First its 100$ 215$ level isnt either 300$ fee either is 215$ anymore ,if he plays 4 SM is 36$ + most of fun players put 2-3 tables /tourneys so it becames near 100$ of rake anyway .

no it shouldn't.
we're talking about the overall games not one's individual playing style.
a bunch of nits/pros swarming a site collectively increases the nittyness of a site, even if they're playing more marginal hands than they would on another site.

it does decrease how nitty the players who are playing specifically for the free/dirt cheap rake would play collectively (way more so at smaller stakes.) those are 2 different issues.

you're treating it as though no matter what the rake structure was you'd get the exact same player pool being dealt the exact same amount of hands. if that were the case then you would be correct.

when wsex came out with that rake free model a lot of people thought it would be a great money making opportunity. they were predictably wrong.

A two table maximum for free with additional tables allowed for a fee, with the ability to buy them conditional on acting on all tables in a reasonable amount of time, would be an interesting concept. Of course, it'd never work as all the hudbot users grinding out 0.0350bb/100 infesting the games that need to play shedloads of tables in order to win a cheeseburger per hour will not pay for something that'll eliminate their entire winrate, and will just open up another site (and then complain about the software)

It's not a "wrong thing" if their strategy was to give up some profit to build up their customer base. The loss in profits was considered marketing dollars. Once they've built up their user base, they could pull back on the rakeback and get as much rake revenue as possible, which they did.
That's the point. They're not looking to be fair or generous to the players. They're doing it for marketing purposes only -- to gain new players. They know they don't need to do that for players that are already playing. The fact that they do these things that you don't consider fair should tell you a lot about why they're not going to make less in rake than they have to.

That's a reasonable tier distinction between tiers, but it doesn't change the point that as long as you have a monthly fee, people who play more will still be subsidized by those who don't. There will be people in the lower tier who play fewer hands/tournament per month than other people in their tier, and they're subsidizing the higher volume players. The same at the higher tier. So there are still inequities, and those inequities are solved by the current system of rake per hand/tournament played.

WSEX might have not been nitty by today's standards. For back then, compared to other sites, it was. Which just means money wasn't falling from the sky in buckets. Taking it's failure as an object lesson that rakefree means nittier in any other context isn't sound IMO.

One big problem was that it wasn't rake free. It was 100% rakeback, at least when I tried it.

If you were a casual player back then it advertised as rake free, sure, but if you read that and went to the site and played you would have rake taken out of the pot to be returned on a contributed model on (I think) a monthly basis. Which didn't sit right for a lot of people.

If you were the type (common back then) to deposit $500 to play 200NL and usually only keep money on site for a few days either busting but running it up here or there, that you get $55 dollars or w/e weeks after you left wasn't moving the needle.

Especially when other sites were handing out $100 deposit bonuses left and right and that equaled out to about the same thing done in a more psychologically enticing manner. I was almost certainly getting a better deal than 100% rakeback by chasing those, with better games to boot.

You make some excellent points. 100% rakeback isn't the same thing as rake-free, especially depending on the model used. And yes, as a big bonus whore at that time, I whole-heartedly agree with your comments about that. I got more than 100% RB playing through a lot of bonuses, and even when I didn't, I was getting a high % and the games were much better than on WSEX.

But, I don't think those points completely support your opening:

I think the WSEX experience can still very much inform what such a model would look like now. The same players that were attracted by WSEX then would be attracted by a monthly fee model now. And there's a good chance that a monthly fee would be as much of a deterrent, if not more of one, to rec players than the WSEX rakeback method was.

While one can't look at WSEX and simply say it can't work now because it didn't work then, I see many of the same hurdles. And of course there's the bigger problem that their model relied on there being value to attracting people to their site so they could make money off them in sportsbetting. Without a way of generating additional revenue from players, OP's idea would be doomed to fail.

I agree that OP's idea is unworkable for those reasons. It would probably be easier (but still wildly implausible) to do with no fee than with a fee. That part is totally self-defeating.

I was just speculating that the difference in game quality between the main rooms and a true rake free experiment today wouldn't be nearly as stark as the difference between WSEX and the majors back then. Just like WSEX,the worst players aware of and attracted to that site would be weak regs but that is pretty much par now as to most formats.


I can't even begin to imagine why someone would try to do this, but this timeline is off the rails so what do I know.

The way this works is that the brokerage sells the information that you want to buy to high frequency traders who then buy the stock before you do and flip it to you at a small markup. If something is free it's because you are the product.

The WSEX model was the rakeback was split among all players who were dealt in so if other players were playing big pots you could potentially get your blinds back without playing. Of course this lead to mostly small pots until they just shut down and kept everyone's money.

Anybody on POker bros with a club could do this right?

only prolbem is club owners are getting rich and dont want ot do this

and no mercy is ever given to the greed of seeing wow i have a club and making huge easy money now.. they dont want to give it up

i have wanted to make a site like this with memebership fees, actually i've done it but no interest locally

0 risk, free money for the work a 90IQ person after some schooling could do well.

As opposed to poker site where you have to:
-keep the infrastructure going (run servers, have programmers on the payroll to fix things and add features, provide support etc.)
-deal with chargebacks and other scams
-deal with regulatory risk
-hire a lot of lawyers to comply with all the country specific regulations
-keep some kind of security team working
-pay for marketing

Maybe a poker site could be run at lower cost but it's not a simple or cheap business to run. Rake is a pretty reasonable model (people who play more pay more). It's just damn too high but then again, there aren't many takers to run competing sites and those who do aren't exactly an example of glaring success.

you say that until you realize all of the bullshit that comes with it including getting stiffed. hell you can't get a player pool trying to charge peanuts. it's almost like establishing a solid player pool is a lot harder than people realize even on a small scale.

why would any sane person running a club on any of these apps burn money for the benfit of poker players?

There is a poker club/ online poker site with this model out there but no players there yet is the problem so..

but yes if players came to a site like this .. over time of course everybody would come adn it would become the new pokerstars

example.. craigslist
they took off with no advertising..

so it would happen.. everbody likes paying less money so thats the bottom line.. its just a matter of people playing there and over time it would catch on like wildfire if got big enough..

On an Internet full of terrible comparisons and analogies, this might be one of the worst I've ever seen.

Just that little issue of how a poker site operates on a fraction of the income; I'm sure that will be no problem. They'll make it up in volume!

do you have any idea how much pokestars spent on servers, security, software oh and this thing called advertising?

this is the problem with these types of threads. people being idealists who want to pay nothing for rake that never look at it from the point of view of the business.

i mean don't get me wrong i'd love to play in great games with next to no rake but that isn't realistic.

Now with blockchain technology, a no-rake poker site can be created using open source code and crowdsourcing...because internet. Surprised they don't just spontaneously spring up without anyone even trying.

because in these trying times and with an abundance of caution we are all in this together

anyone else play on here? i'm invited to game on it, is it reliable and trustworthy?

No, that was the symptom. The cause of this problem? No rake.

But the thing is... they have sprung up. Its just that you - and nobody else - has heard of them.

I like a rake per hand dealt system for cash games. I'm not sure any online sites have tried it. Maybe it is off putting to actually see $$ disappear from your account compared to it being sneakily taken from pots, but it'd make the play funner/better for recs.

how about a 5% rake from your buy ins/addons only?

Exactly

how about you guys make ur own pokersite and charge what u want?

A small site tried a model last year where they only charged 3% of the money that you leave a table with. Anything like this completely discourages playing when you will, or might, be playing only a short session.