But it’s your contention that Stars put none of the additional funds into marketing and promotions?

No, just that it didn't go into creating profitability for the winning players like dnegs and the marketing advertised.

I guess then I mean to point out they were both promoting the same promotion as part of a marketing team. Is that controversial?

How can you say that?

For that to be true one of following must apply:

1) their marketing attempts brought zero people in

2) it brought people in but they were on average equal in skill or better than the existing player pool

And even if it didn’t help, it’s not a lie if they believed it would, or even if there was a possibility

Also there’s really no way for anyone to prove either 1 or 2 were true

Sure, the quote you posted had Josem speaking about a rake increase, and I assume Daniel at some point spoke about the same rake increase as well.

Now I'll try to leave this be, as I'm not helping the thread stay on the PIC topic.

Well 1 could be false, that they brought people in but that it didn't increase the profitability from the players perspective. They could have brought bad poker players in (ie players that unknowingly deviate from GTO)but that the policies and marketing tended them to support and play games of a more jackpot type. Again totally a great business move from a site geared to maximize its own profits with little regard to the longer term welfare of the game from the player's view. But that doesn't mean the players should support it.

In regard to this thread my suggestion is that there is a parallel consideration to observing profitability of a game and whether or not a player is cheating. The summary point would be the suggestion that the mechanism needed in order to analyze either of these is not accessible to the general poker population. And that this mechanism is what Mason alludes to, Josem I think MUST understand and know of, Ansky saw and signed he wouldn't talk about, and these players in the PIC will need to sign to never talk about.

It's not really a conspiracy, just something the general player doesn't feel they need to think about or understand.
I agree with this and I point out we are better able to prove that you can't prove those things, so the claim was always able to be made with impunity.

A somewhat reasonable inference can be made that new players obtained would help matters out. Hardcore players all knew about Stars. I’m not sure when Stars starting signing athletes like Neymar. But that type of stuff brings in target desirables.

I’m not sure how you can say as a certainty that it didn’t increase profitability from players prospective. Was there a mass sharing of results that I’m not aware of? And even if profitability did in fact go down it might have gone down faster without the newer players

I'm not making a claim. The claim was that lowering the profitability by increasing the rake and effective rake more specifically would actually increase the profitability. This was explicitly stated by Daniel N.

Me and you are both agreeing I think, that from the players perspective, there is nothing public to back that claim up however many years later. There is the hidden mechanism however, but what point would it serve to give the player's a profitable environment if they can't even tell if it is so or not?

You said they were lying, that was your claim.

For that to be the case, the extra marketing didn’t work AND they knew it wouldn’t

Or that they didn’t do any extra marketing and they also knew they wouldn’t

Right. That's me paraphrasing. I feel its fair since, for example, in another thread I scrutinized the available data from what I feel are some of the most liquid games in the most liquid times to show that there isn't a way to show the profitability of the field with any reasonable confidence. So I certainly don't mean to imply it as a claim that I proved.

Rather I mean to show that such claims, whether mine (decreasing profitability short term leads to decreased profitability long term) or the opposite corollary from the site's view (decreasing profitability short term increases profitability long term) aren't provable/disprovable from the player's vantage point. Whether or not the claim the marketing team made was true or not didn't affect anything. The claim could be made with impunity (and a cheshire smile).

It can be made with impunity because it’s quite a reasonable inference that extra marketing and promotions will almost certainly attract new players and those are desirable

So no one was lying

It’s certainly not a moral issue, Stars tweaked their business model. That’s it.

The debate was more about whether or not the 'new players' were contributing to profitability for the poker players or rather a profitability for the poker site.

In regard to 'morality', in the economics/business context I define it essentially as profit seeking. Totally moral to raise prices.

In regard to poker, if there was a player that was knowingly promoting changes that would negatively effect the game from the point of view of the players, I would call this immoral.

But I actually tried to quantify/formulate this in a sense and suggest that if a poker environment is such that even the best players can't expect a positive winrate because of excessive fees, it cannot be considered moral from the poker player view to market it as 'good'.

I guess we disagree on whether that happened, but maybe we agree on the principle.

You mean negatively impact the view of some players, meaning the professionals. Recs just want a fun site.

But it’s real tough to make an immoral charge because iirc even after the rate increase stars still had the lowest rake among competitors or at least one of lowest

Yes. My argument defines those two players types as the main ones. Dnegs was speaking to the 2p2 community especially for example on joey chicago's pod when he rep'd this marketing program and said these things.

