fish= dont care about rake(dont mean they should be exploited) but fact is they have no clue what the sites are raking & most of them whether the rake is reduced or increased will still deposit n play for the fun n gamble they crave

regs= majority are break even or slightly losing/winning & to keep these players interest long term the sites will eventually need to decrease rake but normally will be when online poker is in their decline stage & trust me when i say lowering rake will be the last resort for websites to save their business even for a few more months/years


Reasons websites dont listen= not because they dont care but more because nobody is presenting to them a means to which everybody wins.... 2+2ers want less rake and give pokersites no solid solution to how their profits can be increased while the website profits remain the same if not increase

Problem websites have= disgruntled customers

Reasonable Solution: Understanding the market & customer base.... Regs are falling into categories of mass tablers who are looking to play as much hands as possible vs regs trying to play the best games possible on usually alot less tables

new rake structure should make the mass grinders more happy & encourage them to play more hands as their profitability is now increased while simultaneously making the regs who want to play on limited # of tables while only playing the good ones or just wanting to play less tables in general happy due to less mass grinders in their game & less nitty tables

how to achieve this???.... keep the rake rate the same but have a set 50% rakeback for zoom/rush tables which will basically encourage everybody who wants to mass table to stick to zoom as there is more incentive for them to play their style of poker there + potential increase winrate + website earns similar/more $ due to the amount of hands mass tablers will now play

For regs who dont want to mass multi table= make them play the reg tables, keep the rake the same(no 50% rb), limit the # of tables to like 12 to ensure mass tablers are not present & overall even though more rb wont be given to this player pool the games will become more loose on avg n thus leading to more profitable n fun games which makes the regs happy

these changes if everything went well could keep the regulars happy as it segregates player types, keeps regulars happy & makes the websites have similar or potentially better profit margin due to mass tablers now putting in more hands in games designed for faster poker + fish & grinders playing ltd tables being in a looser more enjoyable game= more rake for the sites



p.s no clue if this could work but at the end of the day hearing about how the websites are robbing us & how we want the rake to be reduced without giving solutions for the websites to keep their profit margin is not going to go anywhere & a waste of time tbh

Lol@limiting people to 12 tables helping anything

Again why do you want to reward people when are killing the games long term other than your own selfish interests?but from the sites standpoints why should they do this?

lol@ you not understanding the point of limiting the # of tables able to be played in my model...... it discourages mass tabling regs from playing in the std/reg tables + hopefully lowering reg to fish ratio + overall makes games more loose due to ppl playing less tables which in turn makes regs more happy who hate the fact most tables are filled with these mass grinders


the mass grinders then get attracted to the zoom/rush games due to higher rakeback & will put in more hands because of this + zoom was already designed for these players in the first place tbh so both the site and mass tablers benefits from this

p.s it has nothing to do with rewarding ppl but about maximizing profit + keeping customers happy... if your not looking at this problem of rake from the websites point of view as i said then threads like this become just a hangout for us to complain as these sites wont do a thing as what everybody else is suggesting is for the websites to take less $ n give regs back more when they clearly at this stage dont need to do this as their business is doing well

That would be great for players but it won't happen. For sites to take equivalent rake to today they would probably have to take 100% (or more)* of the excess of withdrawals over deposits.


*With no rake the losers would lose less than they do today. Thus the pie to be split between winners and site will be smaller than today. Currently the site takes the big majority of that pie. If the pie gets smaller but the sites take the same absolute amount then their share of the smaller pie will likely reach 100%.

You are wrong. PokerStars.COM traffic is down around 7% compared to a year ago (Source: http://www.pokerscout.com/news/weekl...r=2012&week=46) but that is offset by the movement of players to PokerStars.ES. Similar impacts in previous years have seen players move from global liquidity sites to unshared playing pools such as .FR and .IT.

Also, OP is wrong in claiming that <1% of online poker players are winners. Every review of actual data shows that between 20% and 40% of players are winners (varying according to game type, etc.), before accounting for the value of VIP programs and rakeback; which means that even more players are net winners when you take those programs into account.

I like where you're going with this and it's got me thinking.

Can you give an example of such data?

i don't know what kind of review that was, but there is no chance that 20-40% of players are winners before rakeback. it would border on mathematically impossible in most games over a significant sample without chip dumping.

