Tl;dr The rake on GGPoker is unsustainably high given the large variance intrinsic to PLO. It encourages a toxic bumhunting culture on the site which doesn’t allow for any reg battles. With our boycott, starting today, we wish to communicate our concerns with GGPoker and significantly reduce HU, 3-handed and full table rake.


GGPoker has always been infamous for having significantly higher rake at highstakes than the industry standard. Their rakeback system is also confusing and not transparent. For a long time now many highstakes PLO regulars have been suspicious of games being unbeatable or very low edge on GG. Through a recent joint effort of the entire highstakes community we were able to confirm our suspicions. While the games might be barely beatable, given the high variance intrinsic to PLO (and especially 5-card PLO) and the relatively low volume at highstakes, playing PLO on GG is simply not sustainable for the regs on the platform.

We have reached out to GGPoker representatives to voice our concerns; however, it fell on deaf ears.

As such, starting today the high stakes PLO community will be ceasing all play at the VIP tables (25/50 and above, 4-card and 5-card PLO) on GGPoker.

We are currently in the process of reaching out to the last few remaining regulars to inform them.


The Rake

Regs pay around 7 to 8 bb/100 rake. We found that rakeback averages between 20-30% for most regulars. This means that effectively the rake is between 4.9 and 6.4 bb/100 depending on playstyle, ante structure, and your player value index (PVI) at that moment. Heads up rake is significantly higher: around 13-14 bb/100 (effective rake of 9.1 to 11.2). It is also worth noting that this rake is consistent across every stake above 25/50. On practically every other site (including GG on the NL VIP tables!) and live poker game in any casino, rake scales down as stakes increase.




Winrates

We found that regs on GGPoker are on average winning 0.5 bb/100 pre-rakeback. With rakeback being 1.5 – 2.5 bb/100 on average we can expect the average regular to win at 2 – 3 bb/100. To understand why this is a problem in PLO we have to dig into the variance and consider the available volume at highstakes.

The dynamic at highstakes is much different from lower stakes where you can just sit down and grind thousands of hands a day. A very good year at highstakes will find a regular playing maybe 150k hands. Plugging these values into primedope we find that this regular needs to have a bankroll of 700k – 1 million to have a less than 5% risk of ruin depending on exact winrate and rake. If this player would also play 5-card PLO where the variance is even higher, their bankroll would need to be even bigger. And with all that, this player has about a 1/5 chance to not make money for an entire year.



It is precisely for this reason that it is considered normal that PLO winrates tend to be higher than NL winrates, to make up for the increase in variance. As it stands PLO and NL regulars on GG are raked to a point where both are making roughly the same amount on average. We believe that to be unreasonable.


The Effect

The high rake environment leads to an incredibly toxic poker environment for everyone involved. The high rake structure causes HU and 3-handed battles to be non-existent as every reg is aware that you’re just bleeding money sitting any other semi-competent player. Extremely aggressively bumhunting and regs fighting for whoever can click on the seat the quickest when a VIP joins is the only way to approach playing on GG. This is not an environment that VIPs enjoy but it is the environment that is forced upon everyone through an unreasonably high amount of rake for starting tables.

As regs started becoming more aware of the rake and low winrates through our joint effort of educating each other as we all played more hands, and our samples would start to converge, we’ve even seen tables break around VIPs who were playing a bit too tight. A VIP needs to be losing at least 30bb/100 to make a game breakeven and regs will now quickly realize when this isn’t the case. As such we believe GG is cutting into their own profits by pricing the rake so high.

By reducing the rake more games would run and there would be more rake generated for the site overall.


Our Goal

First and foremost, we wish to effectively communicate our concerns with GGPoker. All of us respect and value the effort GG put into building their ecosystem and we want to be a part into making the high stakes PLO scene thrive there.

To achieve this, we want to see the shorthanded and HU rake decrease to combat the out of control bumhunting culture on GG.

