Why not? Seems fairly reasonable to me and in line with the stuff I wrote about the situation.

It's not all that complicated.

Regs increase the size of the cake and eat some percentage of it. For Amaya, taking measures to get regs out of the games enables them to eat a larger percentage of the smaller cake which can be more or less bucks than before, not necessarily more. So making games unbeatable is not necessarily their best move, i think it'll be -ev longterm cause a lot potential customers (most of whom would by nature be net depositors) that could be dragged to the site just will do sth else with their time if they read at 2p2 or other news that games are unbeatable now. Ppl hop into poker with the intention to win money, some are uninformed/don't care if games are beatable or not like slot machines, others do actually read news/forums/etc. and aren't compulsive gamblers but just try (most will fail) to make moneyz and amaya will lose all of these.

Stars' "cake" is made up of two things - deposits, and the facility to turn these deposits into rake (ie games).

Previously Stars attracted and recruited tons of regs to come play at their site. The deposits were plentiful and the site needed these huge numbers of regs to facilitate the large number of games that were necessary. Now that deposits have fallen off we're left with a site that is saturated with regs, providing the facility of keeping games running at a rate that is way out of proportion with deposits.

This means that Stars can dramatically cut the number of regs in the games without affecting the size of their cake.

This is your personal judgment of the situation, mine is different cause I think the measures to cut # of regs will make amaya lose a lot of potential customers mid and longterm, see above.

What I wanted to state is: It is not sure what their best action is.

This is important. Does it then make better sense for Amaya to reduce the number of players who win by maybe 90% and to do so by increasing rake, and to make these rake increases over time?

zica,

I understand where you're coming from (and generally agree with your comment about who generally pays rake) but most people would say that the way to have a successful and sustainable economy is to have a reasonable balance: a stable poker economy is going to feature some people who are net withdrawers, and some people who are net depositors.

It seems to me to be self-evident that there are some people who play poker out of a desire to win money. There are also some people who play poker for other reasons. The people who want to win money - both from time-to-time because they are lucky, and also people who seek an on-going income - can and should be part of a balanced economy. In effect, they're giving other players the guarantee of a game by providing liquidity, and in return, they're winning money. That exchange can be part of a fair and sustainable ongoing economy.

Of course, it is also possible to run a decently large poker room where there are no net withdrawers - Zynga and PokerStars both run very large play money operation where this is precisely what happens.

These issues require finding the right balance, and conversations on the internet seem to be deeply unbalanced, arguing for black or white, when there's a lot of grey in the issue.

Not if you say you have publicly said you have "a comprehensive vision to grow the game of poker."

Zica, Reading what you say, you seem to believe that there is - or should be - some conflict between PokerStars and high-volume, net withdrawing, players. That's only true if you presume that there is a fixed-size pie, and the only question is to split that pie up.

However, if you believe that you can grow that pie, then there doesn't need to be a conflict between a poker site operator and net depositors: rather, the two parties can be mutually beneficial to each other. Indeed, if a poker site succesfully introduces more new players, and more new money, to the poker economy, then that could well to lead more profits by the overall net withdrawing group. To use a hypothetical example, 20% of $1billion is much more than 25% of $500million.

"the way to have a successful and sustainable economy is to have a reasonable balance: a stable poker economy is going to feature some people who are net withdrawers, and some people who are net depositors."

I see this, but what I suspect is necessary for sustaining a large interest and activity in poker wouldn't seem balanced to most. For a sports analogy, how many people dedicate massive amounts of time and effort in an attempt to make a living playing professional sports and how many of them succeed? A relatively minute number yet people keep trying.

This is something that the company can actually test, with some risk, to try to find their sweet spot of profit. Perhaps that's what they're doing.

I don't see how having a VIP program that enables people lose .5bb/100 while making a living is good for the poker economy. That VIP program drastically tightened up the game which made it much harder to beat. I am out of the loop so maybe that's not the sort of program they run anymore.

I don't think that's true. Whether it's X or 2X there is a proportion that goes to rake and a proportion that goes to withdrawers so if you can reduce the amount withdrawn you increase the amount available to rake regardless of the size of the pie. My post to which you replied suggested a strategy then would decrease withdrawers while maintaining perceived attractiveness.

The games have gotten looser over the years, not tighter. Used to be easy to play 12/10 at FR and make money but now everyone's a good bit looser (or at least they were when I still played FR)

They got looser because of theory advancement. Actually the higher the effective rake (rake - rakeback) the tighter the game should be.

I think that you, zica, and I, are not saying things that are fundamentally contradictory.

I think that you're saying that an online poker site can increase revenue by reducing the money withdrawn (and while, presumably, keeping money deposited stable). I don't disagree with that.

However, I'm saying that an online poker site can also increase revenue by increasing the money deposited (and independently, it might or might not be the case that the percentage of money withdrawn by net withdrawers changes). Clearly, that's also true.

In the case of all the major online poker sites, they've at least publicly said that they're aiming for the second goal. One could evaluate whether that is happening by looking at their financial reports - many of them are publicly traded companies that make financial reports to shareholders on this stuff.

