marketing it as some skill game where you need to put in tons of work vs players with all kinds of software who have put in a lot more work studying than you have doesn't bring in many people let alone the ones you want.

people like fast easy money and like to gamble - things like "hey do you play pokers with your buddies while you get ****faced- well so did this dumb schmuck moneymaker and then he took 39 dollars and became the wsop champion, you can too" has far more appeal (adjusted for 2017 obviously)

Like the stock market? (trading)

Like the stock market?

Like half of Wall St?

Edit: but to sell it a little harder, all those guys will have 10 times more winning sessions than they do now. In fact, that's the beauty of low rake. Bad players can occasionally escape rake's crushing gravity when the rake is more like the moon and less like a black hole.

You're kidding, right?

The play money sites of Zynga and PokerStars are probably 2 of the 3 most profitable poker rooms in the world, behind only the PokerStars real money room. I have no access to any non-public data, this is pretty widely known/recognised.

no that's the beauty of bad players actually getting to play with bad players that never happens anymore on stars.

if you're halfway decent high rake may be why you're losing- but for tons of bad players it's a non issue.

I've never seen any data on PokerStars' revenue from their free play product. If the PS play money games sits behind only PokerStars RMG and Zynga in terms of revenue, then were talking at least $85 million in revenue last year.

Amaya did (off the top of my head here) ~$850m in real money poker, $240m in casino+sports, $40m in "other." Is there something I'm missing? I'm fairly sure those first 2 numbers exclude freeplay.

Edit: I see now you mention profitability, but last time I checked Zynga was barely profit-making, if at all.

47 pages off rambling while we still have no details on the changes (unless I missed it because of all the noise and chatter)... I'm really only interested in knowing what the new system will look like.

Besides, I suppose it will be different for different countries? F.e. Some countries only have the poker client and no casino client, so those players can't generate starcoins based on casino play. I hope they get more starcoins based on poker play vs those who have access to casino play?

I'll unreservedly defer to your numbers/analysis, I don't know anything on this issue that you don't.

While Zynga overall might not make much profit, does that apply to Zynga Poker?

Revenue might be a better measure than profitability.

Sure there are people who have motivations other than winning money. I think of these as the "chess players", who are interested in the game as a mathematical problem. These are the people who enter the WRGPT and they are willing to keep playing real money poker even with a low hourly or break even. They are the people who talk strat at live tables even if it puts off the "fish" because they are interested in it as game rather than a hustle. The "Thinking Poker Podcast" lads are "chess players" in this sense. I couple of years ago I sent them a hand from a $1 tournament and they spent just as long discussing it on their show as they do when they discuss a hand from NL1K.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, the people who are actually beating the games are in (or have graduated from) this group and the group is almost the polar opposites of the regular depositing players you are trying to encourage.

The "gamblers", whether winning or losing, are absolutely about trying to win money. The question is, what does poker have to offer that casino games don't? Why would a losing player be better served playing poker than roulette? There have to be good reasons, we can't just hope for a continuous stream of people to take up poker by mistake.

I'd say these are the reasons:

1) It's a beatable game and your destiny is in your hands, if only you can make the right decisions.....

2) The competition between other players.

3) As the game James Bond plays, it's a bit classier than most other gambles. (Depending who you talk to) you don't lose respect by telling people your hobby is poker.

There may be more.

Regarding 1) The evidence of this is people, whether like Moneymaker or Haxton who have actually done it. It's important not to shortcut this though. Beatable in a sense that's relevant to depositors means someone like me with a family and full time job can beat it in the evenings after the kids go to bed. It doesn't mean:
"Negreanu-beatable" - i.e. you can make money at poker if you have a sponsor
or
"SNE-beatable" - i.e. you can make money at poker if you have special high-volume discounts on the rake.

I don't have much to say about 2) to a certain extent it's given but for big splash wins I'd say it applies more to MTTs than Spins (where the competition is against the RNG).

On 3) - this is pretty apt:

Here's a quick experiment. Look at the front page of:
The UK National Lottery https://www.national-lottery.co.uk/
then
Pokerstars www.pokerstars.com
and
Stan James https://www.stanjames.com/Landing.aspx

Which of these places looks classy and which looks tacky? Which one is part of a growing poker network and which is in decline?

When Full Tilt and Pokerstars were growing, did their marketing look tacky or classy?

Yes, there is nothing wrong with offering a full range of products. It also depends on the marketing. I used to drag my brother and father onto Pokerstars for a play money home game once a week. I found all the lottery-style imagery just embarrassing.

No one really seems to know yet.

It looks very simple to some: net depositors are good, regs are bad. Get rid of regs.

We look at history though.
888 tried this business model while stars did the sne model.
Guess which one worked best?

You take out all of that, you force predatory behavior.
You turn your software and support from awesome to crap. You lose net depositors.
By word of mouth and general negativity on forum posts caused by your actions you'll lose a ton of net depositors.
And you already have every competitor trying out that business model-> you don't stand out anymore.

Those few net depositors that you do have after chasing most away are gonna lose at massive rate compared to before because you forced regs to hunt them and get really good at beating them.
Then he will lose at a massive rate and stars will get only a small share of his deposit.
All that you do now is force regs to bumhunt multiple sites more and more and become a better hunter and/or cheater.

That net depositor before making his next deposit will do a google search or ask around: hey, how is online poker?
He'll get almost all negative responses now so he'll be way less likely to do it.

