You also have softer games (in some cases much softer) and Stars pays 10bb in rake up to 25NL as well. 50NL is about 8.5-9bb over my sample.

Didnt they say they were going to revise the VIP system in 2015?

^^^ they might but i dont think it will be in the best interest of micro/low stake grinders, dont think they ever cared about 10-100nl regs. They rake us higher than everybody else but give us less rake back %, would just love to see it ger raised.

Obviously, i meant 10 games each time i log on. When i come home from work and i feel like playing a couple of hours i will usually play a bunch HU Sitngos and if a rec player like myself can win overall a good reg should easily crush. I think people play worse when its anonymous as no one can recognize them as beng a fish or keep a look out for them at the tables.

I think this post tilts me harder than the rake itself.


An old post from your challenge thread:
So you obviously make money from rake I would assume. Please stop trolling this thread. We're trying to keep it serious.

I would like to see rakeback linear based on amount played/raked rather than exponential as is the present case. That way casual players with day jobs would have a level playing field with grinders.

More generally, rake is the fee for putting the players together. Why not try to organize rake free poker where you live? I play in a regular tournament which frequently doesn't make its guarantee but the mini-casino is willing to organize it at a loss because it brings people in to play cash and slots. On the same principle, if you know a bar owner who always has a dead night on Mondays, try to persuade him to organize a rake-free poker night. They already pay bands to play to get people in. The costs of organizing rake-free poker are small compared to that: you could structure it for up to 18 players with one dealer and two "flights" to the final table, so people hang around and drink between the flights.

op you chose to play a game for kindergarten stakes

either you play poker for money-in which case play higher, or you play for fun and got 65,000 hands of entertainment for next to nothing

should casinos post the house edge on casino games? how about telling a blackjack player exactly how much they are giving up when they deviate from basic strategy?

why would poker stars light money on fire like this?
how about i can pay 5000 a month and walk into best buy and take whatever i want while we're at it.

lol sure and next online casinos will remove the house edge and sell ads to make a small micro fraction of what they make now.

i understand why people want dirt cheap/free rake but they're looking at it from a one sided perspective. these sites are a business not a charity. we're lucky enough a game exists where you can play have fun and make money.

sites know people can make money off of it so the winners will pay a premium to do so.they know rec players really don''t care about rake.

where else can someone take 10-20k, play a game with it and make good money doing so?

and what incentive do the sites have to charge less? games are crap anyway- people wanna be short sided and make the games as tight and boring as possible driving fish away. it's not like if tomorrow stars cuts the rake by 50 pct they get twice the business.

^^^ The way the games are now is that most regs who play have to bum hunt/table select to make a living, some crushers dont have to do this but for the most part its what happens & even at the lowest stakes this happens all the way to the highest stakes out there. Reduction in rake would basically allow stars to take away bum hunting & make it so that table selection isn't a huge part of the game anymore while not gutting their player base. If they dont care about the effects that bum hunting causes then rake reduction shouldn't even be considered but the fact of the matter is they are looking into taking away table selection or atleast discussing what the best method to do it is.

If they end up taking away table selection & not reducing their rake i think they will lose alot of their clientele.

I chose to play from zero deposit. True. The point is however, still, that the rake is very high and subtle for beginners.

How can you compare poker with blackjack? Because both uses a deck of cards? Black Jack was designed to give an edge to the dealer/house if you haven't figured that out.

Poker is a multi player zero sum game. That is, we play versus other players and the total sum of profits and losses equals zero.

Having rake introduced is no longer poker as defined, it's a modification since it's changes the strategy of it.

Please understand that we are not talking about PokerStars or any other casino to lower their profits.
1. We state that the current rake is high.
2. We present some ideas how an ideal poker environment for the players would look like.
3. It can be a very profitable business without rake, even though it might not be as profitable as PokerStars.

they have to bum hunt bc everyone wants to play a ton of tables at once. they want to have their cake and eat it too so to speak.when all the good players play 10-20 tables and all the ****ty players play 1-2 shockingly the games suck. if you could clone people, and all the sudden live tables had 10-20 good players for every 1 fish games would suck and fish would stop playing.


they funny thing is there are really people out there who are too dense to
understand this concept.

stars will let you play a ton of table- if they get their cut. they weren't doing it to be nice.

they may end up reducing the game a little, but as long as you have nits multitabling 10nl games will stick suck and win rates will be garbage.

and rake reduction/rake back doesnt just happen in a vacuum.it effects the quality of the games.

lol if you think poker was designed for people to make money.
the casinos provide poker so they can make money, the fact a small percentage of players also make money from it is is a fortunate by product for some of us.

please tell me where else i can sit on my ass at home, play a game and make piles of money.


saying you expect to play poker without rake and it's a zero sum game is like saying you want to run a business without rent or electric bills, and when you're barely squeeking by or losing money it's the landlords fault.

Whether they reduce the # of tables played, reduce rake etc etc i think stars realizes they are losing money, i think tis why they sold out their company in the first place as they are seeing the decline of online poker & government regulations around the world are mainly what is killing it.

you ignore any counterpoint because you don't have the skills to argue against them and instead quote me as saying "blah blah blah"
since i'm not a child and can actually form thoughts and articulate them( unlike you)I'll address what you said.

1)yea and so what?
high according to what? you pay 6 cents a hand to play a game. nobody is making anyone play hundreds of thousands of hands for meaningless amounts of money.

next why don't you bitch that you can grind out a living with ten dollar sports bets.

what the sportsbooks end up with most of the money, why can't i bet 1000 dollars a game with a 5 cent vig.



2)and ideally i wouldn't have any bills and i could **** scarlett johanson every day. but i live in the real world and realize those things will never happen, just like an "ideal" poker player environment will never happen.
you can join the real world or you can fantasize about poker stars being a charity.

you can save up some money, become a good player, play meaningful stakes and actually make good money playing a ****ing game.
or you can hope a business for no reason gives you a month of their money. gl with that.

