It probably is. The skill gap between a bad player and a good player in poker is much more than the -0.50 to -1% in ev that you get with perfect basic strategy in black jack.

But in the long run bad players are better off working on their game and becoming good players.

Segregate playerpools by costs of living.
There is a reason Ignition (before btc withdrawels were easy and all the russians started VPNing) and Winamax had the healthiest ecosystems online within the last few years.

If I had a pokersite I would force people to move up once they cashed out(or sent money to another player) a certain amount. After cancelling SNE and most of the reward system Stars made clear they dont owe anybody to make a living and that should count for people from emerging countries as well.
Or you could just ban countries where the amount of money going out is bigger than the amount of money going in. I just dont think that there is lots money coming from countries like Ukraine, Belarus or Lithuania. Add the fact that most alleged bots come from countries east of Poland I just dont see the upside allowing these players to play on your pokersite. But I could also be wrong and maybe the number of money coming in shows a very different picture.

Bots, collusion and seat scripting definitely need to be eradicated but I think segregation or banning certain country accounts is the wrong approach. There needs to be a free market, but a fair market.

With poker tracker etc I wouldn't ban it all, instead if I were starting a new web site I would make it available to everybody and charge them for it if they want it, and charge for training courses on how to use it and for upgrades to the software and add ons to it etc. This is an extra revenue stream for the web site which would also make it more of a level playing field for recreational players that wanted to make the effort to improve or who are simply fed up of consistently losing and are looking for solutions.

By doing this, plus charging lower rake and juice in order to increase volume and the number of players on your site, you are treating recreational players with respect and not as dispensable numbers and pieces of data on an accountant's spreadsheet.

It is a win win because the poker operator is opening up more and more poker related revenue streams and the players who are badly needed to support a large poker eco-sysyem, i.e. the recs, are being treated more fairly and getting better value.

Pros would not lose out either because such an eco-system would allow skilled players movement up the stakes and although the average playing standard of recs would improve a little this would be compensated by far more recs being in the system.

There are plenty of other poker related add ons that a forward thinking poker site could offer and I would be very surprised if Phil Galfond and his team haven't already thought of and planned/built a lot of these.

What you said in your post, is really a false analogy.
What has your analogy of a single live casino visit got to do with online poker (or online casino)? They are really quite different things.

You try to confuse a one-off trip to the casino for an hour, with the long term EV of a couple of different game types.

If you regularly went to this casino, let's say once a day, are you always going to try and shuffle your friend off to the casino?
He expresses an interest in poker, but you always push him towards casino games. Every single time: 'off you go mate.', you say to him.
Are you trying to give him a gambling problem? What kind of friend are you?? lol
Yeah, you'd tell him to read a poker book or two, ok great. So by this statement, I assume you mean, that you don't expect him to always go to the casino, and this is a one-off. Right?

Hmmm, but then you say this:
Oh Wait, ... what? You think his long term EV is zero? How can you possibly know that?
For all you know he might be the next OTB_RedBaron / Isildur / DNegs / Ivey etc. [insert your choice of poker pro here] in the making.
Are you scared to play him or what? Who is this guy? lol
He doesn't even have to be that good to beat your $1/$2 game, just averagely good. Maybe he is smarter than you think?
Even if we assume you had a crystal ball and can somehow know the future EV of this one particular friend of yours, that still doesn't mean you can suddenly paint everyone else with the same brush.

So what has this theoretical one-off live casino visit, got to do with online poker/online casino, or long term EV?

Yeah, I agree a live casino might have an exciting atmosphere (which an online casino doesn't) that might be worth playing just once, while on holiday.
And once your friend has read those poker books, he will realise that he might like to try more than one game or session of poker, to realise his full potential.

You're a Pokerstars employee, so perhaps you can tell me: do they prefer repeat poker customers, or do they like to keep trying to find new people that only play once ever and then leave (and when they play that one time, it's only casino)? I'm interested to know. I guess this is what we are talking about.

And when you were playing live poker, when you sat down or in the middle of a hand, did anyone ever shove a billboard in your face advertising their casino?
Or when you stacking your chips and moving your chair at the poker table, did anyone grab you by your shirt and drag you off to the casino, shouting: 'HEY, did you say you wanted to play BLACKJACK or place a SPORTS BET?'. Did you then realise, that the strange shouting man appeared because you had accidentally leant on a button fixed onto the live poker table surface?
No? Oh that's strange, because when playing online poker at Pokerstars that can happen. Maybe live and online are not so similar after all, right?

