Perhaps the simplest example is when Player A and Player B are all-in, each with 50% equity, each putting their entire $100 into the pot (making the pot $200).

Player A chooses to "cash out" and Player B chooses NOT to "cash out". Hopefully such an example is very easy to understand.

Then it is clear that Player A comes out about where he started (minus $1 insurance payment).

Player B is going to wind up with either $200 or $0 depending upon the outcome of the "flip".

How can it make sense for "off table" adjustments to "adjust for" the "extra" $100 Player B has in her stack (in the case she wins the flip) or the "diminution" of $100 Player B no longer has in her stack (in the case she loses the flip)?

I have no idea what this means.

But in this situation there's $200 on the table at the start of the hand and either $100 or $300 at the end of it. Seems shady to me.

Just like if I'm playing a live cash game and get insurance from a 3rd party I can't settle that payment with chips from the table. This is essentially what Stars is proposing with Stars acting as the 3rd party and I would be similarly uncomfortable with a player settling up that 3rd party debt with chips from the online table.

^^
So in the example above, pokerstars either makes $101 or loses $99? (Not counting rake)

Where have you seen that?

To me, of course the insurance is being paid off/with chips at the table

Yeah, THAT has been the issue all along ?

Seriously ???

That is correct.

If Player A wins or loses, he gets 50% of the $200 pot back, less $1 fee, $99.

If Player A wins the hand, PS wins against Player B and gets the remaining 50% of the pot, plus Player A's $1 fee, $101.
Player A has $99. Player B has $0. PS has won $101.

If Player A loses the hand, PS loses against Player B and pays Player B 50% of the pot.
Player A has $99. Player B has $200. PS has lost $99.

Without the cash out option, Player A would have had either $200 or $0, and Player B would have had $0 or $200. Player B, (who played as if the option didn't exist), is never in a worse position, but he is in a better position if he won the first hand as Player A has another $99 that Player B might win.

It is not, at all.

Probably ideal amount might then be something closer to 0%, but still a charge.

Rake me, rake me again.

A few thoughts on how some players might consider utilising the new option.

If you're a regular and winning player, playing many hands per month, with sensible bankroll management, there isn't really any great reason why you should use the cash out option. Yes, if you always cashed out when in front, you would guarantee a steady profit from those hands at the cost of 1% of that profit - but you would also almost certainly make the full 100% of profit over the long term without ever using the option.

However, for the not so regular player, there might be a psychological benefit from smoothing out the short term fluctuations. If you think that would help you, I'd suggest splitting the possible equity figures into four bands of your choosing. (Say, for example: "A: Below 30%"; B: "30% to 65%"; C: "65% to 80%"; D: "Above 80%"). Then cash out when you are in bands A and C, and take the risk with bands B and D.

The more you are behind, the more likely you are to lose the individual hand, so the more likely you are to have long losing streaks for hands in that particular equity band. Therefore, always cashing out with your lowest equities might appear to be a reasonable strategy in the short to medium term.

Similarly, the more you are in front, the more likely you are to win the hand and have long winning streaks for hands in that particular equity band, so - go for the full pot. (Keep a note of your wins and losses for hands in that band. Almost definitely you'll see that you do win more than you lose, but if you are the type of player who tilts when some of his very best equity hands lose, forget all these suggestions and instead write to thank PS for allowing you to cash out.)

With the "50/50" hands, hope that you get lucky and win more than you lose over your playing time. At least if you lose them you're not going to tilt, as you don't have a great expectation of winning those hands in the first place.

And that's all I have to say about that.

The ideal amount is likely different to different users. I'm surprised they didn't charge different rates to different people.

There are probably some people who would pay 5% or 10%, and others who would only pay 0.01%. If they wanted to maximise revenue, they'd introduce some price discrimination (they could hide the discounts through refunds/discounts/reimbursements/etc.).

I doubt that the optimal rate is 1%, I imagine that more than half of the people who would pay 1% would pay 2% - which, if true, would cause 2% to earn them higher revenue. I don't know what data/research/analysis they've done, so am surprised to see them decide on 1% and not some other number (eg, 0.99% seems likely to be more attractive)

They could price discriminate based on volume (fpps) pretty easily and it would almost perfectly overlap with price sensitivity.

No volume players are probably so insensitive to changes in price it could be 5% without losing much interest. Supernova elite volume players would probably be more reasonably set at around .1%.

This is a no brainer improvement in pricing but they’ve traditionally hired people who aren’t particularly good with these types of things. I could think of a half dozen analogous decisions off the top of my head that show horrendously poor judgment.

The shady part is the effect it's going to have on the rest of the players at the table. When a whale gets it in as a 20% dog against a reg, wins the hand and then 60% of his stack vanishes off the table.

Also just the whole visuals of players going all in, boards being run out and then stacks magically increasing or decreasing is pretty gross. Like, I could get behind it if all the insurance claims were just done as direct deductions or credits to the players account balance (with the option automatically disabled if a player doesn't have enough in his account to cover the win) and the game just plays out as usual but if it's done publicly at the table it's going to look and feel absolutely awful.

Even the worst players understand the concept and the software already tells you what your percentage change of winning when all in. How is balances shifting less significantly offensive? In all reality the true whales won’t be using this most of the time anyways - it’ll primarily be the losing aspiring pros (at least at 1% vig).