For a poker site to say 'we are taking from the profitability of the game for pro players and using it to bring in more unskilled losing players in order to reduce money that leaves via pro poker players), from a capitalistic view is moral and natural. Here pro vs rec is defined as skilled/profitable versus habitually losing etc. Just names for easy reference.

But of course for the players that are pros or aspiring to be pros you wouldn't cheer for the site to trend the recs money into raked money. That's different than cheering for a good investment into the future profitability of the game from the pro perspective.

This is the distinction I make with the phrase 'effective rake' which I define by the profitability. This is the metric the pro should use. Again its just a definition for our ease of reference. Stars had the lowest rake but it was believed at the time that it had the highest EFFECTIVE RAKE because of the difficulty of the fields for example. It was the conflation of rake and effective rake that allowed daniel to make some of the claim he did without a broader segment of the player pool crying foul.

You have repeatedly repeated this claim. You have yet to demonstrate any accuracy to this claim.

Not everyone on a marketing team is always doing the same thing. In this case, DN chose an unfortunate means to 'sell' the rake increases to 2+2 folks...'more rake is better'. But we have seen no support that at that time anyone much less josem in particular agreed with that idea. His current position does not support this and his statements on his position then is he did not say it or support it publically.

If I am part of at marketing team for Pizza hut and someone else on the team goes rogue claiming pizza is a health food as long as you put vegetables on it and not meat, that does NOT mean I am claiming or selling that Pizza is a health food.

They were both selling that more rake can possibly be better. And the worst games I ever played in in my life was on WSEX with 100% rakeback. It's just that Josem didn't explicitly say that line.

But it's ok, they both have nothing to apologize for and implemented correctly may have been correct (I have no idea if it was, probably not lol)

No one is claiming Josem agreed with it. And I'm pretty sure he told me he didn't and pretty sure he will say he doesn't.

But your analogue is not representative of what happened. Were you around?

Stars implemented a marketing plan we can call A. Daniel and Josem both had a job that was to smooth A over with the players. This was literally their jobs. If you look at A, you can understand it simply raised rake to no benefits to the players. Thats my understanding. Daniel literally said raising rake increases profitability to justify A. Josem said what is in the letter I posted which is a justification of A.

Daniel didn't go rogue. He was doing his job promoting A. Josem also promoted A.

In the later Bobo Fetts counters this by pointing out:

I don't understand how that is a counterpoint, when the rest of the passage is to justify the changes.


Or an attempt to get them to sign NDA's perhaps

We're buddies now!

It's all totally normal business to raise prices and promote them as favorable. But as intelligent customers/players we should be able to disagree and call the marketers out for their nefarious support.

We were never enemies

I just don’t get this thread

1) Josem’s statement is clearly “more rake can be better” without explicitly saying it

2) it’s not nefarious support as it could have worked out, at the very least a price increase is not all bad, some possible good things about it. It’s not like the price of groceries going up which is always bad.

3) Neither dnegs or josem needed to be called out. They worked for Stars and there are indeed a few possible benefits to rake increase. It’s just stupid to say “more rake is better” explicitly as it can be used to mock and it did end up on a T shirt

Why would sites care about providing profitable games for the pro players when they can provide pseudo profitable games and have no pro net withdrawling players?

The claim was taking from the pro and giving to the recs is best for the pros profitability.

In actuality we know they took from the pros, everyone agrees, we saw changes to the recs experiences...

we are unable to show that the recs loss rate frequency decrease or that the pros profitability increased.

That's where we are at....and this is VERY relevant to trying to determine if there are cheaters or not, because how do we determine cheaters if they aren't the winning players and what would we care anyways?

No we don’t have to show any of that

It’s a common sense inference that any part of rake increase allocated to marketing and promotions will help all players. Both dnegs and Josem had reasonable expectation that players would have at least a little residual benefit and they indicated that fact.

Do you know the promotions and changes we are referring to?

I get that its reasonable to suggest that a business needs advertising money and that the money comes out of profits and profits come out of customer purchases.

But this doesn't mean that raising pricing increases profits, or that raising profits increases marketing, ...

Most important just because marketing increases doesn't at all mean that this benefits the poker pros.

