think this step has been taken many times over the years, anyone with HEM or tracker knows what they rake.

No-one ever does anything, we'll all be raking a ton tomorrow and give the sites another few million reasons not to lower the rake. BS

I played about 1.5 million hands last year on full tilt. I paid over 200,000$ in rake last year. Im not too happy about that at all. Ive emailed them twice now and you guys fully have my support below is my transcript of emails. Ive had many emails recently to them in protest of many of their changes mostly regarding their rakeback policy change and their apparent disregard of the high volume players.

I think the average rake paid on your site is too high. I would like to be convinced otherwise or see a change in the amount of rake the sites collect from the players. We are watching as full tilt drains millions and millions of dollars from the poker economy every year. If i were to pay any monthly fee for any other gaming environment I'd pay around 50$ a month at the very most. Why does your site offer the same type of gaming environment yet charge me 15,000$ a month to partake in it? Do you really feel that anyone should have to pay that kind of money to play on your site? Do you think that there should perhaps be a cap on the amount of rake a person should pay each month? I mean your business model to basically keep your customers ignorant of how much they are paying is great. If you charged them a monthly fee instead of a hand by hand fee how many people do you think would be upset about how much they were paying, recreational players included? Basically the average player on your site pays about .06$ per hand they play. They would **** themselves if they were charged a monthly fee even though it would be the same amount of money. Yea Im asking for more money but lets be real.. All im asking for is the same amount of loyalty to your players that they have shown to you in choosing your site. The amount of rake paid is more and more relevant as you decrease in stakes. The higher stakes arent as affected by the rake and rake cap because it represents a smaller and smaller portion of the relative stack size when compared to the lower stakes. For example when two players get in preflop at the 10NL limit they usually have stack sizes of 10$. Lets say they both have ako and ako. This will result is in a tie about 94% of the time, when this occures the two players will split a rake fee of 1$. Meaning each one will lose .50 or 5 big blinds. The best players are winning on average 2-4 big blinds per 100 hands they play. If they are running into situations like this which many of us do on a regular basis where only the rake wins. You can see how the rake hurts the lower stake players a ton. While you take the same scenario and run it at 1000NL where the avg stack is usually 1,000$. Then they are getting it in for 2,000$ paying 3$ rake and each is incurring a loss of 1.5 which is .15 big blinds!!! Obviously a gigantic flaw in rake design here.



Thanks for contacting Full Tilt Poker Black Card Support.

And thanks for taking the time and effort to note down your thoughts; I've forwarded them to the Black Card team, who will take them under consideration.

Thanks for your enthusiasm for the site, and good luck at the tables!

Regards,

Mark

Full Tilt Poker Black Card Support



My response email:
Im going to lower my volume on your site by about 90% until i get a real response. So my yearly payment to the site will go likely from 200,000$ a year to about 25,000$. Im sure you guys have noticed my volume dropping dramatically. It is in deep protest of how i feel im valued on the site. And while i think the 400$ bonus was a nice gesture it doesnt match what i feel my value to your site is. Perhaps Im naive in my approach but I dont think there are many people who have put in my time and volume on your site. There's probably less than 100 people total is my guess.

MMORPGs.

If WoW could get away with charging $5k a month do you think they would just up their profit margin to 95%? I think it's much more likely they would feel obligated to spend (erm, waste?) it on something business related... Pretty sure the online poker business could lose a good chunk of the "fat" and still be very profitable (see above point).

Juk

Their profit is a lot higher than you think.

I think you misunderstood my proposal. The secondary max limits the primary max in terms of actual dollars to prevent rake from going up in games that currently reach the $ max consistently. I said 200NL would be the only ones seeing an increase (and also 100NL now that I look at it). Above and below would remain the same or be lowered.

4bb max primary
$5 max secondary

2NL: $0.08 / 4bb max <-- decrease
5NL: $0.20 / 4bb max <-- decrease
10NL: $0.40 / 4bb max <-- decrease
25NL: $1 / 4bb max <-- decrease
50NL: $2 / 4bb max <-- decrease
100NL: $4 / 4bb max <-- increase $1 +33%
200NL: $5 / $5 max <-- increase $2 +66%
400NL: $5 / $5 max <-- same
600NL+: $5 / $5 max <-- same

I think the game quality at 100NL+ would vastly improve due to more money moving up and certainly beyond 200NL you don't have to worry about increased rake as it stays the same as now. If this were insufficient they could still separate small and micro structures from mid+ structures like they do now:

2NL-200NL
4bb primary
$3 or $4 secondary

400NL+
$5

I understood your proposal just fine. Your stated caps just aren't in tune with what the major sites are charging.
http://www.pokerstars.com/poker/room/rake/
http://www.fulltiltpoker.com/rake.php

But what do you do when every restaurant in your town charges obscene prices and you have no grocery store? Quit eating? No, you pay because there's no other option.

