth? I can provide loads of examples supporting it (e.g. hundreds of games running right now at stakes which are unbeatable due to the rake)

what what what?!! this is the strangest thing read yet. Regs who are "rakeback chasers" choose this multi-tabling approaching because they get rakeback and it's profitable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't do it. You are saying there won't be a 'steady influx of recreational players'? I thought you just said fish care about rake (so will be attracted to your games). So you lose 'most regs' who are break-even because now they are losing. You lose the fish (as you state, no steady influx of recreational players). So who is left?


Regarding the bitcoin thing - it's interesting and something to follow closely. I'm sure if it ever becomes a viable deposit/cashout method, stars/FT will be first in line to implement it.

Why not?

if this were true there would be no poker economy.

very interesting read genjix. I wish you the best of luck and I'm excited to see where this one goes. Like everyone else has mentioned repeatedly, put a good deal of thought into the poker economy and ways of getting fish to the site.

No it doesn't.

The only info sent to a client is YOUR holecards. The holecards of other players is sent only to them.

No table observers. You can see who's seated, their stacks but you can't see the action. Simple.

Preventing cheaters is still a much discussed issue. I'll quote my earlier post:
But how about botters/colluders? Say the community finds that player A is a cheater. We ban them, they make a new account and continue. If there was a fee (i.e rake until reach monthly $10) then player A would pay fee, get banned, make new account, pay fee .etc <- They would be paying a tax for cheating and it would favour legit players.

Then others argue why stop botting? Is it really a problem? There was enormous resistance to computer trading when it first started happening on the stock market. It's come and the computers only make small fractional profits, and traders still trade stocks. It didn't kill the stock market. Maybe the free tables would be bot infested.

These are just throwaway ideas. This is still an ongoing unsolved topic which requires talk to figure out.
------------------

People will win more money. I don't see why it's hard to say that a breakeven player would be a solid winner without rake.

I state it's my opinion because of how frustrated fish get when the lose money and go on tilt- they obviously do also care about money too.

Maybe I should reword that. It's stating that our initial target would be the multitabling rakeback grinders. That lets build the software with them in mind first and foremost.

yes, it's nice the massive feedback of ideas we got from our online chatroom today. Lots of very inventive (surprising) ideas came out.

My favourite was the scheme where you offer special 'stripes' for players that've donated -> great idea.

Sorry, i'm not sure how you are disagreeing with me.

"In a rake free poker environment, it's possible that 80% of the players are losers and 20% are winners"

Are you saying this can't be the case?

A comment to the problem of attracting fish. Since it's in EVERYONE's interest to pay less rake. Doesn't matter if you win or lose. If you win you win more if you lose you lose less. Everyone gets more loin for their coin.

So it's just a matter of grass roots advertisement. Everytime you play live you tell people at your table about this new amazing pokerroom with almost no rake. You post in every forum online. You tell your friends. You tell people in the lobby on the site to tell their friends. Every single time you encounter someone who plays online you tell them. We can basically penetrate deep into the market in a fairly short time. Then when the fish have a hard time getting a game on their regular rip off site like stars,tilt whatever they will wonder where everyone went google it and follow suite.
I think that if the software is good enough we can take over the entire market in like a year. Leaving the greedy juicers to wonder how they effed themselves in the woot woot...

Ps. █████ ██ █ ████ everything ███ █████ is█████ ████ ████ fine ████ ███ █ ██████ love. █████ ███████ ███ your █████ ████ government

Its legal if its rake free without going to another currency, why even bother?

zero

But the client software is open-source, right? And from your wiki it seems like you are encouraging others to download and improve it, fork it, 'run their own poker rooms' with it.

So I could make my own changes (including some nefarious code that would send users holecards to my server). Then I would distribute my own client so other players play on my skin. Everyone who runs my version of the client would be unwittingly sending me the holecards.


the problem here is again is the source is open and can be altered, I could easily add in some code that makes colluding easier. I could automatically send me holecards to my co-conspirators and overlay their holecards on to the table, for example.