You can very easily add players to the site which doesn't make the game more profitable for the pros. I think if you were current at all at the time you would know that it was balatant that the moves were made to reduce the money that net withdrawers withdraw.

Totally great business move. But from a poker players perspective, that believes that players that play the best should have profitable expectation, this was a negative change. And if you leaf through the player sentiments at the time you will see the population here believed that the new marketing strategy was exactly that. An attempt to reduce the profitability of the poker games.

Daniel and Josem both explained why this is better for the pros.

Its a ruse, that we consider that there is 'some optimal rake that benefits both the sites and pros the most' when really the optimal amount of rake for sites is not inline with what is optimal for the pro players.

To suggest that the laffer curve would apply is to hide this fact.

Still looks like you don’t understand a few things, no one knows if change was negative. Yeah we can hypothesize all we want but no one knows for sure. Even if win rates went down it’s always possible they would have gone down more if additional promotions and marketing had not taken place. After all, poker has been in steady decline since boom.

And no I don’t know of specific promotions and so forth but if you are calling them liars I think the onus is more on you to more or less make a case that it either stayed same or was actually reduced.

You strike me as reasonable enough to look at the actual changes and immediately be like "ya thats horrible for the pros long and short term"

Nonetheless there is a difference between the general sentiment and conclusion of the players of 2p2 (and their extended networks of affected players) and our present day observations on the changes. I don't think that anyone here is saying that sentiment changed. There were two boycotts organized here. No pro's supported the changes, poker stars pro's were resigning and citing these changes. That's why ansky's eyebrows are like that, they were like that for the whole 1 hour or so interview with Joey. That's why joey had Dnegs on.

All reasonable players support the idea of contributing to the site that provides the chips and the cards and the marketing of it. The population here believed that the changes were detrimental to the longevity of the game on that platform.

It's not disputable that, that is the general sentiment here. You can argue that the changes WERE good long term. But that doesn't change the fact that the general poster here believed and still believes they were bad for the game.

Lol I don’t care about ansky’s eyebrows

Yeah it probably wasn’t a net positive in the end, but it could have been. No one knows for sure, poker has been declining year after year. I don’t really care about the sentiment of general poster here though. Overwhelming majority never get past the initial “I’m paying $ more in rake” and think about anything else.

But a) general sentiment and eyebrows aside no one can really prove anything
b) no worker communicating what they did was lying or immoral

There are plenty of examples where the higher rake site had the better games and overall offered higher profitability

Yes I was around though much less active at that time than later and earlier (I had a earlier account on 2+2 that I lost/forgot the info to access and also lost the email tied to it)

Not only are you saying he agreed with it you are saying he was also actively doing the same thing.

Just because both had a job to sell the concept to 2+2, doesn't mean they both had to do it the same way or 100% agree with each other.

It is also quite possible that DN did go rogue when he said 'more rake is better'. I don't know what the approach that PS had agreed to use; I don't believe you do either. But I do tend to doubt that PS sat down and suggested DN specifically make that statement. I suspect, but will never know, he wandered at least a little of the reservation making that statement.

An alternate approach (not saying anyone did this) would be to say, 'yes, more rake sucks but the alternative are even worse'

Also the Laffer curve is VERY applicable. It is applicable from both PS and the players POV. Now this doesn't mean the the optimal rake is the same for both Laffer curves.

From player POV, 100% rake is of course not optimal but neither is 0% in the long term as PS disappears if that is the case (assuming they don't have other revenue streams.) But somewhere between 0% and 100% there is at least one optimal rake %. I suspect if the rake were 0.001% and was increased to 1%, the net player environment MAY improve. But if it was 10% and raised to 99.99%, the impact would be negative.

The same thing is true from PS POV. Rake too high, no one plays, revenue gone, PS goes BK. Likewise 0%, plenty of players but revenue gone and PS goes BK. But again somewhere between the extremes there is an optimum. It need not be the same as the optimum from player POV. But the reality is, if PS was well run (I am not saying they were or were not), the too optimums would likely be similar because many of the the two parties interest overlap even if for different reasons.

Players like to have higher EV; so they are happier and play more; more games (making money) is good for PS; so they are happier also.

Ultimately, josem was trying to sell what PS asked and paid him to do. PS was also having DN try the same thing. Doesn't mean DN/josem were aligned or that DN actually followed the script PS wanted him to use.