How many people here want to wait until people leave in droves? I certainly don't want to sit around watching winrates decline to the point that we're forced out just because to some people it all seemed pointless earlier.

Obviously they're not in tune with what every site is charging (5% $3 and $5 max based on stake). That's the whole point of this thread.

Played about 3 months on Party 6max tables NL50 and 100 , didnt see a player with stats over 2bb/100, even the players who were utilizing some serious skills were break even. Realised then that barely anyone was winning, all rakeback pros.

This is a sorry state. If we did a regular sit-out where we protest and raise awareness (i like the awareness website idea) of high rake in the chat boxes, surely the sites would have to take this seriously.

+1

Awesome avatar!

http://www.carbonpoker.com/support/FAQ/rake.html
http://www.absolutepoker.com/online-.../rake-schedule
http://www.partypoker.com/how_to_pla...and_blind.html

JH1, Well then where are you playing that rakes $5 for 400nl!?!?!

... and how much of a difference do you think your proposal would make at 50nl? 25nl? I suspect its less than you think.

Lots of complaining but why doesn't ne1 want to protest this??

So make it 4bb and $3 max? idk, it's a balance between improving quality at small+ and improving base winrates at micros. I think I have worded it wrong, my apologies. I see what you were saying in your previous post, I misinterpreted.

My main point is that 4bb is much more in line for everything 2NL-50NL compared to the craziness that is 10bb rake in 200bb pots compared to the 3bb at 100NL and 1.5bb or less rake in 200NL+ 200bb pots. Plus the fact that, for example, 5% reaches the max at only 30bb for 200NL which is accomplished with small cbets that are called flop and turn or 3bet/cbet/call flop after which they play rake free, and with all 400NL pots that have a cbet called, while the vast majority of pots at 25NL and 50NL, nevermind all pots at 10NL and below, pay the entire 5% on every hand that sees a flop.

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeahthasaboutright, well if i get time during my very consistent daily 2k raked hands tomorrow, i'll email support and ask them nicely to lower the rake

I've replicated the PTR Rake by Site and Stakes data to include the sites' winrates in bb/100.

Cool avatars i'll definatly use one. Awerness is a good first step.

Big problem is that pokerstars, full tilt etc. are a business. They are solely concerned with their bottom line. Protesting will have little effect, as this is not a government entity that can be swayed by public opinion.

The only way to get them to re think their business model is to vote with your money and not play on these sites. Once they start to see their profits dropping they may start to take notice of our crys.

The million dollar question is where do we take our poker play to? There is no option other than to cease playing completely, as all sites charge high rake. Try to convince 100,000's of poker players that love the game to stop giving your business to these sites. I don't see it working.

The cycle will go on, we will all complain about high rake and then go and grind the tables and lining howard's pockets.

I have read through the thread regarding a rake free, open source based poker room run by the poker community. While I have no idea how legit it is, we should all be keeping an eye on the project and there is a small chance it could possibly be the answer we are looking for.

I'm curious to know what your opinion is having looked at this chart if you compare to what the winrate of a solid player is at these various stakes.

PokerStars raked 1.4billion last year: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...r-year-874709/

Their profit margins were in excess of half a billion.

I'm not sure how long you've been in this game. But if you were aware of the poker scene at all in 2005 you probably remember Party Poker's advertising. It was nothing short of incessant. Any channel you watched and at any time there was going to be a Party Poker commercial. Their entire global marketing budget was 300mil which wasn't just for poker but also their casino/blackjack/etc. Of which 100mil was due to bonuses. Again not sure if you were aware but they were giving super easy to clear upwards of $200+ bonuses every single month, sometimes multiple times per month.

Now a days advertising is relegated to mostly just poker related programming, and you're lucky to get any bonuses whatsoever. When you do get them they are certain to take a million hands to clear. Be that Stars $50 bonuses that require 1000VPP to clear meaning you pay $181 in rake for $50. Or Full Tilt's rush week where you pay $1000 in rake for a $250 bonus. I'd be surprised if Stars was spending more than $200mil for all marketing/advertising.