It would also be impossible for you have a banned list of software - automatic sngwiz calculations, pokerstove at the table, sharkscope hud, etc etc, all the programs on pokerstars prohibited list. Because again, with access to the program it would be trivial to add in these 'features' myself.

You can debate teh morals of botting if you wish. the reason why most oppose botting is that most people don't want to play against bots. That's pretty much the bottom line. It's not fun to play against someone who doesn't tilt.

If you do take this stance, bots will overrun your games at a 100:1 as it would be trivial for one person to run dozens of bots. Of course no one would end up making a profit and the site would die off.

If you do take an anti-bot stance, again I seen no way to enforce this, as you won't be able to police what I do with my client. I can change the code, run prohibited programs, remove any code that try to track what I do.


---

I honestly think it's great what you guys are doing, you are clearly makign a serious effort at this and it's by far the furthest a "rake free!!" idea has been taken. But I still don't think you have come up with solutions to some of the major stumbling blocks. Namely

- No budget to attract fish, fish are attracted not by low rake but by promotions, advertising, security, and customer service.
- Where OSS may have a history of being secure, they lack in polish, user-friendlyness, fun and stability departments. it will be an uphill struggle competing with stars and FT and these are things that weak players are interested in. And with themout, you won't attract players looking to make a profit.
- Making client software open-source opens up a huge number of potential security issues, and it makes it impossible to track for bots and prohibited software to make a friendly competitive environment.

Gawd, that approach warms my heart so.

So..., I am a fish, set down, lose, don't like the competition at that table, go to another table..., uh..., see the exact same "faces" there.

I leave and never return. Where exactly is the new money coming from again???

Tuff

You could start up your own evil hybrid poker room, but it doesn't mean anyone is going to play on it. If players did, as soon as something fishy was detected players would move to another room.
This project is really about building the platform and commercializing the client side is separate. You put a lot of money behind your room with marketing and additional customer service and you'll attract players. Profits can still be substantial at a fraction of the cost to players. You would have to build up your reputation the same way as existing sites have.

Firstly I shall preface this by saying that security through obscurity is bad security policy. Proven to be false. By saying that everyone has access to the technology means it's less secure is false- it means that everyone has a chance to make it more secure.

That's why Linux (open-source) software is used by armies, banks, nasa, most internet servers and supercomputers- because it leads to secure, solid, reliable software. Whereas Microsoft (commercial closed source) is only dominant in the desktop market. Your android phone? Running Linux.

Simply hiding away the internals of how the technology works and making it difficult to reverse engineer, means that determined motivated people WILL find holes but you make it difficult for the wider community to find problems and fix them.

Right, like a skin. This is how the internet works. You trust paypal with your money? What's to stop me making my own website to handle your money and just steal it (a scam)? Nothing. But trust needs to be built over time.

I'm not saying one table per Poker site. Each Poker site can have as many or as little users as they want. But the more successful sites must be doing something right.

Even with this "closed" non-open Poker market, we've seen the cheating scandals. Imagine if us Poker players had the chance to have actually seen the operating internals of the software to prevent this happening in the first place.

By simply giving away the software for free, you just promote a more competitive market. Give people choice. Allow them to vote with their $$ (or BTC in this case).

This 'project' is actually 2 projects:
- Writing the free software which is distributed and open for everyone. - http://kartludox.org
- Making a community run Poker site. - http://bitcoinvegas.com

Or you can send your holecards over MSN when playing on PokerStars... Why is this functionally different?

Automatic PokerStove at the table is desirable. One of these should be built into the software. Fish love seeing stats and numbers, and pros find it really useful.

Sharkscope- no observers, remember? So impossible to track players. Would be useless.

sngwiz- people use this already, right? Otherwise they wouldn't be in business. And is a SNG push/fold program that much of a problem? When I first started, I used to use Harringtons push/fold tables from the back of his book.

Sure. Maybe have regulated tables & unregulated tables for botters and cheaters... Let's let the community decide. I have mixed feelings about bots. On the one hand people don't like them, on the other they're just not that good

I can ban you from my server. Seize your funds and redistribute them.