This is a principal-agent-problem overrating quarterly/yearly effects on operating figures vs long term results, cause the ppl making the decisions right now likely won't be in charge anymore to be made responsible for longterm effects. Imo major reason why stars made the better decisions while not being part of a publicly traded company

[QUOTE=LeaksSuck;52149751 Imo major reason why stars made the better decisions while not being part of a publicly traded company [/QUOTE]

This hits the nail on the head. They basically went down the tube when they became publicly traded and had to appease shareholders. Maybe those changes would have happened if they were private but I think the time span would have been much more different. Guess we will never know now, time to adapt or die

I apologize for grunching but does anyone know the rakeback% tiers that will be used by PokerStars after the change and what their requirements will be?

Why do you think spin'n'go came first ? Someone had to keep them running/getting fame, and who would without decent rb ?

Now there is something that is really pissing me off, these morons stating that I do not pay rake because I do not make deposits and only cashouts.
I dont understand why ppl talk about this deposit/withdraw poker economy nonsense.
Stars revenue is rake minus rakeback, period

When a player deposits, the money is still theirs, he will only give profit to stars after paying rake. Imagine a perfect world where all players were at the same level and had equal wons/losses, would it matter for stars revenue at all ? Not if they played the same number of games/ payed the same amount of rake.
So stop talking about prizepool money/winning players, its pathetic already.


rakeback cut of SNE is:

low volume rake - Supernova rakeback >>>>> high volume rake - SNErakeback

and the current vip program will be cut based on the same basic calculus

I don't understand why stars should care about deposits or withdrawls. The only make money from rake, don't they? So they should only care about how many people play. So what if there are winning players and losing players as long as the losing players keep playing, right?

What is difficult to understand here? All rake comes from deposits minus withdrawals. Less deposits = less rake, more withdrawal = less rake. As a winning player you only pay rake from losing player deposits. And the more winning players take out, the less rake can be generated.

Withdrawn money can no longer be raked. Stars would prefer if all the players were equal in skill so that the money got pushed around until it all went to rake and all new deposits went to rake and so on. However, as said before, the hope of being an online pro should be maintained so that people will keep trying and keep depositing. So, I expect that Stars would try to find the point of maximum profit while maintaining that hope.

In fact, I suspect they don't care how many people play so long as the least amount of money is withdrawn.

If the winning players are gone the losing players will be able to play longer because they wont be losing money to winners so more of the money available to rake will go to rake.

It's also true that if current winners are gone some previous losers will become winners but a regular loser who becomes a winner is more likely to move up stakes than a regular winner who, presumably, is wise enough to stay at a limit where he has a skill advantage.

I generally go on the side that rake comes from the depositing players, but it's a bit more complicated.

A lot of the really sick promos you could do for depositing players, like giving them really high effective lossback (e.g. matching a reload at 1:1 is lossback of 50%), are only possible if you have a fairly efficient rake generating machine in terms of low-edge regs.

Poker Revenues = hands played * avg pot * rake%

If a decision will result in significant reductions of hands played in a given period, they can't do it.

With cutting SNE, they got away with it because, although regs hated it, they didn't reduce hands played by that much. Transaction fees, getting rid of rakeback, marginally increasing rake etc don't reduce hands played by huge amounts*. Getting rid of software and capping tables does. That's why they don't do it. They can't. Who uses software and multitables? Regs.


*depending on your definition of huge. I contend they've already fked up pretty bad, but banning software and capping tables to low numbers might wipe out 75% or more of their poker traffic almost immediately.

Amaya doesn't own player deposits.

I would love to see any kind of data on this. Trying to turn poker into lotto proxy for mega suckers is aesthetically gross, on the one hand, but also has always seemed to me like plain bad business. Jackpot games that charge 15-20bb/100 rake - with the chance of making you a millionaire! - must have "RTPs" for the bottom quartile of players worse than any slot and most state lotteries. Who plays the lotto? Idiots. Come play poker if you're a fkn idiot.

I guess Amaya doesn't subscribe to the "riches are in the niches" saying, because they had just about the best internet niche there ever was and they blew it up in order to focus on selling lotto tickets.


The problem is that it kind of is black and white. How Amaya, Debt Star, gets dressed up is just different skirts on the same pig. Amaya has backed itself into a corner where it has extremely limited options. The other model, which, to my knowledge, only Pokerstars itself has really tried, would be to lower rake even further. How about 2.5bb/100 rake at NL50. Wanna see a skill game? Market it as a way for the best to make a living. Create an environment where the stakes are good surrogates for skill level, a skill site. Some people, myself included, think that's what poker's all about.

The poker comentariat has tsunami of reasons as to why that couldn't ever work. I've read pretty close to all of them and haven't been convinced. What I do know is there's no chance in hell Amaya could pursue anything like that at this point, never could have. Their fate, whatever it will be, is sealed.

Literally 100% of the players at the world's two largest online poker rooms (Zynga and PokerStars play money sites) play without any ability to win money. Does that data count?

Of course doing something like that would likely alienate a bunch of players who play the current games. But adding an additional variety of options to a variety of people seems like an obvious way to introduce the game to new people.

Not unless they're making significant money from it. Didn't you yourself just post about how notoriously hard it is to convert play money customers to real money earlier itt? Different demographics.


I was (kind of) hyperbolically describing what they've actually done. But sure, bring in the malt liquor crowd. Is there any evidence it's worked?