I stopped playing cash already, only play some mixed-tournaments nowadays.
No need to permanently pay more than a solid winrate in rake when playing low- and midstakes.
Its a simple computergame that just has to be save, and we have to rake 7 figure amounts per year for that?

Same here. MSNL winner pre-Black Friday, then after BF tried starting at 50NL on Merge with a smaller roll, and the relative rake was so brutal that it wasn't even going to be fun to grind with how slowly I'd move up. Then Carbon doubled their net effective rake on June 2011 and I just bailed. That's interesting. I feel like the number thrown around on this forum has always been 10-15% long-term, coming from some years-old admission based on some internal data from Stars, though I might be remembering wrong about the source. 40% does seem very high.

Maybe it's 10-15% among players who have played some threshold "long amount of time", but 20-40% among all accounts, which would include many players who won for a few days and got bored and stopped?

2006: http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...n=&page=0&vc=1

2008: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/32...layers-256274/

2008/2009: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15...layers-221183/

2009: http://www.sharkscopers.com/blog/the...rs-are-winners

2009: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/15...h-beta-452536/ <-- This thread includes the graph reproduced below

2010: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/32...g-term-746668/

The only way to make games sustainable is to increase the ratio of fish to sharks.

The most effective way to achieve this is to limit multi-tabling to 4 tables max.

according to that graph, people that win play more hands.

I don't get why their is such a huge jump between 10k and 50k and then a downswing between 100k and 500k.

Is playing above a certain limit (assuming that high volume regs play higer) -EV for a huge chunk of players?

I thought it was more then 80%, like near 90%.

The point of this thread was to show how unsustainable and unappealing the swings are to players when skill levels are removed from the equation, or showing the point of view of averagely-skilled players currently holding the games together.

If sites took a 43% hit to their profits, the average-skilled players finishing in profit next year will be increased by atleast 1000%, and 99% of good regs will win atleast 10k bb.

This has potential to:

1. Ignite more reg on reg play
2. Clean up online poker image in the forums as a cash grab from a moribund game
3. Fill forums with posts of from luckers and great regs playing confortably for a living and telling the world about it
4. Leave majority of players far more clueless about their skill levels
5. Trickle money up to midstakes

Is it possible that by dropping rake by 43%, the hands being played could atleast double from these results? If so, then that's great incentive to do it

To clarify, <1% of average-skilled players will be in profit over a 60k hand sample with current rake levels.
In reality you also have highly skilled players eaking a profit, and a sh**load of big losers

(from the op)

This.

Upswings are the most fun thing in poker. If you are a bad player who has to compete with the additional loss from rake you are never experiencing these fun upswings, only breakeven stretches and downswings.

i'm not sure what you're talking about OP, but i was talking about the graph that josem posted which is pretty misleading.

if anyone would like to make a propbet using a random sampling of 1000 players on tracked sites with less then 20% beating games prerakeback being a win for me, let me know. you'd lose 100% of the time.

http://www.thehendonmob.com/alex_rou...yer_are_losers

If you look at your database, particularly of players who have any meaningful number of hands, you'll find a significant proportion are winners. For me, if you filter my database from this year for players with 50+ hands, then there are 1535 players who are winners, and 3099 players in total. Effectively, at a mix of NL2 to NL10, half the players who play with any regularity are winners. They more or less break even across the set of hands as a whole (-$62 from 595k hands) with the rake being paid by the players who show up for just a few hands: the net field as a whole has lost $4.2k from 754k hands. Effectively, the purely recreational players got hammered: players whom I played fewer than 50 hands against lost at an astonishing 61bb/100; despite over 1/3 of even these players being profitable. There is a pretty low proportion of losing regs; but bad recs just get eaten alive these days. A few whales (at least at the microstakes) are funding poker for everyone else.

Obviously, these numbers are before rakeback etc, so you'd expect these numbers to be a little better once that's included. So overall, I would say that 20-40% of players winning seems reasonable, at least at micro cash.

OP, please address this criticism, as it seems to make your argument much less convincing.

you do understand that players who win continue playing much moreso than players that lose, right?

Of players from this year with <50 hands in my database, 3267 are winners, while 5609 are losers. So that's over a third of players with very few hands being winners. These aren't the high volume regs...

OP is on point, but until you provide answers for WHY or HOW a site would lower rake, it's just a moot point

WHY would be something like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve
(argument for lower taxation among governments, but largely controversial)

HOW would be starting a new online poker site, so that stars et al operate in a more competitive environment