I'm pretty sure most people are worried about the rake online being raised to the point where they turn poker into a casino game, an unbeatable game where all players lose and the house wins. And if they arn't worried about it, they should be. Once the rake has been raised to the point of turning poker into a casino game, I think you can no longer legitimately call it 'poker'. Maybe sites that attempt to call it poker will get into legal trouble with the gaming authorities? And since your company claims to be worried about the 'Poker Ecosystem', does it really make sense to keep trying to divert people away from poker to your casino games and therefore weakening the 'Poker Ecosystem'? I think it's more these type of things, that people are referring to, when they start talking about the difference between the EV in poker vs casino games.

Anyway, it is interesting to hear your point of view, I look forward to your response, thanks.

The more I hear about this poker ecosystem the more it reminds me of when I was 22 and accidentally was “hired” as part of a multi-level marketing scheme.

I didn’t make any money at first, but if I just stuck with it and kept getting other people to join (and bought all these extra marketing tools and reports), well then I was definitely going to start raking in the cash at some point.

Oh, and the point was that the expected return for a casual player is very likely better for a casino game than poker, given the rake and the assumed number of better players. If poker is a skill game as we’re assuming, that seems pretty clear, thousands of words worth of hysterical hypotheticals aside.

all this . Thread was better when it was mostly posts like below. Lately it just makes my brain hurt.

No, he was confusing short term EV (a one-off live situation), with the long term EV in relation to online games. I think this is quite misleading. Maybe he just made a mistake.
His friend could lose his $100 in seconds at roulette, just place it on a random number. How is that any better? You have like a 2% chance of winning or something?

I don't think his friend will learn much from that, except maybe acquire a gambling habit if he wins. Or much more likely, lose a lot of money fast when he loses (and possibley get into debt trying to win it back). I think he was trying to say there's some short term benefit to casino games, I don't think that is necessarily true. Also it doesn't seem to bear much relevance to the thread topic, anyway. Doesn't seem like a very good arguement for any online site to require a casino element.
Although, I guess I don't mind a casino element being there, if it's discreet and unobtrusive (and definately no casino buttons on the poker table window!).

At least we can agree that 'Poker Ecosystem' is an annoying phrase

Leaving details aside, I believe these are quite good thoughts. It would make a lot of sense for RIO to actually go down that road, given the credentials they can already build upon.

what type of discussion is in here OMFG

this is intended to be a site 100% full of regs, or semidecent players that are thinking of themselves they are regs?

you wouldn't play such a site, believe me, reg or wannabe or whatever you are


in 2218 people will say, there was a game called poker. internet killed it

there seems to be a great debat going on here, not read a single post, but still, it feels like it's great
anyways: when is the site gonna be released?

Nailed it.

It's sounds like a WPN 2.0 type site. For those that don't know what's going on over there and/or have never played on the site go check out joeys thread. That pretty much ends all discussion irt restricting certain countries from playing. I won't say which countries, but their cultures actually promote and encourage cheating in all forms. And cheating/ ****ing Americans over is just icing on the cake for most of them.

If you're a poker nerd and enjoy the grind against all reg lineups paying massive amounts of rake then more power to you. I'm sure you will love phils poker site. Whatever makes you happy right? But the number of people who do are incredibly small and won't give the returns that PG is looking for.

Sad, but mostly true. Last best hope is a regulated global pool. The internet poker world needs US players.

I do think live poker will continue to be ok, however.

While I don't think RIO will be as negligent as WPN and many other unregulated sites before them, I don't see where this site "fits" in today's environment, from a pure profit perspective.

Are there really that many new ROW online players out there? Enough recs to make a healthy rec/reg ratio plausible, given that currently, the vast majority of those eagerly awaiting the arrival of this site are regs? Are there any recs that even know this site will launch someday?

There are so fewer internet poker players than there were before 2011 due to BF, scandals perpetrated by unregulated sites, Amaya dropping the ball, no US players, tougher games that necessitate pros chasing recs away w bumhunting tactics, etc. So how does RIO expect to enter this new market and create revenues like Stars, PP, and the other biggest sites? Players who haven't deposited on a poker site within the last year aren't going to suddenly come out of the woodwork because a new site pops up.

It's too bad and I hope I'm wrong, as it'd be better for poker if the biggest site in the world was run by Phil Galfond instead of Amaya's shareholders. But entering a shrinking market that's been trending straight downwards for years seems more like a labor of love than a successful business model.

