You mad bro?

It's the rake structure plus the average quality of opponents the make it hardly beatable, or at least not for significant amount of money.

The entire industry is like a cartel. No one is offering a good product. To say otherwise is a joke.

I used to play professionally. I work with different things now and no, im not butthurt. I quit a winning player. I know ppl like to use this argument.

You are paying 50k / year to use a webpage or a poker client. I can list other services were this exists on one hand. With one finger.

They could and would survive with a 90% rake cut. The excess shi.t in this industry and the raping of customers is second to none.

I can think of the CFD products that people are scammed into as well.

That competing sites arent popping up is a serious concern.

The complete and útter humiliation the business is putting on poker players is quite disgusting. when this cartel/olígopoly possibly is crushed the poker boom 2.0 will likely take place.

The main difficulties in this business are the gambling laws of most countries.

Not much can be done when most countries treat poker as a shady degen entertainment thus applying prohibits\extreme taxes.

Well, not exactly like a cartel, but with the same effect.

A cartel is a group of businesses who work together to control a market.

If all the sites got together and decided to agree on rake, that would be a cartel.


What Stars has is more like a monopoly through incompetence of other operators. Sites that are competitive through rake are lax with security, or software. If a site covered all those bases, stars would be vulnerable.

I think if the delays for RIO poker are actually attention to quality and security, Stars is going to get exposed by the competition.

I am a rec player who sometimes plays poker because it feeds my inner gambling degen. Over the past six months I would say that I have been to a casino something like 12-15 times (playing mostly poker but sometimes other games as well) and played on average something like 20 hrs/month online. I usually deposit some money, play an evening or two, and then cash out (if I am not bust). Over this period, I am up something like 500 EUR live, down roughly the same online (although live I play much higher than online).

And after trying a host of different site there are only two that I would consider playing on - Microgaming and Stars. Microgaming because of legislation in my country that makes it much easier to play on the biggest sportsbook there (which is MPN poker),
since withdrawals come directly to my bank account etc. But Stars because the software is lightyears ahead of the competition and I can always find whatever game I want to play. I also tried Party and 888 Poker but from a rec point of view, they are horrible - after having tried Stars, to play something with so dated and ugly software, no thanks.

So when I want to donk off some money, I go to Stars. When I want to donk off some money but I am too lazy to go the route via online wallet, I play where I can which is MPN.

What Stars does perfectly for a player like me is:
- a lot of games at all times
- fun formats if you want to gamble but have limited time (Spin´n´Go:s, Hyper MTT:s)
- Zoom PLO
- wide selection of games (donking away at 5-card PLO is fun)
- chance to win big for a small investment in MTT:s
- nice software (especially compared to competition)
- chests are fun (when you get close to one you want to play more just to get it open)

And probably a lot of other reasons why Stars can charge higher rake and people don´t give a ****.

All you have to do is look over the balance sheets of publicly traded poker sites and you would see that poker sites couldn't survive with a 90% rake cut. Hell they probably couldn't survive a 25% rake cut long term.

You act as if poker sites are printing money which they haven't done for 10+ years

There is no poker boom 2.0. It will not happen. The skill/luck argument is over and everyone knows it's a skill game. Even recs know they aren't going to sit down against Phil Ivey and win. OK they don't know who Phil Ivey is, but nobody thinks those at the top just got there by luck. The only thing left is play for entertainment.

Rakeback means nothing to the players that matter to PokerStars or any other poker/gambling site. It's 100% irrelevant. When somebody plunks down a buyin and goes home broke they don't care where it went, just that it's gone. Rakebake just encourages regs to stick around longer. The net losers are net losers, and they don't care where it went, they just want to be the winner next time. Giving them rakeback is like some sort of pity enticement to come back with more and lose again. While this works somewhat, it can't sustain an ecosystem. Regs merely provide liquidity, and rakeback will be decreased without exception until that liquidity dries up.

Howard Lederer of Full Tilt didn`t manage to survive without any rake cut.

Damn, the expences were so high

I disagree.

Sure, alot more people think of it as a skill game coimpared to earlier.

But i would say there's still a big pool of rookies, bad players, degens and also people who have never played but are thinking about it.

When such **** as "I Took A Pill In Ibiza" gets close to 1 billion views on youtube, you begin to realize that nothing in this world is really hopeless.