This mostly applies to cash. For MTTs it's much less true - people can't do shady-seeming stuff like sit out or table-hop, and the volume of regs provides the high guarantees to attract the depositors. This is probably why MTTs have been more or less left alone by the sites. The rake is much more visible for MTTs too, recs would know something was off if they were in an $8+$2 tournament.

We're almost agreeing. Sites for sure need net depositors to succeed. Someone's gotta lose.

Sites don't need regs to succeed. But having them won't make them fail, either. a Site with 50% recs, and 50% regs will still succeed if the recs enjoy losing their money there.

Personally, I feel that having a site focussed on MTT's is better positioned to succeed than a site that has a wide array of cash games.

Recs are far more likely to feel like they got 'unlucky' in MTT's and re-deposit, than if they sat at a cash game and got continuously **** on by regs.

Yeah, 100% agree on MTT and on recs/regs mix. The numbers need to compute in the end. Of course, looking at it from the poker site POV, if they have the recs, they only shoot themselves in the foot by adding regs.

My point is that Phil's site needs to have a rec niche base of some kind to be considered a viable product. Turkish, Italian, Chinese, Indonesian, etc. If he does not have this base, he will never have a sustainable site. It is the first and most important requirement and I just don't see it happening unless there is some magic going on that is not revealed yet .

Also, in smaller poker site business models, the MTT's are used for promotional purposes, they actually cost the sites money instead of making them money.

Not in the long-term, it won't succeed. There's not any infinite pool of recreational players to prop up the online game, and a site with too many regulars/recreationals will rapidly deplete the component of the player pool that net deposits.

+1

If it was only about more friendly environment for recreational players then a cap for number of tables you can play would be the first thing to implement. This makes recs/reg ratio higher and limits stalling. The cap should be 3-4 tables at most. Next thing would to introduce serious id verification process for players who play high volume which should include more than just verifying documents. If you want to have any kind of chance to fight botting and multiaccounting you need to make telephone calls (this is standard and companies who need to implement know your customer policies already do that) but also have access to webcams at least occasionally.

One of the main things recreational players look for is to play against real people with real emotions and personalities, preferably from similar socio-economic or cultural background. It's no fun to play against opponents who are perceived as dead serious tight nerds happy to make 10$/hour when you are there to splash around and have some laughs. In this respect online poker of 2006-2008 era was much more enjoyable, with a lot of chat, showing cards, personal vendettas etc.
It's also desirable that rec players get to play against other rec players at least some of the time. Current environment is the worst possible for that. Again, limiting number of tables and good verification process could go long way in this direction.

I am not sure anyone has incentives to make it happen though. I feel that image of online poker is already irreversibly tainted in recreational players' eyes. One site doing things right will have hard time reversing that. Actions that lead to more rec friendly environment will also result in less revenue (at least short term, but maybe also long term). With this in mind I am not surprised sites introduce more high variance games, low skill games. This is one way to make things fun again and attract more deposits.

Only in the business model where regulars actually withdraw money.

Therefore PokerStars is switching to a business model of offering low/no-edge games where regulars are at most marginally profitable.

Just because somebody is a regular doesn’t mean they win money. Every casino has table games and slot regulars who sit there every day even though the house has an edge in those games.

While I agree with most of what you say, removing regs out of the equation results provenly only leads to minimal short term revenue loss. This is one of the reasons that regs boycotting Pokerstars was such a bad idea for the regs in hindsight and very good for Pokerstars, because it confirmed this fact to Pokerstars at that time.

Along with Pokerstars example, there are other rec friendly sites that have completely blocked all regs and found that rake in fact just stayed the same while close to 100% of the biggest monthly winners were in fact "mega-recs".

That is correct, net zero effect customers are nice for the site. They still don't bring in the money that you need to run the site though?

Oh, right, Stars gave you access to their raw data and you got a team together to analyse it?

(Or you believed the funny comments that Stars made up about the healthiest the ecosystem had ever been for that 3-day period?)

Obviously, I don't have access to Pokerstars data, but I do have access to data from the other "fishy" site that backs up Pokerstars "funny comment" 100%. So yes, I believe them.

Hi Daniel.

You don’t need access to data. It’s pretty much common sense unless you have a personal agenda which makes you incapable of seeing the bleedin obvious

Hi Lee.

Am going to bungle this up badly in trying to bring up a point Sauce brought up in the 2015 discussion thread - but didn't he say something like that in a larger player pool like those on Stars, all populations will tend to approach standard normal distributions ... so even in player pools of all recreationals, there'll be some players are much better, and some that are much worse, with most being in the middle. And so if everybody's losing to the rake, the majority will still be losing to the rake and the better of the recreationals, or something like that?

It seemed like Daniel understood that, and that's why he continues to use a hypothetical with a small player pool and a skewed distribution?

Gosh, does this even make sense? If not, never mind

Pokerstars draining as much money out of poker is going brilliantly, I play high low fixed limit Omaha on the site, but the days of 10 player games are now so rare, so little action there these days, as presumably players have switched over to the sports betting and slot machines, and lost their money. Well done Pokerstars!

There are two types of people that would suggest you can sort the profitable players out of the game and still have poker. You are being an idiot and you are disrupting this community.

Recs and Regs is not the proper distinctions between players types.

If you are a not a player, why would you post here? If you are a player, why would you think that someone with lesser game theory understanding should lead the direction of the industry?

Noose is loose and in full form.

So GTO of him to boast of GTO superiority.

Poker is a game where ignorant players are constantly overestimating their understanding of the game tho. And yes you absolutely need the data, which is why poker stars have the player reps sign NDA's

Since there are many more losing players than winning players (skillwise rather than luckwise) I think that the general narrative is often at least somewhat controlled by ignorance.

bumpnrun you are that segment.

That is not correct.

In a perfect world for Stars, all players would have the same skill level. No matter if it's the one of a chimpanzee or Sauce. That would allow them to rake away all deposits and nobody would be a longterm winner.

One basic problem with that: If everybody was on Sauce's skill level, that would also imply that everybody is really smart. And smart people don't play online poker for real money if they can't beat the game, unless they have plenty money to burn and/or a gambling problem.

If you remove all longterm winning players from a player pool, there are going to be new winning players because among the remaining player pool, the best former losing players will turn into winning players. But those players will have a significant smaller edge over the worst players. And smaller edges means more rake for Stars.

In the longterm, the skill gap would increase again, but for one Stars isn't really in the longterm game anyway and if they were, they could just remove the new longterm winning players again.

I just find it interesting how many people feel as though pokerstars or any poker site for that matter has some kind of duty to be "player friendly". Other than fraud, IE security issues and keeping your money safe, I am not sure what a particular site owes any of us. They have very little competition, and their promotion decreases show that. The only reason they were generous in the past with their promotions was because they had a lot of competition. I highly doubt they were making financial decisions for the company based on what was the best for the poker community.

+1

Except that it is, at least in smaller sites. They use tournament promotions as traffic driver, if you think differently, you are just misinformed.