an also, how exactly would them having an agreement to not lower rake hurt you or any other small skin?

I don't think I understand your question.

It's not like anyone can start a poker site and hope to get traffic without a lot of marketing. That's much money to spend before profit. Ofc Pokerstars know this and has no reason to lower the rake. The only reason would be if players quit playing because of it.

However Pokerstars rake ~$4,000,000/day (40,000 nl100 buyins) which I personally find a bit on the high side, even for advertising cost, development etc.
I'm sure there are other companys making less than $4,000,000/day that spend more on developing and advertisement than Pokerstars do.

what i mean is that you imply that stars/ftp price fix, but they charge essentially what they charged when they had a ton of competition in the US. they're also hugely popular outside of the US despite still having all of that competition in those markets.

also, knowing how much a site rakes doesn't really mean much on its own. right now there's 31,767 tables running on stars, so yeah, i'd expect them to rake a lot of money. i'm not going to pretend like i have any idea how much money they spend, but i'm pretty confident that their cost scales with their player base a lot more than most people seem to think.

hey ****ers this aint rocket science either

someone do this

That's nothing new. Vegas is a cartel. The Indian casinos are a cartel. That's life.

If you think these people are going to take a pay cut in such a cut-throat industry, you're kidding.

Instead of trying to fight reality, why not try to overcome the rake as a strategic problem, not a political campaign.

Well, I never said it was something new or that it was something unusual, I just said it is the biggest problem.

If you read my post I clearly said they will NOT take a pay cut unless players stop playing and they're getting desperate.

So since we are on the same side I do not understand why you argue with me saying the exact same thing as I already said.

Let's get on with it.

So as someone who is not a NL player, how does CAP games affect the rake? From what I gather, it is a low-skill, high-rake, RB-whore's dream. Is that an accurate assumption? So even without "raising" the rake, stars is still raising the rake with this move. Not a great move for online poker, imo.

exactly right.

Guys! Rake-fee poker exists! For real money!

We are suffering from a collective action problem.

I can't believe some people in this thread are advocating against their own interest. or maybe they work for big poker rooms, i don't know.. that's why they defend rake.

Rake is like a cancer to poker. It kills many games:

- in raked cash game calling all in with 51% hand is a mistake when you have to pay 5% pot.. it means EV- to call
- micro / low limit heads up cash games are pointless unless your opponent completely doesn't know how to play
- and because of that there is no reason to start new tables because you don't want to play heads up
- short stack SNG games with too many solid players .. your edge is not enough to beat rake .. again it's like 51% vs 49%
- NLO8 without fish players .. once again it's like 51 vs 49.. you have to fold when you're not a big favorite to win.

currently only betraiser offers fair fee for playing poker.
this is only poker room when you can play 50.0000001 vs 49.9999999 and have EV+

Better to think of rake as a strategic problem. It requires a finely-tuned brand of tight and aggressive play. I'm not sure what that looks like (yet).Tthe higher rake is a tactical problem, not a political one, just like caps, antes, and stack sizes.

Here's an example I've mentioned before:
AK vs, a low pocket pair has only about 43% equity thanks to uNL rake. (Mr. Lederer gets 6.67% every time, because Poker After Dark costs money, you know.) So you need even more dead money in the pot to make the call when the bad player shoves his stack.

Look, taking the rake as a poker problem and making adjustments when necessary is surely reasonable. You aren't likely to convince Lederer, Parasol and Scheinberg to take a pay cut. OTOH, you surely can make adjustments to your own game.

How is a rake-free site going to have lots of recreational players? WPEX didn't -- and it was subsidized by a sportsbook. You basically traded coolers with rocks and hoped to make money off the rake refund next week.

Repeat after me: Rake is a strategic problem, not a political one.

yes, that will do for better player. but some don't adjust and with rake they are loosing players while they should be winning players in poker without rake. I think as a community we should take care of these players

here's something i was discussing earlier today that i think is relevant.

the reg/fish dichotomy is not really valid anymore. There are no longer tables full of people without the rudimentary knowledge of starting hand selection. There are, however, regular players doing things differently to other regular players and gaining an advantage as a result. The effect of eliminating rake increases the skill advantage one player can have over another just like the effect of increasing it decreases any possible skill advantage until at a certain point in becomes a negative EV game.

Rake-free poker best promotes poker as a skill game where subtle variations in play yield an advantage. To illustrate the point, In a rake free environment you might happily play in a game filled with "rocks" playing tight ranges in a sometimes face up manner because now a 3% edge is exactly that. Its a continual process of adaptation. Its why i love playing poker. rake is my enemy.

Before the UIGEA, the tightest tables had 30% of players seeing the flop. Now those are the juiciest tables.

The classic fish is playing 64/0/1, limps every hand, and will call down pot-sized bets with any pair or draw. This species is almost extinct. Today, the fish play 30% of hands at 6Max. And they rarely have a full stack.

As I've said elsewhere:

1. Standard donk folds flop to c-bet without a hand or a draw.
2. He may call the turn on a draw with lousy pot odds. That's all the fat value you're getting.
3. He won't pay off the large bet on the river without a real hand.
4. If he raises: 2/3 times TPTK is crushed (Baluga, anyone?) and 1/3 times he's bluffing.