You cut more and more rewards, you will increase hunting even more. You try to counter that by removing table selection, guess what?
Like you saw on .ES the games will just not run at all until the fish sits.
Why the hell would they run? At that rake it's clear for all regs involved that it's -ev to play even vs an inferior reg.
If it was SNE rakeback then the game would go on reg only(history shows it) because some would believe their skill edge is large enough to cover the rake.

Regardless of how it looks regs won't be dumb enough to play each other in a massive rake situation.
As long as you understand that basic principle - that a reg is a reg because he is not a huge dumbass, you understand that no system like that will work.

The ones who win are live casinos and fish who save some of their money by not depositing anymore and spending their $ on other vices.

You make a crappy law, you force people to break it. Especially since you're terrible at enforcing it.
A new account pops up very often at midstakes multitabling and beating the games. Obviously a previous player with a new account.
And why wouldn't he do it if they don't catch him? Deposit bonus, he already knows the opponents.
There's no value anymore in keeping the same account, reaching a high vip status. You can make supernova now (they highest status) in 3-4 days.
Previously you worked a lot to reach a high vip that it was no value to change accounts and cheat.
As a side effect it also increases the bad image of online poker, resulting in further decrease of net depositors.

The above is spot on. Having players who can win long term is what gets many people to deposit in the first place.

Does anyone have any more info regarding Seat Me? How is it working in Spain?

I play on the .es platform a little and in my experience cash game traffic is down. I used to play a fair bit of PLO 8 to maintain my (silver) status, but I have not seen a PLO 8 game in action - or players waiting to start a game - since PS brought in the seat me feature.

I guess it would be different on the .com or .eu platforms because of the bigger player pools, but if I was a PLO 8 junkie, I would be getting my action offshore.

There should be nothing wrong with players winning long term.

The current problem is that their variance is too low. They are not earning their wages by providing enough variance, because their stakes are too low because they can play too many tables.

Been said plenty above, but multi-table caps are a really important past of the solution. Then probably similar-wealth-country pools, at least for cash.

It's been quite a while now since they announced it. It may not come to pass after all if they think it is too big a of a risk having already failed in Spain.

More than enough variance
I can't see why a site would ever willingly cut off part of its player base and don't understand why people keep bringing that up. I'd be on board with the table cap. Mightn't make much of a difference at mid to high stakes because the volume is so low anyway at the moment but would make game softer at the lower levels for sure.

Do we agree on the assumption that "increasing traffic" -> "increasing rake paid" is what amaya is seeking a solution for?

If so: Has capping tables ever led to increased poker traffic on any platform where it was introduced/tried? Serious question, i have no idea (but doubt so).

You seem to see a problem in ppl winning at a too high rate.
If u force regs to play less tables than they want to, their time for decision on each table goes up and they'll play better (read hud stats in more detail etc.) while the 1tabling hudless recreational player still does the same, so he'll likely lose at a faster rate than w/o table cap AND might have to wait longer for his prefered games to start cause ppl cant opensit that much. I don't see how this is good. I disagree with your prediction of Ppl moving up stakes cause they cant 25 table micro stakes anymore, but willing to change my opinion if data from other site suggest this has worked

Because part of it's player base are net withdrawers. They remove money from the system and this is bad for the site.

Yeah and w/o withdrawers being allowed it's super attractive to play for new customers with the intention to win (and withdraw) money.

We had those oversimplifications enough in this thread imo.

The NPV of future rake will be much higher if this year's depositors will deposit again next year, which depends on the quality of the games i.e. not too many reg-seats.

Extra reg-'focus' could never offset an extra fish at the table.

Even anecdotally - we could claim that to return a fish needs to see at least 1 other player he thinks he is not worse than. (Quite possible for everyone, as they over-rate themselves slightly, as long as the games aren't as disastrously bad as they are online today.)

1 tabling, geo-isolation and fish retention is why there are more ~$200 games running in 1 square mile in the west end of London than there are on Pokerstars.

I don't think that's true.

And i don't think making regs 5table 200$ games by forbidding them to 20 table 50$ games (this was what u suggested the multitabling cap does, right?) improves that situation either

A table cap would force those who make a living grinding the micros either to move up or do something else. That would mean more opportunity for recs to learn the game at low levels without playing 'pros'

The thing is that even a 100% rake (like 1+1) could be wortwhile if the site would share it wisely.

Talking about micro stakes this might be a good idea.
So there are sites that have a table cap and formerly had none (and might also be the other way round, don't know). How did their traffic develop in relation to the poker market overall after the introduction at micro, lower and higher stakes, any valid data on that?

A dumb reg in 2018 will look the same as a dumb reg in 2017.

Supposedly in the year after 888 instituted table caps, 888's poker revenues - if not traffic - increased, but the correlation doesn't imply causation. (Many other factors were involved). Bovada/Ignition and Unibet also increased their shares of the market without enabling/encouraging mass-tabling in the micros.

It's funny how general consensus is that while "people who can lose big in online poker might be very successful and smart people IRL", yet site's seem to think rec's don't care about rake.

888 revamped it's rake structure (while removing the VIP system, too) last August. E.g. 50/100 100/200 250/500 and 500/1k have now rake caps $10, $20, $30 and $50 - even if the hand is HU. I think there was quite a bit of action last year at these games, but I think they've dried up significantly. I've put pretty much zero volume on 888 this year. The lobby looks also very empty and I still open 888 client every day. Would be interesting to if 888 makes more revenue by 10x'ing the rake, if the action doesn't dry up more than 90% - which I think it has.

But the games were a joke anyway, with Russian/Ukrainian poker mafia angleshooting free hands in those games and not posting their BB like ever.

Probably the most incompetently ran site I can think of.