Yes but we were all so happy to find this magical online money tree that we didn't think to complain at the time.

YouGonnaGetRaked2.0

Stopped by to support this thread.

Paying more in Rake than I pay for my Mortgage is just disgusting.

How can a product/service truly be this expensive ? It is obvious that due to the differing legalities of online poker worldwide, an efficient supply and demand equilibrium has not yet developed.

There was a thread like this on LiquidPoker. Some players wanted to do mass sit-outs and email campaigns to PokerStars. The consensus was that:
- Other regs (myself included) would just jump back into the juicy games.
- Stars has no incentive to cut rake by 0.05% if a few nitty regs sit out for an hour.
- No unified action due to opposing views.

Lots of regs were even arguing that the rake is good value! The advertisement and the cost of the poker site. Conversely I argued that poker sites are pretty shoddy software that's easy to make. For the price we're paying we should have solid software that orders you free pizza with webcam and everything. Advertisement: other software managed to get by on faaaar less. Compare the price of modern games (some of which are technological accomplishments!) to poker software... Sites are laughing all the way to the bank!

Getting bored arguing I hacked up some examples as proof of concept to prove my point:


Still unconvinced they switched to other arguments. That you get good value on advertisement. That RUNNING the site, not creating it, is expensive. I've done research. 60K users on a typical poker site costs roughly $12k over 24 servers. Lets 6x that for an inefficient large organisation, so say $72k for running the poker site.

Advertisement costs: a full page in New-York times costs $60k. Lets assume you pay for 100 of these in a year or $6m. Let's assume that stars makes a loss on the tournaments held (eventhough they rake tourney buyins) of ~ $2m. That's $8m total.

Or a few days (under a week) profit for PokerStars. gg.

Here's our latest version of the client:


Software is free- you can download and run your own poker sites now although it's not recommended as it's very early days. We want to make a community-run poker site and are working on the setup to make that possible... talking to lawyers, acquiring funds, creating the platform & software, and documenting.

This is wrong. Because of the top heavy VIP structure it encourages people to play assloads of hands. No rake = no VIP structure = less hands = less tables = better poker.

if you can do anything with mine i will use it

so good hahaha

tyty, and i agree completely obv

Then start your own website and advertise specifically offering lower rake, and take market share over from those "greedy sites" that charge too much. You'll make great profits + you'll help the game you love.

Complain less, do more.

Personally, after playing live with 5% rake with no cap and being raked on pre-flop action, and having seen even worse places where they take 5% from every street, I think online rake is a joke, especially above NL 400. It only becomes a problem at NL 100 and below and then again only when the skill of the players is very close.

avatar change!

the rake is a huge problem at 1/2 as well
I played 60K hands of 1/2, earned $2.40 for the trouble and raked over $4000
(ran above AIEV)

woo hoo, rakeback?

With a rb deal at 50+ it's still more than 2000 dollars. If you're allin es under that, your'e still doing godd

That said, the rake is ridicously high. Pokerstars net profit of 500 millioner dollars paid by the players through rake is far too much

Yes, rakeback. But also, improve your play and you should make a lot more. Even at a measly 3bb/100 you would have made $3600 and that's not including rakeback.

Then push for deregulation so that more companies can start up and advertise without having to get a license. That way, there'll be more competition and the rake will drop. Also, you'll get to start your own poker site.

Thanks everyone who is using avatars. Nice avatars d0nk3y.

If anyone wants me to edit their current avatar post ITT.


Will make more avatars/animation stuff soon.

Have not seen the use of "measly" used much on these forums, well done. That is all.

so you need to beat 5bb/100 in rake to be break even at the tables at 50NL today is this right?

Good luck with that.

Could a load players pool bankrolls, buy a failed poker room cheap, and just go nuts spamming and advertising on donkey sites?

Hows the community run poker room idea coming on now that the threads been shut down?

And will poker players ever be arsed to do anything about rake? Ive started up 2 threads in the past for 'fulltilt rakeback petition' and recently outed a terrible security flaw at everleaf network and literally got 1 maybe 2 positive responses. I literally have no idea what is wrong with the poker community but action is not the strong point

because poker player are lazzzzzzzzzyyyyyyyyyyy

just voted and moved it from 4 stars to 5 stars

making a difference 1 vote at a time

Good thread man and thanks for the avatar!

Keep on Rake n' on..

Name a failed cheap stand-alone poker room and a price, there not cheap.

I looked into it a while ago out of curiosity with the same idea and the figure I got for getting a company to built a fully secure and working poker room was $2,000,000, I imagine a established room would be more. (this is what one company claims to have paid to get one built, it may be totally inaccurate)

If there was a room going for a couple of hundred thousand, this could be viable. Skins of a network are cheap, but you cannot set your own rake structure

Massive sitout only works for cash obv and many, many people are tournament/sng players.