LOL, great example, EXCEPT ... Starbucks has perfected deceptive naming for their coffee offerings .... there is no SMALL.

At Starbucks, the "small" is called Tall, the "medium size" is called Grande (i.e Large).

Starbucks never labels its offerings as "small", there no wonder he stared at you ...

Why aren't you online ordering your Trooper coffee .... keep your money in circulation in the poker community ....

I think it’s a shitty example.
Starbucks isn’t asking their customers directly for feedback like RIO is.

You should've seen the look on the Starbucks manager's face when I told him I don't like how they splash their coffee pots

@PhilGalfond Also I think you are underestimating the negative impact of what a high variance game can do to a grinder or grinder wannabe. When you go on a big upswing, you are more likely to lose money later in a big variance game. Luck evens out they say, yes, it evens out by going in an opposite direction.

Gamblers assumed this principle of combined probability by adhering to a extreme MartinGale system, which proved inefficient as there are just a few times in a row that you can double the money in your bets before you go broke on a bad streak. Mathematics teachings afterwards wrongly assumed that gambling events are independent outcomes by the recognition of the "failure" (disputable) of such system.

But are they trully independent? I would argue that anybody who has gambled for a long time feels like disagreeing. I ask the grinders, on average, after a big upswing, did your results returned to normal or did you seemed to have a worse luck streak thereafter? I think in this forum we are enough experienced with graphs to reserve me the time to post any MTT or even many SNG grinds where grinders income comes in short term waves, not a consistent line of every day success. This is also apparent in sport betting, example: after the first game of a soccer season, all teams have 100% frequencies on their results, meaning they have either won 100%, drew 100%, or lost 100% of games; because they have only played one. But how often, say on a 20 team league, how often they finish with 100% frequencies in their results? Virtually nobody does ever. What this means is that that first game frequencies is conditioning future season results to decrease the preseason expected following frequencies of that 100% result, and increase the frequencies of all other options.

What all this means to a grinder on a high variance game, is a discouragement to play on the lose (because of how hurtful) AND on the WIN (because of how they are projected losers thereafter). No wonder pros - who you claimed wanted to revive their dreams- arent attracted to play on your bingo splashes system. This is not a fail in our reasoning as you claim Phil, this is an instinctive and sometimes rational understanding of what is ahead of us.

We grinders play to provide consistenly for ourselves and/or our families, we are discouraged to do that on a bingo enviroment.

This is a thread to discuss RIO poker site and provide feedback to Galfond and his team. I don't think it serves any useful purpose for people to critique other people's feedback (unless it becomes repetitive, over-the-top, etc.).

I am sure that Galfond and his team want to receive unfiltered feedback on what people like or don't like about the site.

Phil,
Have you thought about trying to quantify the extra variance added from STP?
If you could say, STP increases our average customers standard deviation from X to Y, then atleast regs would know what they are getting into.
They could adjust their bankroll requirements properly and maybe not be so fearful of the added variance.
Just a thought.

The irony is strong with this one ....

Did you ever say, all-in and pour your coffee out on the floor and, then ask for your free refill ?

When you cut to the end, it kind of makes things clear .... grinders who cannot take variance in their "roi for their time grinding" may be the kind of nits RIO may think are not good for their business, which seemingly seeks to entertain recs with features like STP.

If you want to provide consistently for yourself and/or your family, get a JOB or grind somewhere other than RIO.

Jobs options in Ecuador are not more attractive than playing poker, specially for an introvert who most of us grinders are.

I dont think they have to choose between recs or regs, they clearly need both, we all need both. They offer 51% rakeback, what about the other 48??? Sports betting are very intelligent on this, they operate with tiny margins and make much more profit as they attract more customers.

But yet they are relying on some of these "nit grinders" (who are supporting RIO atm for various reasons) to keep their business afloat for now. They can't have it both ways.

Hey, Smokedtruth. Thank you for completing the survey and I look forward to catching up. Just for the record (for those reading), my blog was posted two days ago and I didn't promise to have personal one-on-one conversations with hundreds of people immediately.

Here's the relevant section of the blog:

I’ll be contacting you one by one, based on how much time I have available, and chatting with as many of you as I can. I have no idea how many sign-ups I’ll get and how quickly I can chat with each of you, so I don’t know how long I’ll keep you waiting or if I have a chance of getting to everyone.

I will make an attempt to chat with a variety of player-types and to give each of you who I do chat with an appropriate amount of personal attention. I won’t have anyone pretending to be me – if we chat, I promise it will be me on the other end of the conversation.

Dude.. just stop already, it's embarrassing...You trying to prove your point and you are failing miserably.

This is definitely not our view. Nits are welcome!

I've tried to explain many times that the majority of pots aren't splashed and the majority of splashes are small. The variance on RIO is not massively different from other sites, and achievable winrates (if given the same player pool) are higher. Worst case, I believe these grinders who are worried about the variance could simply drop down a level and have a nice earn on RIO.

But, what I want to make most clear is that we're not at all saying we don't want certain player types. We do!


This is a great idea. Thank you!! I wish that an independent high-volume player could simply share things like:

Their variance on RIO compared to other sites
Their winrate on RIO compared to other sites
Their effective "splashed" rakeback % (even though that doesn't actually mean much - people think it does)

I'll talk to our team about this idea and see what we can share, but I expect it would be more beneficial if you all heard it from 3rd parties.


This is absolutely not how variance works. Unless you're altering your play (your expectation), the probabilities have nothing to do with past results. This is something that every poker enthusiast should understand, and I strongly urge you to re-evaluate your perception here for the sake of your success in the game.

Again, RIO is not "a bingo environment." All poker has plenty of variance. RIO has slightly more variance (and less rake). It's not all that different.

