1. Many cannot.
2. Most cannot.
3. Already do that.
4. Maybe one day...
5. Certainly will!

has anyone checked if the rake for plo 25/50+usd increased or remained the same after 1st april 2023?

you sum it up really well. What surprises me how many people participate in this system of low marginal winrates (after rb) and grinding 16h/day for leaderboard ev. relying on binking a jackpot every 3/4 months. Most of the people in those pools are those 45 wwsf 19-15 zombieregs and in general makes it boring af to play against (because you just have to play disciplined vs them). But then I guess great software + other slot machine features (like you say) + dominating Asia market is what keeps this system going....

Its not impossible to use house bots @lowstakes (gg will certainly give u all of the integrity data!) or alike systems where same account gets shared by many asians, etc.

There are plenty of ways to exploit their system to make leaderboard money.

The total `players online` number doesnt rly represent entire true picture of how online poker volume works these days (certainly not from pokerscout numbers).

A lot of things there can be misleading - thats the whole point (but yea obv they are nr1 right now, noone`s denying that).

So much for the boycott lol

https://www.youtube.com/live/i3y2vTEuaA4?feature=share

I guess when there is enough money to be made these hs pros throw their principles out of the window

it's a replay

No **** their bottom line is #1 reason for this BY FAR. But midstakes is still far more beatable in terms of bb/100 than high stakes was even with old rake. If any of these guys decided to sit at GG 's $2/$5 table their winrate would be much higher than they had at 5K+, even though the rake is higher in bb/100.

But if you're midstakes player this protest has circumstancial positive effect on you aswell. If they are successful, GG will realize they can't get away with absolutely anything and shall they try to implement it at your stakes, you have a blueprint on how to proceed.

And nobody forces you to stay at midstakes for life, high-stakes isn't some exclusive boys club. If you work hard you too have chances to make it there. Doesn't hurt if there are still games then which are possible to beat, and you sure as hell don't want these guys moving down to your midstakes games.

Always makes me chuckle when I log into GG. And see the hundreds of players at each rush and Cash level. Literally makes no sense when other sites charge much less rake

And I feel now saying you like the software, isn’t a good enough reason.

And I guess a lot is to do with liquidity. But again, players are just shooting themselves in the foot thinking like this

The situation in online poker can only get worse and everything will eventually die.

For the major online poker rooms it doesn't matter how much money we can print by playing on them. The gambling addicts will always be there losing and not giving a single ****, they will never know what rake is .

Thats their goal, cut all the edges, make everything stupid.

Sometimes i think that the long run is something that only we, poker players, are worried about. Of course you can instantly increase your revenue by charging more rake, but in the long run it wil only kill poker (and not give you money anymore duh). It amazes me how they cannot think 2 steps ahead of their time, maybe they already know what the future of online poker will be: infested with RTA.

If RTA will eventually kill the game, right now is the perfect time to grab all the money they can before everything dries out. You see, thats a clear tendency in all poker sites, they know that there are ways of using RTA and never getting caught, doesn't matter what AI they implement ingame to detect cheaters, RTA will always be there and will get even simpler to do. Poker is destined to be just like any other old online game infested with cheaters.

They don't give a ****, they never really liked poker anyway.

Where can you track those stats?

I tried to do my part and bring awareness to the bigger picture around this issue. I believe a room like GG will always try to increase its EV at our expense (online pros). This will squeeze out more and more pros, with no one to represent our interests.


Short term, looks like GG is open to discussion, which I consider a small win. Important to see how cooperative they will be.

It doesn't make sense to take an anti-poker player stance. Things that hurt high stakes players will eventually hurt lower stakes players, too. The whole goal of poker is to play in games that you make money in, and if sites are instituting mechanisms where literally nobody is able to profit from a game, that's what the death of poker looks like.

I guess the question for a relative noobie like me, is where to play cash poker online now? I am up for suggestions.

Bovada and PokerBros

You seem to be blind to the fact that as a professional poker player you are not doing something noble yourself. If you are a winning player you are on the same ethical level as the poker site.

And you are talking about it all as if the poker sites are destroying something beautiful, that has some meaning like the Olympics, The World Series, Village Green Cricket or Sumo Wrestling.
It's just online poker.

Live poker does has some meaning and some beauty to it and human value to it, online poker has next to none.

Winning poker players are just like professional Counter Strike players. If you want to be a CS pro you must invest a lot of time in Counter Strike. Fail, fail fail, fail, and one day you might actually succeed.
Its not my fault that some people are just blasting money away with no intent to get better, farming fishes is the equivalent of killing a scrub with the knife in CS.

If you don't want to get stabbed and owned anymore, its simple: get better. Or close the game and go do something else. Using the knife is allowed in game, using Aim bot/wall hack/trigger bot is not (RTA).

Live poker is indeed very charming. But i think online made itself remarkable due to all the epic clashes that occurred between the pros: Isildur vs Durrr, Jungleman vs Durrr, Stefan vs LLinusLLove... to name a few.

