http://www.pokertube.com/poker-news/...-on-jan-1-2015.

Does anyone know more about this?

So this is basically essence right ?

Sounds like the network is essentially instituting a shark tax for its skins that will trickle down to the winning players in the form of reduced promotions.

The sky is falling

The system seems to favour recreationals, but is not totally like Essence because player points are still going to be awarded via the weighted contributed method in cash and proportionally to the fee in SnGs. So it's more like Microgaming's True Value (that has indirectly drawn cash regs' rewards there down to 50-60% total at best).

The iPoker system looks more transparent, but still, the explanation is a bit confusing. Do I take it right that my 'virtual balance' (tracked starting from as early as January 2013, so in my case, my entire iPoker presence is accounted for) is nothing more complex than just my lifetime pre-reward winnings at a skin?

E.g. if I sign up, don't cash in my first two €100(=€94+6) 6-max superturbos, then win (€394.40 gross) in the third one (and also earn bonus €5 for it, which however doesn't count because 'bonus money is treated the same as deposited funds'), my virtual balance will become +€94.40, hence, if I lose the fourth one, only €100-€94.40=€5.60 will be treated as an actual wager 'out of my virtual balance', hence the total gross revenue assigned to my skin will be €6x3=€18 from the first three tourneys plus €6*(€5.60/€100)=€0.336 from the fourth one.

Or have I understood the scheme wrong?

Anyway, MTTs and Twister aren't going to be affected (which is logical because variance makes virtual balance accounting infeasible for them, I mean, it's hard to tell regs from recs basing on actual winnings), maybe there will still be massive promotions for these formats.

What a complicated system!

It seems the network is finally admitting that its policy of encouraging rakeback grinding for the past few years was "bad for the game", but these changes could be a total cluster**** for some skins and quite a lot of players.

It's not a good time to be a Belarusian HUDbot.

Hmm, I think breakevenish high volume players will be rewarded bigger under this system than big bb/100 winners withdrawing similar amounts (because of lower volume). As said in the article, bonuses are treated the same way as deposits. So, if a player loses 'at the tables' (pre-cashback), their virtual balance will be negative and they'll generate revenue for their skins, so promotions might become polarised between those aimed at recreationals (depositor freerolls, missions) and at masstablers who don't have enough thinking time to play well (like SNE).

This could be a good thing, only if all the money generated by the change goes towards promotions, bonuses, and marketing towards rec players.

OK, it seems I've misunderstood the system. It looks like my skin will get revenue only when I fall below my previous low point of pre-cashback winnings. E.g. if I first drop €2K, then go on a heater and win €1K back, then drop €2K more, then my skin will get revenue from my initial drop, then cease to get it during my heater, then restart getting revenue from my play after my lifetime winnings fall below -€2K again (and go down to -€3K total), even though I may get €5K in rewards (that won't count) in the process and be a €2K net withdrawer as a result.

This way, it looks like I'm one of the most valuable players to iPoker now In addition, if I now take the system right, jackpot SnGs may also be featured prominently in points-based promotions because rake there is 14.5%+ and pretty every reg there loses pre-cashback (so is very reward-dependent), and perhaps the same holds for DoNs and superturbos that have massive rake (e.g. 8% in €20-50 6-max STs) below the €100 BI level.

Well, it seems quite logical because, especially in SnGs, weak but workaholic 'rakebots' are needed for games to run.

Edit: looking at it once more, the language is so ambiguous that 'bonus money' might refer exclusively to the first deposit bonus of a skin, which is in line with what I've heard about the current network policies... well, things are tougher then: to be valued, I'd need to lose after all rewards except FDBs, making money from FDBs only I'm not sure if further bonuses awarded after 1-month inactivity count. But they'll surely no longer be a walk in the park, smth like that Stars 25% reload, i.e. people will have to redeposit quite a bit to get them.

I've come up with a funny allegory I can't help quoting here.

I am trying to understand this: assuming the other 5 players at this SNG are winning regs (bigger winners than you) then I think that their VB contribution to the pot is even smaller than yours hence your skin will be credited with a larger portion of the collected €6x6 rake. Am i right?

