sry you're right, mostly just to coach99 and killingit who are basically the same person.

but for coach99 asserting China has no money to gamble should be grounds for perm ban from the internet and all things electronic for that matter

and yes some of the issues surrounding live cash in macau do cross over to online,, mostly Chinese cultural issues around poker and gambling in general. Chinese culture just looks at gambling much diff than Western.

i lol'd well played.

I read this and thought that can't be true. Turns out it isn't. USA is first and, depending on the list, India is #10, #11, or #12.

First: India doesn't have a gambling culture, and has a very protectionist economy. You can see the micro national poker sites they have. Almost no one plays, and any few questions about poker online by young people are replied that the sites are prohibited and its against their culture.

Second: Phil Galfond is a smart guy. He's not going to ban tracking software and limit severely multitabling when the best and dominant site has those features available. That would be suicide if he wants to compete with pokerstars. The objective isn't going to go for 3rd place with crappy software and a miniscule share of the market. I'm sure the aim is to go head to head against Pokerstars like FullTilt did. In this day and age there's no need for a giant marketing budget with bad comercials. Social networks, word of mouth, will do its job.

Build it and they will come. RIO just needs to have a great piece of software and it will become the second player in the market in no time.

1 million rupees is 14909 dollars, so it could be true on that basis.

But seriously, India has a middle class. There are people buy things like new cars in India, aren't there?

If you can buy a new car you can also upload $100 onto a poker site once in a while and the number of people about whom that's true is only going to grow in India, China and a load of other countries - including Brazil. The trick is going to be retaining them this time around.

The thing that killed poker tremendously was fragmenting the global player pool, and it sickens me to read about the exclusion of countries because a few xenophobic idiots say so

Yes ! and +1

will people plz stop making posts saying there is no middle class etc in India. thats just plain dumb

google is your friend

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_of_living_in_India

If a new online poker company (especially a privately held one) does not have India as primary target market, then they are doing it wrong

I think this may be the opposite of what is needed in a sustainable model.

If we assume:

(A) Pokersite needs to profit
(B) Winning players need to exist

For (A) the average rake needs to be at a certain level.
For (B) the effective rake for winning players needs to be low enough to permit them to profit.

In that [simplified] model, from the players' perspective, it would be ideal/nice/fair if recreational players paid the same (or less) effective rake than the winning players, however that is not a prerequisite for the model outlined.

---------

NB: I'm not saying that it's fair system, just that given those simple assumptions it may be the case and it is possibly worthy of consideration. I'm also not saying it's necessarily correct- as I haven't spent too long thinking about it- and maybe I'm missing an Assumption (C) involving recreational players. It's just that intuitively to me it's seems like it's correct (but intuitive thinking about the poker ecosystem is often wrong!)

E.g.:

Scenario 1: All pre-rake winning player wins at xbb/100 and all pre-rake losing player loses at xbb/100. If rake was >= xbb/100 across the board, then there would be no winning players and, if assumption (B) above is correct then such a model would fail.

Scenario 2: All pre-rake winning player win at xbb/100 and all pre-rake losing player loses at xbb/100. If rake averaged out to >= xbb/100 across the board, but winning players were raked at more than xbb/100. Losing players would lose at a lesser rate, and their funds would last a little longer, but they'd still be losing players, as would everyone on the site, and such a model would fail.

Scenario 3: Average pre-rake winning player wins at xbb/100 and average pre-rake losing player loses at xbb/100. If rake averaged out to >= xbb/100 across the board, then there could still be winning players if those pre-rake winners were raked at less than xbb/100. Losing players would lose at a higher rate, but the argument is that their increased loss rate would have far less of an impact than the opposite and equal increase in win-rate for winning players. Therefore such a model could be sustained(?)

Again, as this is NVG, I stress I'm not saying this is "fair", or even correct, just that it may be worthy of consideration before people automatically assume that a rec-friendly model means fun players have to be charged less rake and given free blow jobs.

The problem here is not that its main competitor has those features, is that most recs don't know why they are bad for them. Even if they keep up to date on poker events like tournaments and such, the number of recreational players who go beyond poker news (the site that won the SEO poker wars forever) for and they are not going to explain to them why they should pick a site, any site, over PokerStars. I doubt PokerStrategy would either, with it's affiliate program.

Save for the WSOP and WPT, Amaya controls what most Recs know of the Poker World. RIO could be the best poker room in the world and 75%-80%would never know.

I doubt Social Media Marketing would be enough. They'll need to go on the aggressive, probably will even have to look beyond poker. They would have to take a page from DFS did and bombard their potential costumers with ads. Maybe sponsor some mainstream Youtubers with a heavy International, 18-35 demographic like EnchufeTV or Screwattack.

For someone who has spent so much time discussing / thinking about rake / ecology you still don't get it do you!?

How can you think the most important criteria for winning players is level of rake (ie B)? The key driving factor is presence of recreational net depositing players. Rake of course matters also.

Would you rather play in a 4 handed rake free 5/10 game with Trueteller, Kanu and Ike or a standard raked 5/10 game with Scout, Kanu and Ike?

Without making the changes to marketing spend to give more to recreational players so they re-deposit and play for longer then the games will continue getting tougher and therefore to meet you condition B rake would need to continually be reduced to allow players to keep winning (as less rec players). This would not meet your own criteria of sustainable as condition A not met (the sites wouldn't profit).

As this is NVG, I was intentionally careful and specific with my wording in my post. Your response seems to indicate you didn't read it thoroughly.

+1. I agree with this post. He is arguing from his own selfish viewpoint of making profit for himself, not for the wider issue of game sustainability.