The full table rake needs to be reduced significantly to stop games breaking around VIPs that are not losing at the rapid rate necessary to make it profitable enough when we take the variance of 4-card and 5-card PLO in mind.

In addition, we need to see a rake system which scales down as stakes increase, to account for the fact that competition at the highest stakes is incredibly tough and VIPs tend to on average be better players at the highest stakes.

Very nice to see this happening, hopefully it works out. Rake seems competitive up to 1/2 and after that it's ridiculous, I think at 2/5 it's already around double the industry standard and gets worse for each next stake since it doesn't get scaled down as you said.

Are you aiming for a specific reduction? Would also be interesting to see what regs are standing behind the boycott, but understandable if they wanna stay anon

I won't name any specific names as I want to avoid the situation where one person can be singled out. But if you just think of a top 10 online PLO players in the world, all of those people are in with the boycott. We have practically all the most well known regs in our group.

is this a shot at vasilev sergei he is not top10?

if GG rake is too high why not play a different site?
stars rake is a lot lower, arent their enough fish there or something?

ACR will probably get a lot more action in the coming days

This isn't going to go well. GG won't care - they like a player pool that's got fewer pros. You'll for sure get a bunch of scabs that will register a new account with Natural8 and take on a much fishier player pool. And in general high stakes players have had to face much much smaller rake than low stakes players, acting as a loss leader for bringing in players for the smaller games who get raked to death. I don't have much sympathy I'm afraid when there's plenty of other sites you can play on.

It worked when there was a similar boycott of NL a few months ago for similar reasons , acr got all the HS traffic and GG backed down

If you can't win almost in theory the rake must go down. Poker is defined as a +EV game.

It's already worked a few months ago. I don't know why GG would try it again though....maybe they'll have more of a backbone this time. I guess we'll see.


Cheers!!!

GL guys. PLO rake is a nasty beast. We'd all be rich without it. Kind of. (srs)

It may not change GG, but don't play GG. Maybe they will get more fish with all the good regs gone. Problem is good regs are not what makes the games.

That is ridiculous. Live, they charge a time charge, so the rake is pretty insignificant in high stakes games.

Good luck!

One of the recreational players in that game just won 15k then bounced lol

unreal how the rake is so big compared to NL.

mid stakes should be reduced aswell !

rake is 9bb+ at PLO1k and PLO2k which is insane and almost no one can beat this

We are extremely supportive of this boycott. This rake structure is regressive to their own goals of an anit-bumhunting culture (which is ironically against their own ToS).

We posted a blog discussing the nature of your boycott to inform our users. The vast majority of our users are live poker players and fans of TV cash games, but publicity is publicity.

https://highrollpoker.com/blog/highs...ke-controversy


If anyone who's currently leading this boycott wants to provide an official comment, we're open to hearing from you! Our email is contact@highrollpoker.com.

Thanks for helping the cause! I'll shoot you an email

problem solved

/thread

Been playing 2/5, 5/10 & 10/20 and although I have a small win rate pre RB, I would like to chat to other regulars in these games and whether they’re experiencing the same problems as me.
Such as locking my account, warnings for nonsense & just generally the feeling of being unwanted.
This is an open invitation for regs to contact me and see if they are experiencing the same issues.
Best wishes Life Grind

jungle didn't get the message

Day 2

Another group of the "community" looking for better deals for themselves instead of the game /players overall.
You were all warned and advised to band together and get rake lowered for everyone or atleast better RB system the last time
Yet all anyone cares about is themselves and how much they can bleed from other players so here we are again
You all get what you deserve from GG for being greedy and accepting their shitty site and opaque rules.
The poker community and this site in general is full of disgusting ppl. Just look at the most popular threads lol
It's all cheating, scamming and conspiracy bs.
You are all basically stuck with GG and it's horrendous model now because you only care about yourself and can't see past your nose

if you care so much about rake why play on the site with the highest rake??? it doesnt make any sense at all

if you want lower rake there are many other sites, instead of announcing a boycot just move to sites with lower rake (ie. all of them)