But I still don't really understand how this VB is being calculated and how the rake is allocated. iPoker - help please!!

I think that, in an all-reg game, no immediate revenue is generated at all for their skins (except that those who lose in this SnG get closer to the breakeven points of their VBs and it becomes more likely that they start generating revenue at all).

This SnG, however, generates additional revenue for the skins of those players who had previously lost their deposits to these regs.

For example:

1) A Bet365 rec loses a €95+5 HU turbo to a Betfair reg. Bet365 is assigned €5 revenue.

2) A NetBet rec loses a €100 HU turbo to a Coral reg. NetBet is given €5.

3) The Betfair reg battles the Coral one in a €100 HU turbo and loses. Bet365 is additionally assigned (95/100)*€5=€4.75 revenue and so is NetBet because, out of the €100 the Betfair reg paid as the BI, €95 had been deposited by the Bet365 rec and lost to the Betfair reg, and also €95 came from the NetBet rec via the Coral reg. Note that now these tagged pieces of money now both shrink to €90.25 because €4.75 rake has been taken out of both.

4) A Wiiliam Hill reg beats an Everest rec in a €50 HU turbo. Everest gets €2.50. The piece of money tagged to the Everest rec shrinks to €47.50.

4) The Coral reg battles the William Hill reg in a €190+10 HU turbo and loses. Bet365 additionally gets 0.05*€90.25=€4.5125 in revenue (because rake is 5%=0.05), and so does NetBet. Everest gets 0.05*€47.50=€2.375.

So people on stars r unsatisfied and willing to try out / switch to different sites and ipoker introduces a system that not a single unsatisfied stars player goes there. Their executive board has to consist of monkeys, its teh only explanation at tos point.

"Have u seen there are alot of stars players who are willing to move sites"
"Yeah, lets make sure they not going our way"

Yeah, basically it's now a ping-pong among networks: no network wants the disgruntled winners to land on their territory, each network wants them to quit poker altogether and leave all the recreational deposits up for rake grabs

But, and it's a huge 'but', there's point 6) possible in my above example:

6) The William Hill reg (or an occasional rec if all the regs are driven away), after winning all the rec deposits, just withdraws everything and never plays on iPoker again. In this case, the deposits are no longer wagered and the network no longer gets revenue from them.

To prevent this, iPoker is likely going to allocate some part of tagged money also to the skins of those regs who play it through instead of withdrawing immediately, just with a smaller coefficient than to the skins of the original depositors. Deposits do have to be 'converted to rake' by regs, so it's necessary to embrace the latter to an extent too (search Korn's articles on the future of online poker).

Note, btw, that the source-based rake model will not be applied to MTTs, and one of the reasons is that they need massive fields to enable eye-candy guarantees, so every player is almost equally welcome in that format. (A notable exception is the WCOOP ME, where SNEs no longer get free tickets; but it's not an exception because Stars are tight with guarantees, while iPoker is known for allowing overlays.)

Now that I'm thinking deeper about the mechanics of the whole thing, I just can't think of a satisfactory way to tag any promotional euro to a skin other than the skin that hands that euro to a player.

It's clear that a deposited € is a virtue of the skin that has enticed a player to put this € up. It's clear that a € won by a reg is still a virtue of the skin that has brought the money donor in. It's somewhat clear that a € of a deposit/reload bonus also belongs to the skin that has issued it because it has enticed the player to upload more money.

But it's not clear how other promo money, like VIP rewards, should be tagged - in the process of chasing a top VIP level, I do play my own deposits through, but for the most part I convert deposits of players of other skins (while they do the same for mine). Ideally, such promo funds could be tagged to all skins proportionally to amounts of their players' deposits that I play through... but of course doing so accurately is a hard task, it would become a mess, especially because my skin has other channels of both revenue and spending. Instead, this promo money gets tagged entirely to my skin, for the sake of simplicity...