There are ways a new poker site could disrupt the market from day 1 to gain a lot of new sign ups.

One example is:

If you are new and already know your first 6 months' approximate burn rate then you could make your site rake free for all cash games above a certain level (~$5/$10 and up) and juice free for MTTs (~$50 and up). Rake and juice is charged on all other games/MTTs smaller than these. Make all HU poker rake free.

Okay so that's all the regs coming to your site, but what about the recs?

Give them plenty of free rolls, also free rolls to WSOP packages, and offer free rolls where the prizes are free RIO coaching.

Rake on sub $5/$10 cash games and juice on sub $50 MTTs will likely pay for the freeroll stuff above.

So there you have it, a pretty simple method of getting a lot of players of both types.

It has to of course be a time limited thing, let's say 3 months, and the site itself needs to be far superior to its competitors in terms of competitive/lower rates of rake and juice after the 3 month "free" period, better or equally good software, better or equal choice of games, better customer service and game security etc to make sure that you retain your customers when the full rake and juice is phased in.

The beauty of this strategy is that it is a price war that has your much bigger competitors in hand cuffs because your burn rate is a guaranteed loss anyway, so heavily discounting costs you nothing other than an opportunity value that probably didn't exist in the first place, whereas a current big site to match your discounting would be taking a real hit on profits and it would be for their very large existing player pool.

So the above is broadly how I would approach it. It would only need a very small marketing budget because word would get around very quickly about rake and juice free for a lot of the games, and the number of cash prize and RIO coaching prize free rolls being given away to recreational players.

The alternative is the traditional slow building process method to gain players through standard marketing methods, but as posters have said above, with a considerable risk that the player numbers will stagnate and never grow particularly big.

If you are in a very competitive market place and have zero customers on day one it's often a great strategy to heavily discount or even give away your services.

Great post.

I'm curious why you think live poker will be ok? There's only 3 areas that might be ok but the rest of the country games have to be getting worse, right? That's for live cash of course. I think live mtts will always be ok because it's mainly for entertainment.

The fact that there exists 'regs' who play very low stakes, complain they cant make money without a loyalty scheme, HUDS and multiple tables, but who do not understand where the money comes from AND think poker has a higher EV than casino for new players, shows both the massive success of training sites and tooling, and a lot of the problems with the structure of the modern online game.

If I remember correctly I already read pre BF a post on 2+2 suggesting that only a mtt-only offering will keep onlinepoker healthy longterm. Might even have been Elky who made that post. Since Phil has a huge cg background this might be a highly unlikely solution.

Having a ****ty software will keep regs and recs away so I think the only solution is a table limit even more so for the micros. Have it at 4 or even 2 tables. Recs mostly wont care and it will make it so much harder to make a living on these stakes. The same should be applied to STT's and probably most mtt-sng's(<5 tables).

What you dont need is more free coaching. There is already so much coaching available for free on twitch, youtube etc.. Too many twitch streamers already emphasize the need to teach yourself rather than just enjoying the game and having fun. I dont mind telling people that if they want to have longterm success they need to learn a lot about the game and always stay ahead of the curve. But telling people who ask what should I play if I only have 1hr a day that they rather invest that time into a coaching course is just too much in my opinion.

An app-only single table site would have a decent balance. In 2018 the idea of wanting to be sat at a desktop at all pretty much means you aren't good for the games.

^Many sites allow more than one table to be played in the app. Unibet allow 4 for example. People with short attention spans need stimulation of constantly getting hands, even on mobile. If it should really be one table only then zoom.

Can you elaborate ?

(I understand that "playing on a desktop" represents a shrinking market share. I suspect your reason is unrelated to market share however and reflects some attribute of "desktop" players, Why do you draw the conclusion you do ?)

I'm under the impression that seat-scripters, bot managers, mass multi-tablers, data-miners and HUD users all use desktops, but not all recs use desktops.

I realise some recs use desktops, I think it would net off well overall.

+1

Not charging rake does not get you customers. There have been plenty of sites that have employed this strategy, but none of them have been succesful without proper access to a consistent pool of net depositors. These players could care less about paying rake)

Please be so kind to enlighten me as i don't know for a single country whose culture promotes and enourages cheating in all forms.

I don't know how old you are, or what education you've received, so please don't get offended by this, but your post is extremely dumb.