It is an improvement until recreational players find out they are being treated worse than other players and decide to leave the site.

Setting different prices for different customers is pretty widespread in literally every industry - from restaurants (oh? you want the fancy bottle of wine?) through to recruitment (look at the prices on advertising to hire one job, vs hiring hundreds) to the last twenty years of online poker (supernova elite got ~60% of a rake discount compared to bronze players).

I doubt it would be impossible for an online poker site to email selected high volume customers something along the lines of:
"Hi,

We see that you're a high volume poker player, but haven't used our impressive new variance-reduction tool. Reducing variance is an important part of being a high-volume regular player. To help you smooth the peaks and troughs, we're giving you 50% off all-in insurance for the rest of 2019."

etc.etc.

What if one can accurately determine if it is more likely or not that an A or a K was already folded preflop. This could obviously be determined via collusion but a really good player could likely also make a determination based on hand reading.

Would this be enough to make an all in decision to take the insurance more plus ev if it can be determined the true equity of the hand is less than what pokerstars calculates it as? Is the 1% enough of a tax to make this worry irrelevant?

An extreme example that would occur rarely in practice would be 3 players colluding. Two have AK and one has QQ. One AK player gets it in with the QQ player and takes the insurance.

Apologies if this has been accounted for and I just missed it.

That is not the same thing at all, because in both cases you are selling different products. Note that even if two workers have the same job title, they will have vastly disparate skills. Labour is thoroughly heterogeneous and no two people do the same work, even if the job is similar it will be impacted by soft skills like general intelligence, emotional intelligence, punctuality, work ethic etc. etc. Yes, different goods sell at different prices (duh), but a firm selling the same product to different people at a different price is practically never done and for good reason, as such a practice breeds resentment.

I cannot take your views seriously, because they seem to be based on this incredibly flawed premise.

Here's a couple of concrete examples from my personal life

-Amazon UK right now sells the identical pairs of speaker stands for £25 and £50

-The huge prevalence of loyalty discounts etc

-Huge amounts of the food and beverage industry offer targeted discounts (Ladies Night; Industry Discounts; etc)

-Figuratively no one buys the same car at the same price as anyone else

Bold is the one that almost everybody should be familiar with, it's so ubiquitous that TV shows have entire plots based around this fact.

You don't even have to go outside the poker industry... the entire basis for their rewards system is price discrimination. If you play especially high volume you effectively get 50% of your rake back (which can be converted to cash) which is functionally identical to paying half the price that a new player is.

Almost every single time you hire someone to do a job (that isn't of trivial significance) the price is negotiable, where you have your max willingness to pay and they have a min willingness to accept - and the price you arrive at falls somewhere between those two points.

Employers do it all the time. Companies often strongly discourage employees chattering about salaries, not just because some people are more qualified and have more experience, but also because your salary is in part a function of how desperate they perceive you to be. If they come in with an initial offer of 60k they may be willing to pay as high as 75k, but there's no chance in hell that they'll make you that offer if they know you have no other options.

There's no industry at any level that doesn't do this. The entire basis of retail is that the retailers get a different price when they buy from companies in bulk. It's incredibly common to offer student and senior discounts because these are two groups that're more sensitive to changes in price. Coupons, employee discounts, happy hours... these are all ways that companies discriminate on price offering an identical product.

Why would people be especially bitter about this? If you're interested enough to learn how the price system works you're probably capable of understanding why it works the way that it does.

If basing it on volume is offensive, maybe a better option would be to do it on the basis of how long you've gone without using the service.

It starts off at 5%, say. If you're all in and choose not to opt in, it reduces the price by 10% to 4.5%. Do it agian - it reduces to around 4%, and so on until it's reducing by very small incremental amounts. After x number of hands the price drops to around .5% and let's say this is where a hypothetical player decides it's worth the vig, and so they use the feature. Now the software would bump the price up by 10%. This makes it so the price is always roughly equivalent to a persons max willingness to pay.

There're different ways to calibrate it but anything along these lines would be just an enormous improvement from their end and make it so all players benefit to some extent.

Now we just need one of their forum vultures to drag this piece of red meat back to their boss so they can claim it as their own.

A lot of people are resentful of Jeff Bezos, but his company pioneered algorithm-based "dynamic pricing" online, and every other major retailer has copied it, because it's so profitable. You can literally have two people living in the same house being offered different prices for the same thing on Amazon. (You'll sometimes see another price if you're not signed in).
I'm not sure if it's the same elsewhere, but one of the most annoying/confusing forms of dynamic pricing in the UK is with train fares. You can have 600 people getting on the same train from Manchester to London and each one paid a different price (depending on when/where they booked the ticket, and if/when they are returning).
The same goes for holidays/hotels. Never ask the people in the next room how much they paid, unless you want to feel cheated for the rest of the holiday.

PokerStars Confirms “All-in Cash Out” Coming to Real Money Tables

It won't be replacing Run It Twice feature



https://pokerfuse.com/news/poker-roo...-all-cash-out/

All-In Cash Out is now live at micro stakes tables (excluding zoom)

PS Blog says 1%, website 2% ... anyone tested?

No mention on the client settings page that there's a fee, it's enabled by default.

where does it say 2%? do you have the screenshot?