I'm not putting words into your mouth. Your position is that lower stakes games are raked relatively higher than higher stakes games, and that that is wrong. Stars has to make money somehow, and they are not going to cut into their bottom line. So if you want to decrease the rake at lower stakes the only way to counteract that is to increase the take at higher stakes. You can't have it both ways.

You have always been basically saying that it's wrong that people at mid stakes pay more rake in bb/100 than people at high stakes. Yet now in this SNG scenario your position is that since it costs the same for stars to run a 2 minute 3k hyper as a 2 minute 5$ hyper, it's wrong for Stars to charge so much more in dollar amounts for the 3k hyper. Do you realize that these two positions contradict each other?

Obviously a site should not earn 600$ for a 6max sit and go that lasts on average 180 seconds. But they can.

The rake problem is obvious. They can charge what they want so they should, and I would do the same. As soon as games are really starting to decline in terms of volume they will give in, but everyone is still happy grinding out tiny edges at this moment so they wont change a thing. Maybe they hire Lee Jones to put some roundtable thread every few weeks to try to change the perception of regulars, nothing more.

Buying FTP will not help (obviously).

Yes Stars has to make money somewhere, no one would dispute that. In fact I want Stars to be a profitable concern and doing well, I am sure we all do.

I don't like the fact that Stars cites the fact that the VIP program was cut back due to the economic poker climate (fair enough) but then makes an estimated $80 million bid for Full Tilt.

Is making in the region of $1million a day profit a lot of money? I think so. They could make 500k a day instead and radically lower the rake structure and therefore tie up the market for years to come.

Seeing that Stars won't deviate into their hundreds of millions yearly profits then I agree with you, rake redistribution is what is needed.

They could be completely radical and just set a standard level of rake for all levels, now that sounds fair to me. How about 3% across the board regardless of level. So a $1 pot would be rake 0.03c and a $1,000 pot would be raked at $30.

buying ftp by stars was as bad as the black friday for grinders.

no chance of any competition to stars anymore, and there is no real need to explain how monopolistic stars already behave.

This is a silly argument. Someone could pocket 1mil/year but instead you expect them to make the choice to make 500k with the same amount of effort. That is not going to happen and if economics worked like this the world would be a pretty LOL place.

The second part of what you said doesn't have much merit either. If you can make 2 mil in the next two years then it would only be reasonable to choose to make 500k/year if you could guarantee with 100% certainty that the market would still be available for significantly more than 4 years. Obviously this is not realistic.

Just to clarify my position: I do think that games are pretty heavily raked but I don't think it's some terrible situation like everyone makes it out to be. What I really don't like is that people who are most passionate about promoting how evil Stars is either offer no solutions, or solutions such as "Hey, Stars should just make less money and stuff!"

Your idea is horrible. This would be really bad for the games. I really wish that people would think before they post.

Obviously if Stars were to do this then anybody playing over 50NL would be paying more rake because it would be uncapped.

At 100NL a 200bb pot would get raked $6. This would turn a lot of okay regs into losing players and guess where they would go? They'd all move down to 50NL and cause more regs from there to drop to 25NL. Wash, rinse and repeat. The micros would get tougher not better and this would only increase Stars bottom line since even more players would simply be grinding for RB instead of actually making money at the tables.

What would be truly awesome, is if Stars looked at the rake in all games in terms of bb/100 and see how much bb/100 rake a game can really tolerate. I was at the March meetings and I did bring this up, sadly nothing has come of it.... yet.

I'm grinding 25nl right now and it is costing me a whopping $20/hour in rake which seems kinda high. Granted, I'm Supernova and get decent rewards but still I don't get how my grind makes Stars that much money. I haven't even put in any serious volume this month (55k hands) and I've paid pretty close to $1k in rake.

Rake really needs to be more proportionate to the stakes you're playing. That means lower caps. TBH, I think that the percentage is fine but the caps in bb should probably come down a bit at the midstakes and a lot at the micros. I think that at NL10 the cap basically never gets hit unless you have 3 full stacks get it all-in.

