Speaking of the Rake ...

knircky:

I was having a hard time comprehending that rake chart you posted (is it really that bad?) until I received the following [unsolicted] email from a friend of mine.

<beginning of friend's message>

Alan:

It is 11:25 Eastern Time right now. I just checked Poker Stars. There are 37,943 players on 5,847 tables. Betweed 40 to 50 percent are on play money tables. That means that world wide, on the largest poker site in the world, there are roughly 20,000 playing for real money. World wide man. That is a lot of people to draw from. I know the WSOP events have started now, but I didn't think the drain would be that much. The main event will only get 6 to 7 thousand or so.

The rake is the main problem in drawing cash players. I once explained to friends that fact when I went to the race track a lot. Due to the rake if a million dollars was bet on any one day, only about $800,000 came back to the public. That meant that $200,000 stayed at the track, money the public lost. How long with the rake are new players going to stay around? Not long in my opinion.

I don't know how many online sites there are now but the play money players are not going to make a big difference in the states once we get it here in my opinion. Of course, as my Marine Corps drill sergeant used to say, "opinions are like aholes, everybody's got one." So what do I know? Just my thoughts on the subject.

<end of friend's message>

I haven't played internet poker in [at least] 3-4 years, but if the rake is truly as bad as you and my poker buddy describe, Gary Loveman's dream of attracting "millions" of new recreational poker players to WSOP.com will remain just that - a dream. It's my understanding that Caesar's is notorious for raking the h*ll out of the cash games during the WSOP, so maybe they think they can get away with the same thing once they start up their "legal" internet site. (If Caesar's does over rake their site, it will be interesting seeing how their competition responds.)

This is true ... in that Caesars rakes a ridiculous amount. Though most other casinos also rake an amount that is crazy so no need to single out.


This is my fear.



Honestly the PokerStars rake and some other online sites ..... all had rake way less than casinos, but were still way overraked and hard to beat due to rake.

If Caesars gets anywhere near a monopoly, they can easily turn it into basically a video poker game by jacking up the rake to unbeatable levels.




10% rake with a $4 cap + a $1 bad beat jackpot drop is easily beatable live because everyone sucks ... though obviously not makin as much as could.

A 5% rake with a $3 cap and no bad beat jackpot is largely what has been lived with online. And it is nuts. Only the very top players at mid and high stakes are able to win enough that they profit as much or more than the rake attributed to them.

It's true. Had the Rake been just 0,5% lower throughout the last year, my BR would be a couple grand bigger today.

Lego05:

This is where "irreconcilable differences" exist between the operators (both online and live) and poker players. Operators will always push the rake up to "whatever the market will bear," while we, as poker players, want the rake as low as possible. (Or at least low enough so that the game is beatable.)

There's only one way I know of that poker players can combat the deleterious effect of excessively high rake. In effect, we have to go on strike. If a flood of new "recreational players" do materialize, that influx of new players will likely face sharply higher rake. (I'm aware of a B&M casino up in West Virginia that charges a $7 rake on each pot. They do this because they're a monopoly - they have no B&M competition within a 50 mile radius. If these operators can get away with it, they'll rake us to death, so we have no choice but to fight back.)

We have to get the message out to as many of these new players as possible - via email and the various forms of social media - that they are playing in an unbeatable game. We can't "negotiate" with the operators. They won't reduce the rake unless and until they see players refusing to play. So these new recreational players, (especially if they're coming from sites like Zynga), have to be educated.

Look at it this way. If we don't stand up for our own self interest, the operators sure as h*ll won't. If they knew they could get away with it, they would rake the pot at 100 percent. (Heck, if I owned a poker room I would be doing the same thing! Nothing personal, just business.)

Ok, your reply here narrows my assessment of your range to the following: you are either the drollest of droll comics or you're nuts. Advocating multi-tabling at B&M casinos pushes me toward believing the latter. Either way it's time to end this little side show and get back to the real discussion. How can online poker attract REC players or what can online poker do to make a better environment for RECs?

I don't understand why recreational players want to limit the amount of tables the 'regs' play? I mean if you think somebody playing 16 tables has a huge edge over you playing a single table, then that edge would only be ludicrously magnified if the reg also played only one table.