And here we have a loophole. It turns out that, as soon as I lose a certain amount pre-cashback monthly, it doesn't matter under this system how fast (in terms of the number of hands or games) I lose it, nor how big my rewards are, nor whether I use mainly them or mainly my own money to buy in. If I drop €2K pre-cbk over 2K €20 supers with a -5% ROI (and earn €2.5K in rewards in the process, ending up with +€500), I'm going to be as highly valued as a regwhale who drops the same €2K monthly over 400 games with a -25% ROI.

So I don't think the new system will be that bad for 'losing' grinders, it will just take some money from crushers and give it to whales so that they last longer and hence deposit more over the lifetime because the game will become more enjoyable to them.

does it not count for anything that what made pokerstars the biggest site is the ecology there was perfectly set up for winning players?

and what happened they get more traffic then all the other sites put together if you look how some of the games they have changed traffic has dried up.

many of the losing players aspire to be winners and will leave the game if beating it becomes impossible.
the influx will not come.
every time a site tries to hit the regs and be rec friendly traffic drops. many people got into poker to hope for a peice of that pie if word gets out that games are now not beatable they will not get the name numbers long term and it will die.

been beatable is what made poker a $ billion industry change it and this will die.

One more factor that has made Pokerstars a market leader is their software quality. I'm not sure if the change will allow iPoker to pump more money into fixing their server problems, but if that money isn't spent efficiently, no recreational will stay on the network for long, a few server crashes will be enough...

Oops, that was a stretch. In fact, a mass grinder will bring negative net revenue to a skin under the new system (the skin will get a gross revenue of at most all of that player's pre-rewards losses, but the rewards will be all out of the skin's pocket, so the net revenue will be minus his withdrawal amount), whereas if a big winner is given zero rewards, he'll bring zero (not negative) net revenue and still not mind playing, but it's hard to distinguish these categories from each other and from recreationals who still need incentives, so rewards can't be abolished altogether, it's hard to tell how to adjust better to this system without losing traffic.

But most probably the system will give some (smaller) piece of deposited money to the regs who convert it, as said above, and it's not so black-and-white and hopefully high volume players won't get banned right away.

Juk

obv it was meant as a joke, but the truth is, that no poker room wants the 'former winning player, now loser due to the rake increase'-players from PS .. at least not in big numbers

you can produce as much rake as you want ... if you regularly cash out, you're "hurting" the system. smaller sites couldn't afford that.

for losers the games were always not beatable, also "losing" and "winning" depends on the competition. a winner on a weak site, could be a massive dog in a tough environment

compare it with durrrr and others. they made tons of money in the golden age, b/c ppl blew money away, like they don't care. but the competition got better, former winners turned into losers and left. since years the markt is declining, smaller sites are try to make their environment as fish friendly as possible.

the game is still "beatable", just for fewer players ... it's ignorant to say pokerstars kills online poker, while in fact online poker is "dying" (well actually the popularity is declining) and pokerstars just adapts (like all the others did before and still do)

they should focus on fixing the regular disconnects. Thats driving away more traffic than anything else

In theory, the winning reg should win the exact amount of before, just slower...
preventing the fish to be slaughtered.
Sounds pretty good to me

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahaha

Recreational players being driven away? You dont suppose there massive rake and 0-3% rakeback for rec fish has anything to do with that do you? Nooooo lets just dive into the pockets of the ppl who have built the site up and put years of work into actually being able to play at our grossly over-raked tables without a having to take out a second mortgage.

Truly had it with the greed and ignorance of the online poker sites, grab a lifeboat fellas!

ok, here's the workaround:

1. Player A knows Player B quite well (sort of friends)
2. Player A deposits $10K on one of the ~30 skins
3. Player B does same at his preferred skin (if he has not already that balance)
4. Lets play ~ 20 hands NL1K HU and Player B runs really bad (looses $10K to Player A)
5. Player A withdrawals $20K from this whatever skin
6. Player A ships $10K to Player B
7. Player B is down $10K at his preferred skin and gets rewarded like hell being sort of fish/rec/netto depositor