3)hilarious. without rake pokerstars wouldnt exist and neither would almost any poker game in the world.

it wouldn't be a little less profitable for them without rake, using ads instead- they would be lighting almost all of their profit on fire so a bunch of nits could play microstakes and pay their bills. how does that make sense for ps?


basically your argument is you're pissed a business doesn't let you sit on your ass,mass multitable a game and suck all of their money out of the poker economy. boo hoo. if it bothers you so much, get a real job save some actual money and play poker with it.

these are actual good ideas, but they require effort. most people on here want stars to take the time money and effort and let them reap the rewards.

I'm sorry I didn't quote all text. It was more of a space thing.

1.
- High as in ~12k/day at nl10 Zoom only.
- I'm not trying to make a living playing poker.
- Sportsbets? Really... You continue to compare apples and oranges.

2.
I agree. It will not happen with an attitude that it will not happen.
You are angry because people try to accomplish things you think is impossible?
Why not just ignore it? It's not like we're trying to start a terror organisation.

3.
Wuut? Did you even read. Haha. You say the same thing.

I'm not pissed, and I have a job. What the heck are you doing?

Borg sounds angry, but he has a point.

If OP thinks that simply reducing the rake would be a panacea, or make business sense for sites, he's probably mistaken. The online poker population is declining (in the Western World at least) for a variety of reasons. Rake is unlikely to be the main cause of the online poker recession, because rake was "high" during the boom years too. Rake has even been reduced in some cases, but the games are still dead/dying or tough to beat. As such, reducing the rake alone won't really change much, and campaigning on that single-issue is largely a waste of time, imo.
FWIW, I currently choose to play on sites with higher rake and worse software and customer support than Pokerstars. i.e. rake is not the primary factor affecting my choice of poker supplier. I'd obviously prefer to pay less rake, but then I'd like to pay less for my electricity bills too. :/

I agree, rake is not to blame for the popularity of the game, not very much anyways. Skill is increasing, people can't be lazy to win no more. Most of these players realize they now lose and leave.

Guess in the big picture, the general sentiment of the thread is maybe that poker's fueled by hope - like people get into poker and stay in poker with the hope of making money. But yet, rather than feeling hopeful about the future of poker, people across the board seem to be feeling a bit more cynical. Because games have gotten a lot harder, so winners are winning at a lower rate, and people trying to become winning players are facing bigger headwinds than ever before?

And PokerStars must have noticed as well, because ... have the bonuses for first-time depositors gotten more generous? They used to just offer that bonus that could only be unlocked by playing massive amounts of volume. Then they introduced the Bankroll Builder promo where you could unlock $8 in increments by playing something like 2 orbits of 2nl. Now can't you get $20 outright as well as $16 worth of MM tickets, just for making a deposit?

Like, in the big picture, are we maybe collectively concerned that the player pool is being 'overfished' in an unsustainable way?

Guess maybe the rationale for feeling like it might be good for the game for rake to be lowered is because there's less room for players to make sacrifices, because winrates seem to be lower than ever before - but yet rake's stayed the same?

Sample of data for ~100k hands of 10nl Zoom (not representative of the general pool in any way - just one small sample):


Also, with rake being lower, casual players who are breakeven to slightly losing could then be slight winners, which might help give new players hope that there's still $ to be made in poker, to see more players winning with a win-rate, and not just due to putting in massive amounts of volume?

Or something like that?

Not saying PS would ever even so much as consider lowering rake - just saying it seems like it might benefit poker to have lower rake, until hopefully online poker becomes legal in the US again?

There is two discussions in the plo forums atm about this subject.

Rake analysis between PLO & NLHE incl. Zoom

Zoom50 unbeatable?

NL10- 60 hrs per week 8 tables, break even = rake back $6.7k pa


ZOOM NL10- 60 hrs pw 4 tables, break even = rake back $8k pa


PLO10- 60 hrs pw 8 tables, break even = rake back $14.5k pa


ZOOM PLO10- 60 hrs pw4 tables, break even = rake back $19k pa


Average (not min) wage in many parts of Europe below 500 euro a month......


Do not know if this is reason for reducing rake or not but if you think about it and argue the new player point for lower rake?


IMO to get and keep new players you need ability pools in micro stakes/ anon tables (which i do not think will help v the mass tabling ABC players) or number of hands played pools.


I think the fact that so many can stay in micros and grind a living is worse for the poker economy.


I do not begrudge any one they should be able to play stakes relative to their cost of living but as it is the starting block stakes something has to be done to give new players the chance to learn and enjoy with out having to face people who play thousands of hands per week.


You could argue the rake as it is is better for many micro players/grinders as the rake back in the field gives them the option to play so many tables ABC knowing the rake back will pay the bills and they do not have to do any thing but go for even.


The vip rewards are easy for new players (the small ones) lots of freerolls and i do not think any one has pointed out you get more vip per $ rake the lower you go. You get 10vip per $1 on 1c-2c not 5.


How many low/mid stakes players are going to bother with all the freerolls like the one 4 x a day? you get a lot of help on stars to start a roll like free tickets from the school as well so should the low/mid/high stakes players be the ones paying for this while you get a better fpp rate and even lower rake?

Poker tools made by stars for stars would help many players too, could have a hud that is free and only covers up to nl/pl10 then costs x fpp points with each stake jump.
Making even micro fields some how would be the best thing for poker imo and the best chance for new players to have a chance to learn an enjoy the game.

Very disturbing looks like they will not be happy until they rake every last cent out of every micro player or turn them into FPP slaves.Never have been a stars fan boy.
One question why is zoom raked higher?