Lazyace

You are correct that my suggestion of giving a %age of rake at every level did not take much thought from me and your assumptions may well be true.

What I am aware of however is that the rake at many micro/lower limit levels combined with a stronger player pool is making some games / stakes increasingly hard to beat.

I don't want to see online poker turn from a game of skill where you can win by outplaying your opponents to Blackjack where the only winning going on is with the house.

Thanks for posting this. It's frustrating I've done such an apparently poor job of expression my position, at least from what you've read. My sole interest here is in having a healthy poker economy, for all stakes. Although I have used very high stakes to illustrate exactly how much rake lower stakes players pay, I ultimately could not care less if certain stakes or games are more favorable value wise than others. A point I've mentioned multiple times is that high stakes revenue is largely irrelevant. You can see that data here: http://www.buyhands.com/blog/rake-top-100/ Stars didn't recently increase the Stars high stakes rake for any sake of fairness or balance, they increased high stakes rake solely out of greed. And the whole player representatives thing gave them an opportunity to try to use lower stakes players as a scape goat to avoid taking much heat for their own greed from higher stakes players.

I do agree that Stars has to make money somehow. However, many people are leaving this game because of the excessive rake. I don't even mean regulars who consciously leave because they go from winners to rakeback pros or even small losers. I am talking about casual players. Imagine a casual player who does well in his home game and decides to go fire up some microstakes PLO online. He earns 10bb/100 pre rake - that is a huge earn rate. Unfortunately for him Stars charges 20+bb/100 in rake at microstakes PLO. He is going to feel like he's outplaying his opponents, will indeed be outplaying his opponents, he's going to get it good - and hold. Yet somehow, he's going to be losing at 10bb/100. Dropping a buyin every 1000 hands, a bankroll every month - all the while constantly outplaying his opponents. How long do you think this player is going to stick around? No, he's going to end up quitting or even here: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/28...dition-255990/ If you ask him why he quit the last thing he'd ever mention would be those few cents to couple of bucks that were charged every pot.

When people stop using your product because it's too expensive, what do you do? According to Stars you make it even more expensive for the remaining few regular customers. They obviously believe that online poker has all but completely price inelastic demand. When the games are good, they are probably right. But the games aren't good, and they are taking a dangerously long time to adjust. With the current state of the games I feel that favorable adjustments to their rake structures would not only generally be favorable to players, but ultimately to Stars as well.

You failed to say why not.

The players have made very strong arguments and each group of reps has pushed pushed it. It clearly fits with the fairness that stars pushes. Please don't make mockery of Stars belief in fairness, without 6x accross the board nobody can stars seriously when they say they believe in fairness.

nobody here is taking stars seriously anyway at this point, it's just a bad joke

Stars sucks and just ignores all good points on rake

6max players not getting 6x VPP is the most disappointing news to me.

Stars is the best site right now, but if Party or iPoker ever release 'Fast Poker' with software which isn't horrible, I would honestly play on either of those sites over Stars.
The rewards are simply better for 6max players.

If Stars is trying to maximize their profits, it makes sense for players to do the same.
As they say, just business nothing personal.

cool story bro

+1

Lee,this is James, we met at IOM for the March player meetings. Not sure if you remember me or not. I was the outspoken microstakes guy fwiw.

I really think that yourself, Steve, Isai and whomever else need to take a good hard look at your overall PR strategy with 2p2.

The last minute switch to WC on January 1st was without a doubt a huge PR disaster. I would hope that if you guys could do it over again you would have got the ball rolling on the rake discussions months in advance. You gave back some compensation by extending SN/SNE status through 2013 and made it a bit easier to maintain it. I know that some feel its not enough but it is appreciated by many I'm sure. Hindsight is always 20/20 but you guys know how your vip system works right? And you are aware that the people who were most effected by the switch are professional players for whom grinding on your site is their livelihood right? So it just makes sense to try and 'plan your hand' for future streets and prepare to offer up that compensation from the get go to avoid these PR disasters or at least minimize them to some degree.