I see a lot of chess analogies, so I guess this one is like when the grandmasters are playing speed chess against a boatload of different opponents at the same time. Do you think you have a better chance of winning in that format or heads up with the grandmaster?

Re: the rake: It's definitely too high in the smaller games right now. But please remember to do effective rake. If you pay $1000 in rake but get $500 in rakeback, you only paid $500 ceteris paribus.

I doubt the average online player ever thinks about rake. Their thought process goes something like this:

I deposited $100
I played
I won
Whooppee
I'm coming back to play some more and make more money!

-or-

I deposited $100
I played
I lost
Boo hoo
I'm coming back to play some more and get my money back!

-or-

I enjoy playing and I don't give a damn about the money!

The big thing for Gary Loveman and all the other operators is how to get that deposit!

I say it's by providing an agreeable environment for the type of player they want to attract. Now, what is that?

Does anyone a have any stats on what game types recreational players play? Is it possible to gather such information? I play on Ipoker and FTP and it seems to me (just from observation so i may well be wrong) that MTTs are where the recreational player puts in most volume on those sites.

On Ipoker at the low and micro levels there's loads more rebuy/turbo MTTs (as opposed to standard freezeouts) which i have to assume drain the bankrolls of the recreational players. These rebuys on ipoker offer great value for 'thinking' players but they can't be good for the long-term sustainment of the games. There's no MTT sng action and not much cash game action on Ipoker.

On FTP, before they shut down, MTT sngs were grindable as plenty recreational players played them, now those games are totally dead. Where did the recreational players go?
Was it to Rush MTTS or just MTTS in general? Well on FTP they extended the late reg period for loads of MTTS. So now a recreational player can reg for an MTT 2 hours after it starts and get a 10-15BB stack...again great for grinders who get value from the impatience of the recreational player who logs on and just wants to play 'now' - but those recreational players are losing quicker. They have to be and that's not good in the long run.

It's already been said that cash games rake to much at micro limits, so it seems to me that to improve the lot of the recreational player sites need to have fun games running round the clock where the rec player can maybe just lose a little more slowly than they are at the moment. So they get more enjoyment from their relatively small investment. Word of mouth is huge...i got six of my mates to sign up and deposit on FTP pre Black Friday. Great software, fun games, good variety. Now i wouldn't tell anyone to deposit on FTP. Same goes for Ipoker. I would advise people to deposit on Pokerstars though, just cos they have the most games. But i don't think it's a good thing for poker in general for one company to have such a strangle hold on the industry. Competition is good - or it's meant to be. Without it the industry stagnates, which is what we have now.

I don't know if your rake numbers are accurate but, if they are, they're quite revealing.

You're saying the rake online is less than half what it is in casinos and, yet, that is bad? If the rake is such a deterrent to players showing up, how do casinos attract players with rake twice as high?

The casino double rake is beatable because "everyone sucks?" Are there no suckers online?

Here's what I think about rake:

1. Rake is here to stay
2. Rake will be the maximum that the market will allow
3. If you can't live with rake, go play roulette where rake turns into rape

If the little dog hadn't stopped to take a whiz he would have caught the fat rabbit.

For starters, they slow the game down.

I'm an online rec player (live reg). Some suggestions:

--Multitabling itself isn't a problem. Slow play is a big problem. Multitabling is only a problem to the extent that it slows play on the table. Easy solution - tighten up the time limits, players who sit out due to time limits being exceeded are kicked off the table in one orbit. If you sit out to go take a crap (and click the checkbox yourself) it can be more liberal. If people can 16-table and not slow down the play, more power to them. And frankly I like it as a rec player because if you multitable you're trading volume for optimal play on any individual table, which can give me a slight edge.

--HUDs - LOVE them. I don't have any problem with a HUD and wish all players would avail themselves of the tools they may use.

--Buying hand history DBs - HATE this and support everything Pokerstars has done to make this difficult. If you've played a hand against me at any time, I hope you will access that history and use it as you wish. If you have never played against me, you should have no idea how I play and have to learn about me (using the tools you like) as we play. Adding HH from purchased DBs is already illegal afaik and it bugs me that there are people who have no problem cheating.