Instead of getting fat value time and time again, beating the game means prevailing in a lot of RIO situations.

Think of these donks as like nits, just with a MUCH wider range. They aren't paying off without the nuts. Instead of setmining, these guys want to see a lot of flops cheap. Once there, they want to draw or see a showdown with any piece of the board.

While these are still terrible players, they aren't going to spew fat value unless they have a made hand that you crush. Even if they pay off, you get maybe 35bbs.

And this, my friends, is why the lower limits are so annoying.

Regs play passively except when they are coolering each other with set over set, flush over flush and AA vs. KK.

You have it backwards. Eliminating rake decreases the skill advantage between players because each player has more equity in each hand.

better to think of it as a betraiser shill, one of the seemingly hundreds in this thread

Are you serious? LOL im gonna repost this quote each time you make an reply in this thread.

Without a rake, bad players get better odds to do what they love best: call.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you.)

In my opinion this problem is not going to be fixed until online poker sites become legitimate businesses in the eyes of the federal government. Right now no new sites are coming around and sites actually *leave* the US market because of the current restrictions that are placed on them. This makes it so competition is almost nonexistent, all thanks to your friend the federal government. A lack of competition keeps prices up in any industry, poker included.

It is kind of funny that some guys actually think FTP/Stars would like to see poker legalized in the US. That seems extremely doubtful to me as it would almost certainly cripple their business in the long run. I'd say that any industry that has revenues of billions per year is quite powerful and could influence politicians if they wanted to. In this case, the sites really don't want poker to become legal and regulated - it really isn't what is best for them. They could easily have been the ones to use their influence to pass a very creative rule: that they aren't the ones breaking the law, it is the payment processors. So now they can run their business out in the open while still getting the government to prevent new players entering in their market. Sure they lose money once in a while when a shady payment processor doesn't deliver the funds, but making it so there are very few big/reputable poker sites far outweighs this relatively cost.

When online poker becomes legal I'd expect there to be way more rooms opening. At least some of the new rooms will offer a more competitive rake structure and it seems pretty straight forward to me that this will draw more players to that site in the long run. I mean if two sites are offering an identical product but one has a lower cost...

Anyway I don't think trying to battle the sites into a lower rake is productive, not at all. I think the battle should be on the poker legalizing side of things and you should be really active with PPA if you want to help this change. I am personally not that active in the PPA, but that is because I am too lazy to put in effort most of the time. It seems like you (OP) and some of the other guys have some ambition here - focus it in a way that is more productive so I benefit!

i played on hour with somoen HU at cake yesterday with 100$ stack ,
after 1 hour i was at 99,75$ and the guy was at 65$.....

i play a guy before him for 300..some hands i was down 200$ he was up at 235$..

i mean around 20bb per/100 hands...are u kidding me...

cake = garbage

i mean seriously, how can asite keep the same rate of rake HU table with 9 max or close to it..their should be massive change there imo

trust me you're wrong on this one. i recommend thinking about it more.

What ARE you talking about? Are you are saying the rake is good for the players because it give calling stations slightly worse odds to call you? If there is no rake,why not just making an bigger bet and create whatever odds you want to offer and you also get to keep all the $, the best of both worlds. I hope that wasn't too hard for you to grasp.

lol

No rake is good for weak players. Breakeven and marginal losers become winners. It is also good for strong players, since they keep more of their winnings. Yet the absence or presence of rake does not per se make the game more or less skillful. Since zero rake keeps man players from busting out entirely, they are the ones most helped.

No.

BTW, you realize the industry created the 100bb buyin standard to reduce the advantage of winners over losers, right?

You are a joke, just days before you wrote "You have it backwards. Eliminating rake "DECREASES" the skill advantage between players because each player has more equity in each hand." Now you decided to backpedal and say rake doesn't affect how skillful the game is. While that may be true, it does affect how hard it is to win $$$ in the game,which is the end goal of the game.Skill can only take you so far if the rake is too high and edge is small. As skill narrows more and more, the rake is gonna take an higher and higher toll on the players. That is the whole point of this thread.

crossposting, maybe it's worth it

1. How much money would be necessary to launch a poker site? Lets say 1000$
2. Than we ( the players ) invest in that site by buying shares until we reach that 1000 $
3.Site is launched. Yayy.
4.Some serious guerrilla marketing is happening by players investors. I would invest 10% of my roll and thus obligate myself to promote my (sounds so nice ) site. I directly brought at least 20 ppl to pokerstars and didnt even try.And indirectly? I could do a lot better if I try. Imagine if 10 000 ppl invests and starts promoting, guerilla style.
4.Rake is 5% with 100% rakeback, payed monthly into accounts of players with appropriate e-mail: ''Hello there you wise player,you. You have just recieved a 500$ (for example) directly into your account. A 500$ that would have been taken from you on any other poker site by that site as a fee. This 500$ says you are super wise for playing here. Tell your friends and enjoy our games.''
5.Word spreads like fire.
6.Players who are investors/stakeholders get the money(proportionaly to their stake%) from selling advertising space in the loby and on the tables. ( that money could be used in first 1-2 years for the site advertising purposes. )
7.Everyone wins?
8.One time... players?