All of this could have happened in a private session, we were only able to witness all that thanks to online poker. I see some beauty in it, multi-tabling is enjoyable.

But those amazing online cash game battles are in the past so we've all had our time marvelling over them. What we have now is players playing online who have solved the game or who are using RTA to solve it.

The viewing interest is now in high stakes live poker. If online cash games didn't exist tomorrow and never again I think nothing of value would be lost.
Online MTTs are different, they do have a value, the value is the dream, that someone can play a $10 comp and win a few thousand or win a few hundred thousand
using a $10 sat or buying in for $100. This has some value, online cash games don't, they are just punters and addicts against professionals, the former nearly always losing and feeling sad afterwards.

Yes, the contraction and possible destruction of online cash games might affect the liquidity of online MTTs, but on the other hand, the recs that would have been losing in cash games
will now have more money to play MTTs, so we might find that MTTs are not adversely affected and may even grow.

Counterstrike professionals get money because people want to watch them (which induces sponsors and entertainment platforms to pay them), while online poker professionals get money directly from the worst players at the table, minus some cost of doing business (rake). This is why knifing beginners in counterstrike is not profitable (no payment per kill, but payment per achievement), while bumhunting is profitable.

In a sense, the high stakes regs do provide limited entertainment value to recreationals, as the game doesn't run without them. However, the quality of entertainment provided by winning poker players to losing poker players is, usually, inversely proportional to the bb/100 made by the winning player. Incidentally, this latter point is even more true for live poker when factoring in sunglasses, scarves, silence and excessive tanking.

I do feel for the poker players who are hit by their game of skill being turned into a degenerate gambler's fiesta. Similar to Hyper turbos, Spin 'n Gos, the Grand Tour, rake increases, and so on.

However, there's no moral high ground for profitable poker players here. This shouldn't be a 'boycot' - you should just stop giving GG your custom and deal with the consequences in your life. There are things you could do with more impact on society than the minute entertainment value you've provided to some range of hundreds to thousands of people over the course of many years. You should also factor in a lot of people have given money to you that they actually couldn't miss, they may have lost their house or their marriage over their gambling losses, so take that into account when you sum up the 'value' you've provided.

If you truly felt like becoming the best poker player is the goal in your life, there is no reason not to play elsewhere. If you only played poker to profit off of recs, then I don't care about you and your loss of income. I will share with you the disdain for GGPoker, but I have no respect for the boycott.

did they really gave up? that just seems too odd
or were there rules imposed to say you cannnot play pokerstars in asian countries?

im dutch and here I am allowed to play GG but not allowed to play stars

So let me get this straight - Negreanu said more rake is better and everyone was laughing at him, then he went to GGpoker, basically became GGpoker and everyone followed him and thus proving his point GGpoker became number one traffic site.

And now we are back at protesting?

I remember in the the early days of GG when Bryn Kenney, who I think was their first main North American ambassador, said that they wanted the games to be focused on recreational players having fun and for it not to be a place for pros to exploit them, that it was all about fun and if the pros played the recs they were expected to gamble with them and not clinically exploit them. Which is that GG is designed to be fun, it is not designed for professionals to make a living on it.

The very high rake and the unusually strict rules (and even more strictly enforced and sometimes unfairly enforced rules) about bum hunting, table selecting, and plain old "playing too well", underline what Bryn said about the ethos of GG, right from the get go.

Somehow, after a little while, he then, by his own detailed confession/reveal on podcasts, was asked by GG, according to him, to procure high stakes pros into high stakes cash games,
to help build the brand and to attract railbirds and to generally generate some additional excitement around the brand.

He did this, according to him, by acting as a money conduit and by many of the players using a VPN to circumvent GG's own Ts & Cs.

Now they have doubled the rake at these stakes. Is this just a mis-step by them based on greed or perhaps an off-hand remark in a board meeting of "what if we increased rake to x we will make y times as much", or is this a deliberate strategy to force out the pros that Kenney helped bring them, on the basis that their brand has now grown meteorically, so they no longer need the group of high stakes pros. They have done the job Kenney brought them in to do, and now it's good bye to them.

It might be about 50/50 whether it's a mis-step by them, or a deliberate constructive dismissal of the high stakes pros.

Why don't the Pros talk to the other poke sites as a group to see if they would wqant their business? By sitting on the sidelines (boycott), you are really just hurting yourselves, because you are not making any money. Who do you think can holdout longer?

Start getting all the highstakes players unite as a group and start negotiating with the other pokersites.

PokerBros clubs always charge the highest rake out of any site, club, or app. Almost all the games on there are not even close to beatable.

ACR has the best rake situation, bovada is good as well.

The trick to pokerbros is to play for a maximum time period of 1 poop. Then play PLO6

VIP game is now running again, guess the mass boycott is over haha