So yeah, you don't need to have any fear for the sites profit margins. Right now they are absolutely ridiculously huge. Decrease the rake by a massive amount and their bottom lines would still be ridiculous.

Site growth last year was > 100%.

This year its -3%.

The rake is pushing players out of the games. Imagine some 'fish' who plays $25PLO and is a pretty consistent 'loser'. He drops around 20 buyins in 20k hands. He feels like he really has an edge and just can't figure out why he's down 20 buyins. He starts to think the site is rigged and decides to quit playing and becomes one of those tons of guys at your home game talking about how online poker is rigged.

Obviously its not rigged. But that fellow that dropped 20 buyins in 20k hands actually won 20 buyins on the tables in those 20k hands. But he paid 40 buyins (!!!!!!) in rake. He leaves the games and that's that.

When that player is forced out of the games the games become that much tougher. And suddenly now the guy that was slightly better than breakeven is now a loser and ends up quitting the games. And now the games become even harder. So fourth and so on.

It becomes a downward spiral once you start to reach a certain point where the sites are taking more out of the games than players are putting into them. And I think we have reached that point. For online growth to go from > 100% to negative in one year seems like more than just random noise in growth patterns. This will be crystal clear next year when the games continue to deteriorate and the sites are seeing substantial losses of players.

The concern is that by the time the sites finally do something about it, it'll be too late.

Uhh... it isn't noise, but perhaps the myriad of other reasons that contributed to this have failed to bring themselves to your attention. Suggest you read about some of them here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28/internet-poker/

I happen to think this is a great idea and much better than anything else I've heard in terms of approaches to reducing rake. Twoplustwo is a start, and there's absolutely no harm in making your avatar an anti-rake one. However getting your avatars on Pokerstars is the real goal. It doesn't matter what limits, either. If there are anti-rake avatars all over Stars from micros up then even the ignorant while start pricking up their ears and paying attention.

You can do this via PTR and their 'top winners' lists as well.

Its very depressing to see the rake at work. This data is for Stars:

Top winners BB/100 average for $.05/$.10NL = 3.08.
Top winners BB/100 average for $25/$50NL = 4.7

Well, you can deduce the answer. Use stars as the example:

2NL rake - .20/ 10bb/100 - player needs a 5.01BB/100 wr to win pre rb
5NL rake - .38/ 7.6bb/100 - player needs a 3.81BB/100 wr to win pre rb
10NL rake - .66/ 6.6bb/100 - player needs a 3.31BB/100 wr to win pre rb
25NL rake - 1.59/ 6.36bb/100 - player needs a 3.19BB/100 wr to win pre rb
50NL rake - 2.80/ 5.6bb/100 - player needs a 2.81BB/100 wr to win pre rb
100NL rake - 4.94/ 4.94bb/100 - player needs a 2.48BB/100 wr to win pre rb
200NL rake - 7.31/ 3.66bb/100 - player needs a 1.84BB/100 wr to win pre rb
400NL rake - 10.95/ 2.74bb/100 - player needs a 1.38BB/100 wr to win pre rb
600NL rake - 13.19/ 2.20bb/100 - player needs a 1.11BB/100 wr to win pre rb
1000NL rake - 15.54/ 1.55bb/100 - player needs a .79BB/100 wr to win pre rb

This is assuming this chart is accurate. I have no idea.

If this is accurate, you can see that having a 5.00BB/100 wr wouldn't gain you much without massive volume. This is why the current state of the games is in the shape it is in. Unless you put in mega volume or are of elite level thinking at your limit, you aren't going anywhere for awhile. And factoring in the majority of online player pool is at those lower levels, you see the dilemma.

Again, I have no idea if that chart is accurate. My response is based soley on those numbers punched in that chart.

Deposit and withdrawal problems are no new phenomenon. In fact I've had substantially fewer problems this year than last. And the market slipping is overall so that includes the .IT and .FR nationalizations.

Blame everything but the actual problem is likely the sites' plan as well. Its certainly not going to be easy for them to admit the market can no longer sustain their extortionate rake levels. Which again is the danger here. If they wait until its too late, well... it'll be too late. These threads aren't just for the players but the sites as well. Greed can be a very blinding force.