Thank you for the feedback - I agree. I would definitely like to do this eventually. I'm looking for some quick wins given our long development list.

No.

Pokerstars is a billion-dollar company. A new site is never going to match Pokerstars' liquidity, regardless of their policies, features, and rake.

The fact that we are smaller than Stars is not evidence that we chose the wrong path (which is what it sounds like you're implying). Otherwise, it would be evidence that every poker site besides Stars chose the wrong path.

Pokerstars made plenty of decisions a long time ago when the landscape was different. Now, changing those decisions carries risk.

I don't believe there is a right or wrong decision when it comes to many of these policy choices. We chose something different. As far as understanding why we went this route....

I explained every decision we made in great detail before we launched. You can find my explanations for each and every major policy choice here: https://www.runitonce.eu/news/

Those explanations have been there all year. I've gone on podcasts, done interviews, responded in forums and on social media, streamed on Twitch... I've talked about our reasoning more than any other poker site has explained the reasoning behind their decisions.

I don't believe that online poker is dying, so I would be surprised if I said that, but who knows.

What I believe is that online poker is facing 3 major threats:

1) Botting
2) Losing players losing too consistently
3) Regulation

I've also said that I suspect Pokerstars doesn't believe in the future of online poker in its current form and that they're continuing to make changes that threaten the ability to earn a living playing online poker.

This is a good question. I had expected it to be the latter, but now I'm not so sure.

I'm hoping that this exercise of reaching out to a bunch of players individually and directly will shed a bit more light on the true feelings of the community.

Np! Glad you liked the idea.

I was thinking something along the lines of, you select a few of the accounts that have played the most hands across different games/stakes and figure out what their standard deviation is if you filter out STP hands vs what is is with STP hands included.

Not sure if this is the best way to do it, i'm sure your team will know better than me.

But i agree it would good to hear some players post their findings as well.
I hope to see RIO succeed (and enter US market one day so i can play )

GL

First of all, money never falls from the sky like rain.

And the choice you've made is ...to troll here? Whatever man enjoy your life. When you actually decide to play, rather than troll, you know where Stars and Party are.

I'm surprised to hear you realise this.

Phil - any ideas on what the equivalent of STP will/should be for SNGs and MTTs when they start running?

If you open the Unibet client and go to the SNG tab it's very noticeable that when there is a particular stake not running, i.e. it has 0 people at tables and 0/5 people waiting, that when someone actually sits they are often joined by another person, and then another, and quickly there are 5 and it gets going but someone needs to make the first move.

I would recommend spending the promo budget in such a way as to benefit people who are actually open-sitting SNG stake levels which are not running and thereby getting them going. So "splash the prize pool" or rakeback or whatever should be much higher for the first X SNGs played at a given stake after they have been off for a while (maybe if there have been 5 or fewer run at the given stake level in the last 2 hours or something). You could also do the Domino's pizza thing - if you have to wait more than 15 mins for SNG to go off (measured since the last one went off) then the prize pool is always splashed to at least the usual rake level (so the site is giving it free to the players).

For MTTs it's doesn't really matter - there is variance enough - just reduce the rake by 51% if that's what you want to go for, or juice it up by giving losing players tickets or something.

Basically decide what behaviour you want to incentivize and design your promo system to support it.

Yes, this is the very best that a poker site can do! Let people choose, this counts also for the avatars. Some people like fat... others like skinny...

Keep listing to the people, try to make everybody happy... and they will talk about your site and new people will join and play! This takes time and work.

I have looked again at your avatars in your video. They are not that bad, when I look now! But I don't like the eyes. There is no white, that's the reason they look boring, I guess... They all have the same eye color. The table, the card deck on the table and chips are really nice!

Are there any plans for Spin & Go and Hyper Turbo formats? I think this is a space with some potential. You see Stars really pushing Spin & Go's in particular. These are raked really high but still very popular among recs. The possibility of binking a big score is appealing and sitting down for less than 10 minutes and still winning a tournament is nice too. If you have a site that runs these with lower rake and no HUDS to deter bots, I think that would be appealing to a lot of recs and grinders alike.

Mr. Galfond talked about hypers on stream and how the rake is too damn high. In my opinion implying that RIO will have some kind of hyper turbo format.

"I mean that we'll definitely discuss and very seriously consider it" - I very much like the sound of that I was hoping you'd say that.
non-anon tables with screen name alias is an important piece of the puzzle, that will help bring the masses.

I really think you are on to something here. I think this is what a lot of people in this thread are saying (in their own unique way).
So I wanted to try and help show the perspective of potential customers.

Our experience of variance, is that it can be absolutely brutal. So when we look at what's on offer we assume the worst (i.e. 0% rakeback won in STP, or close to 0%).
(even if that may seem illogical to you).
So even though I understand what your saying about '51% rakeback' on average, I would still assume a worst-case scenario.
Nobody wants to be that guy who moves some of their action over to another site, to get higher rake - it's much easier to stay where you are.

Ok so somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but it looks like this (for example):
RIO rake: 5.75% . . . . Star rake: 4.50%
4.5/5.75 = 0.7826
5.75 * 0.7826 = 4.5 ; Stars 4.5% is 78.26% of 5.75%

Or in other words, this is exactly equivalent to saying Stars gives 21.7% more direct rakeback (compared to the RIO base rake, for this stake).
So we need to make 21.7% rakeback in winning the random STP hands, to even match what we already get at Stars right now.
Also your caps are higher, but it's the same sort of problem.

This further calculation of the STP variance, is a step too far, to expect anyone to work that out, rather than assume the worst (0% STP, or less than 20%).
I mean in terms of your marketing.
Maybe change the '51%' or don't be too tied to that number ? (seeing the higher base rake & caps quickly puts a downer on it anyway).

Anyway like you said, something needs to change here.