This is several questions in one:
- There's lots of talk about methods for achieving a budget. A popular one is donations. My favourite is offering an elite logo/nick highlighting for donating players. Others suggested are: merchandising, pay for your own table name, pay fee once you reach 10K hands to continue.
- Word of mouth is a strong force.
- Isn't this forum a kind of "customer service"? People provide Poker advice for free. Imagine if they had a financial incentive to do so.

You stated that being OpenSource was a security risk above... XD
Yes, we're not looking to topple PS or FTP. Just to have a nice rake-free site for players run by the community. And to make a more competitive market to reduce rake all around- everyone benefits. It forces PS/FTP to update their software too.

Making client software open-source closes up a huge number of security issues.

Wikipedia:
Linus' Law states "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". More formally: "Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix will be obvious to someone."

Everything you say about security is correct and you make good points. You are missing the broad point.

The poker client is very unique piece of software in that the user itself has to be trusted to use it in terms of the rules in place. That is why poker software may 'spy' on the user, try to detect prohibited programs, force captcha requests, make it difficult to interface with the client.

If you make the client code open source, you remove all ability to police how the users are using their software. You won't be able to maintain a list of prohibited software. You would have no means of detecting bots.

"Automatic PokerStove at the table is desirable." - being able to do automated range-vs-range equity calcs is in no way desireable. At ALL online pokersites, this is considering cheating.

"sngwiz- people use this already, right?" - no, not at the table. Again, this is cheating.

"Or you can send your holecards over MSN when playing on PokerStars... Why is this functionally different?" - it would be trivially easy to automate it and would be undetectable.

"Sure. Maybe have regulated tables & unregulated tables for botters and cheaters... Let's let the community decide." - how would you know if I run a bot? Making the client open source, allowing people to write their own clients, and removing PTR removes the only way to try and detect usage of bots.


"Making client software open-source closes up a huge number of security issues." - again you make lots of good points of security, all the security isn't obscurity, closed source doesn't solve the security issue, etc etc... this is all fine. Accept in the unique case of poker clients, the user should be restricted on how they can respond to the server.

Basically when you open up the source, you will be opening up the API to interact with the server. You don't see any issue with this, seriously? You don't understand that some programs should be prohibited when making a poker decision, and that by doign this you would have 0 way to detect this?

I'll summarise this Wikipedia comparison between Windows and Linux's security.

Malware & Viruses:
Windows: > 2 million malware programs.
Linux: outside of researchers labs: virtually unknown.

Open vs Closed:
Windows: trust Microsoft to do the right thing.
Linux: anyone free to submit fixes.

Response Speed:
Windows: fixes released once a month. Security vulnerabilities known to persist for months and even years.
Linux: sometimes within hours, usually within a few weeks.

User Accounts:
Windows: everyone is Administrator.
Linux: carefully partitioned system with user rights.

Filesystem Permissions:
Windows: unused.
Linux: unix filesystem permissions.

You think I added any slant to that, then go back and read the Wiki article to make sure. Linux is more secure than Windows is a fact. OpenSource software has always proven to be more secure than closed source because closed source vendors usually don't give a **** to fix a bug when it's not directly impacting the user experience (not a priority over other features).

One only has to look at Cake Poker using XOR encryption for their card- WTF?! Absolutely ****ing terrible. And that's a big name site. Who knows what else is hidden in these softwares that we don't know about.

Yep, there is an API standard being published. See my protocol Request-For-Comments. The standard will be published so that anyone can easily make clients with minimal code.

Ways to detect bots eventhough anyone can make clients:
- Popup that requires you to enter a CAPTCHA or chat to a human.
- Use z-testing to analyse what is the chance this player is a bot to 99% certainty, given these input variables (play speed, bet-sizes, player stats...) when this is the average distribution with variable means and std-devs. It will then say yes or no. I believe this is what PokerStars does.
- Require suspected players facing a ban to setup a webcam of themself playing and compare their play.

... Don't mind additional suggestions people have.