Now when I look at the whole concept of player meetings, I think to myself - wow! This is great. And in theory it is great from the players' perspective. There have now been 3 groups of meetings that have gone over and it is yet unclear as to what exactly Stars' motivation is for having these meetings.

There are basically 2 approaches that Stars can take here and get value out of these meetings.

Approach 1) Is naturally, bring the players over so that you can show them sensitive data and get more open lines of communication. The players can see things from the business perspective and the business can see things from the player's perspective and hopefully some positive changes can be implemented that would prove beneficial to both parties. This approach is obviously the one that is most ethical and best for your image and relationship with the 2p2 community.

Approach 2) is the unethical one in which you bring players to the IOM, show them charts with percentages and breakdowns, treat them very nice and leave them with an overall good or better impression of your company so that they can return home singing your praises while everything remains the same.

I'm not accusing you guys of approach 2 being the path you've chosen but I know that I'm not alone in thinking that is the case when there have not been any positive changes that have resulted from the last 2 meetings. Though everybody who did go to the meetings ( myself included ) has praised your company in some way in the related threads. I really would like to see something positive come out of these meetings. Yes it was a good experience for me, and I do recommend to everybody who gets a chance to go, but ffs guys, at least throw us a bone. I don't even care if that bone is something that I specifically benefit from but it would go a long way in terms of 'faith' to see micro plo or LHE get some kind of rake relief.

Hell, even if you were to announce that you're going to try and have a lowered rake structure for LHE next weekend or so as a trial to see how things go. Maybe a small decrease here or there actually gets more players playing the game?

You guys would get flamed a lot less if you took an approach like that and tried implementing a temporary change and then evaluate as opposed to the typical response of "Interesting idea, we'll pass it along and consider it" which at this point basically equates to a good ol' "cool story bro".

You guys have been the best for software, security, support and integrity for a long time and I believe you still are and do appreciate it as do many others here even if they don't like to say it. But, in a very short amount of time you've become absolutely notorious for getting people's hopes up for some positive changes and then letting them down.

Its now at the point where whenever a Stars rep posts something here the typical response YOU can expect from US will be a good ol' "cool story bro".

These threads, and the player meetings are a nice gesture but its getting old fast and becoming so transparent to the point that your words are becoming meaningless.

The ratio of words:action is way to high. More action less words imo.

Cheers

+1 well said. For the love of God please get rid of those rake increases at micro and low limit holdem you implemented in January, it remains gross for those players and you need to make some comment about that.

Another downside to the players meetings is it silences intelligent community minded people. Regardless of what they see over at the IOM, good or bad, they are forced to not discuss any of the negatives. I suspect this is why Do it Right has been reluctant to go there.

The biggest downside for the meetings is that now, nothing of note will ever be changed unless there's first a meeting to discuss it. Discussion apparently can't be finalized over the forums anymore for some bizarre reason.

If someone posts about a huge issue (wrt to e.g. rake), a ton of other posters concur that it really is a big deal, Stars' response will be: We'll talk about it at the meeting. It's already happened and it's not acceptable.

ZOOM poker needs a dedicated promotion towards it considering it's a new release, to attract more players!

Huge downside If you ask me. People are overall passive so when this happens, its a insane lost for the cause. Although, the people who signed a NDA could still speak their mind without saying what they saw/know.

No we're not.

Great post by LazyAce

Is Lee still following this thread or no?
I have tweeted Lee 16 hours ago about this thread but still no response and his last tweet was 3 days ago.

he will post soon®

coulda fooled us, ducy?

Good job stars on leaving this to die.
I guess Lee has more important things to do:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...36&postcount=3

Pretty sick. If this is even close to accurate there's no way the games can survive long-term. People are just going to quit poker to do something else if they have to grind 50-200nl for a tiny profit (or none at all). Also, what might be forgotten here is that this all means very few people are going to be able to move up levels.

Stars needs to lower the rake if they plan on keeping their player pool healthy. Then again, why would they do that if they have a solid grasp on the market? It's just too bad Party and co. are sleeping on the job. They have offered 0 competition to Stars since FTP went down. I think they are to blame just as much as Stars in this.