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.