Ha! Seriously? Come on chaps, is reading comprehension really so difficult?

I'm asking questions about possible models. I'm making assumptions which I stressed more than once may or may not be true, as I was questioning a common belief. Nowhere did I state what I thought the most important criteria was (as that other dude claimed) and I'm making impartial comments, hoping to invite thoughtful discussion.

I have no selfish agenda, and I no longer even play full-time. If you curb your emotions then the words on the page will hopefully become clearer.

I agree poker has to be beatable, as evidenced by the existence of winning players, otherwise why do people choose poker over other forms of gambling?

A lot of this "rec-friendly" hyper-spin stuff seems predicated on assumptions that lead one to the conclusion that recreational players are people who would be better served just taking the -1% ROI hit from a hand of blackjack and don't need to play poker at all.

Where Melea's thought experiment goes wrong though, I think, is that if the beatability comes only from volume discounts on the rake then the game is not beatable in a sense that has meaning to a depositing rec with a job and family.

My 'zero rake & tax long-term winners on withdrawal' model would easily fullfil points (A) and (B) as by taking a % of long-term winners' winnings they are still winners + the site makes money. And with zero rake there would be wayyyyyy more winners.

I feel there is a point (C) missed:

(C) Site charges should take an amout from the games that doesn't impact the games too hard and allows decent swings for all players.

('Decent' is relative but we can agree playing a 15bb/100 winner on a 20bb/100 rake isnt gonna result in any fun or deceptive upswings, its just dumping money every time u sit down)

Your scenarios meet (A) and (B) but by allowing winning players and a site to both beat up on bad players results in a terrible player experience for a certain group, and this group are called 'depositors'. So (C) is not fulfilled.

But with my model we allow the game to have its natural rake-free environment, players will lose only to other players which allows decent swings for all, a large percentage of the field will be winners, and those winners will pay a percentage of their winnings to the site upon withdrawal. This fulfills A,B & C.
Infact this model goes a little further on (A) and (C) as it adjusts the site-takings based on convurging skill levels. So sites take less as skill levels converge plus they have a greater incentive to produce winning players from skill based game formats.

But wont super donkeys still dump money with no upswings anyway?

Yes, and these guys fuel the industry so should have a ton of free stuff and tickets aimed at them to keep them visiting the site, they should get a feel of value from their visits.

In 2006, 888 used to just randomly put $20, $10 in my account, I kept visiting and dumping my wages. Effectively I was probably on 2000% rakeback but I lost tons. True story

This is right, the tax withdrawals model doesn't convert winners into losers where rake does that for a large chunk of the field.

I doubt Galfond has the balls to try this, even though he's in the best position, but I would like to see someone try the totally rake-free model.

The basic idea is you offer rake-free poker as a courtesy to gamblers and you then cross-sell them sportsbetting, slots and casino.

It's hard for an established brand to cut off its revenue stream with an experiment like that but given he doesn't have a player-base to lose yet, he should have a go.

The bizarre thing about the above is that its the model that corresponds most closely with Amaya's "we're buying a database of gamblers to cross-sell to" statements when they bought Pokerstars. If such a DB is really worth 5 billion then offer a bit of free poker to build the database.

Rake needs to be looked at first and foremost for ssnl plo .. lots of viable options to get pokerstars customers but feel the site idea is a long way off what we consider a threat to pokerstars or any of big competitor

At least for tournaments there should not be any problem to find sponsors who play their adds in the breaks. One might be even able to find a sponsor for the whole price pool.

I don't know why Phil is wasting his time and money on this.

No way it will be profitable nor a success.

You can't beat pokerstars.

Yeah, let's just close all other online poker sites already.

The ones around today had to fight tooth and nail for the *****ty market piece they have compared to Stars. I sincerely doubt Phil Galfond is looking to compete for fifth-second place. That said, I think it can be done, but it would need a huge investment.

It's just way too easy to use "you can't beat Stars" as argument. While the other sites are not printing as much money as they want, some actually are quite successful in their market segment and make profit. I'd reckon PG is clever enough not to expect to throw Stars from their throne.

Tooth and nail?

Their largest competitor PartyPoker pulled out of the US 2006, UltimateBet scammed their players relentlessly, Fulltilt stole player funds and refused a ton of players rakeback, and all sites stayed a good 5+ years behind stars for even the simplest of features such as (resiable tables, timebanks, breaks etc). Their rake was high, rewards abysmal and if you got a reply from email support within 2 days you were lucky. This decade they started getting competitive but wayyyyy too late.

My one pet-peave about this industry for the last 10 years is that Pokerstars got the easiest f***ing walk to the top amoungst cretinous competition.

The CPM (money per 1000 views) isn't really that high though.

Think of a TV station that gets a viewership of circa 30K. Slovakia's version of God TV gets about that and they don't have the money for full time professionals presenting the shows.

A cool animated effect where the table appears to physically flip over and there's a roulette wheel or blackjack game (maybe something different each time) would get people dumping serious money though.

As for cash and SNGs - maybe enforce a 5 min break at the same time and move on from the p-bottle culture. I suppose if people still want to pay rake they could have a 60-minute table.

If you can still monetize the customers you can run zero-rake poker as a way to attract them. It's maybe a smaller share of the pie for the site than the current model but someone like Galfond doesn't have a pie at all at the moment.

Make it easier for players of poker to "dump serious money" at break-time table games? I hope Amaya ain't reading this.

let's say this is true.

1) i highly doubt that ad revenue would be close to the rake for the tournament.

2)even if it was why wouldn't the poker site still charge rake since people are clearly willing to pay it?