--One player/One account. I don't care about real names, but I do care about stable pseudonyms. I.e. that "binkitlikeadonk" is always the same person, and that's the only account that person uses. Support all efforts to enforce this.

--Not a rules thing... One of the most notable differences between Tilt and PS back in the day was that there was a much stronger culture of chatting on Tilt. I.e., people would have little chats, "nh" "gg" "wp" and longer stuff. For an occasional player this is very nice. Nothing to do with the rules, but the culture was much more enjoyable.

because there are too many ****ing regs

Best shot they have would just be to let poker stars serve us and take there cut,for them.,then PS does all the work and USA makes big money....,that or cut the take in half....

are you sure you're a "recreational" player? you mean to tell me you don't want the rules somehow changed in a way that you think would help you? wtf man?

He said he is a rec player. Here we go now, trying to define one by their responses. You dont like his responses, so cast him from the rec responses into the regs.

At least let us declare ourselves as rec or reg without debate.

It is not currently installed anywhere.

i was being sarcastic, i am praising him

and wtf is this about slowing the game down? call me crazy but don't you think it's easier to just have less time for a decision? plus most good players will take the maximum anyway to avoid any timing tells

and since when is poker so simple that you can make every decision in 5 seconds? seriously go play roulette or whatever, everybody wants donks playing poker but not if they have to have it ruined so they can "have fun"

pokerstars even has a "home game" option, you can set up games and only invite your 'rec' buddies and have any kind of rules you want

in the end if you're bad you will keep losing no matter what unless you start asking for +20% equity each pot or something just cause you are a "recreational" player

don't get me wrong, auto-sit software should get ppl banned imo, datamining permanently banned and maybe funds seized or frozen a bit at least, but all these suggestions about separating the player pool are just idiotic, you know you can choose any table you want right? nobody forces you to play with the best players

The rake is not the maximum that the market will allow, it's whatever the room in question chooses to charge, rake pricing decisions aren't taking place in econ textbooks. There is strong evidence that rooms will price certain games far beyond what the market allows, and this causes rapid decline in those games and in turn the entire upstream of games which they feed.

As for number three it's great advice. Unfortunately I'm fairly certain large numbers of players have taken it and will continue to do so.

If that's the case those rooms shouldn't be in business. (Or won't be in business for long.) It's suicidal to charge more than the market will bear -- for anything.

Not just slow. 'zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz' slow. I know when I used to sit at a few tables and had to wait every.single.hand for the same players to finally get around to acting on my table I'd get aggravated. And it was very often that I'd have to wait on a few players. That's no damn fun.

Hud's should be banned because games are way better without them than with. Some people are literally unable to play well without them though and they'll fight so hard to keep them.

The rake in casinos is way way way lower than online.

Rake is a function that takes money out of the poker economy. So do winning players.

If you want to compare rake of two games you have to look at the ratio between winnings and rake.

If rake is higher than winnings the games become unbeatable. This is happening online.

Also the 10% vs 5% is not quite as important as the cap. Live the cap in 100nl game is 1bb and at a 2/5 game its less than 1bb.

How many bigs can the sites rake at a 2nl game?

We don't have exact figures but it appears that rake online is about 70-90% of money moved, while live it seems to be closer to 30% at the low stakes games (online up to 200nl and live up to 500nl).

Once you play 5/10 the rake is effectively negligible.

I agree with all your statements somewhat. However if the industry does not adjust rake than poker is nothing but a slot machine.

All other points you are discussing are irrelevant compared to how important rake is for the health of the games and beat-ability of the games (rake in fact is the only thing that can make a game unbeatable).

I believe that the industry will adjust. The sites are already trying to fix their economies, however they are all doing it the wrong way. All their efforts are geared towards increasing the effective rake, while that is precisely the problem of why the games dry up.

However I am an optimist and believe int he forces of nature (the market in this case). The more players that understand this topic the better by the way.

Threads like these however show that even knowledgeable poker players and poker pros have no clue how rake works and how much rake we pay.

hence the current decline of the industry. every site is doing this atm