I agree with Do it right and his basic approach. (don't rake but pay fee on cashing winnings)

However I do believe that charging the fee at cashout is a good idea (although it would be great for the economy because you get punished to take money out of the ecconomy)

I proposed a Winner Pay ALL rake strategy where i basically said, lets just have the winners pay all of the rake and have them pay a % of each session as long as they are winners.

So instead of raking hands, lets rake sessions (but only the winners get raked).

I thought that this rake might be something like 10-20%.

So lets say you deposit 100$ play 100nl and have 300 on the table when u quit. The site would then rake 200 >> 20-40$.

However when i learned that the sites keep 50%. So rake is just a very elegant way to take away that much money.

However the concept is still the same. Rake only winning players and don't rake the fish. However if i were to propose the solution again i would suggest to simply do this by increasing the rake and then:

losers : 100 rake back + some added cash tickets (ring game tickets, tourney by ins)
break even players : give lots of rake back (never cash, just tickets and entries)
winners: give little rakeback (tickets to higher games)
top 10% players: give no rakeback, but give tickets etc to play higher games)

>>> essentially that means only winners pay rake. top winners pay super high rake.

Fish (who dont care about rake) get money thrown at them all the time, which they do care about

Winners can pay rake or move up the ladder, high winners even more so.

So essentially what do it right (i am a huge fan) proposes but use the rake method to do it.

this is the base concept. however it think it works best if you rake em all the same and then give folks stuff back.

Such as ring game tickets and tourney entries

just to be clear. this is not going to work in todays set up.

Stars rakes 50% of the money won at 50nl. And they are the cheapest. there is no way you can do that without shrinking the economy unless it is growing like crazy.

we treat poker like its a casino instead of what it really is.

We need regulations that say: a site may only collect x of rake in relation to money won.

I think that X should be between:

20-10% depending on the stakes.

Today its more like 50-5% (according to my data). I have seen a link sent by do it right that went from 80% to 10%

I would like this idea if it didn't massively encourage multi-accounting. JJProdigy has demonstrated that it's very very hard to stop people doing this, if you give everyone the same incentive then I think you'll see a lot more people cheating this system.

And I think that tax on withdrawls is unsustainable too - firstly, recreational players will be seriously upset when they first withdraw. Secondly, there is also a big incentive to cheat it here too. Imagine you are a losing or small winning player. You can sell your cashout option to a big winner so that that winner doesn't have to pay as much tax. This is amenable to being caught by good security but good security won't stop everyone.

In my view the solution is to reward recreational players disproportionately to their play, and reward high volume players less. Winners will come for the recreational players and recreational players will stay because they are being rewarded well.

This probably sounds stupid since I'm a fish myself but is poker basically becoming or going to become unbeatable? Like to the point where even Phil Ivey's win-rate is hurt dramatically?

this would be awesome, all the pros would get dummy accounts to dump to and play rake free, while the fish would pay all the rake.

not only are your arguments based on assumptions pulled out of thin air (1% winners, 80 sd, sustainability of poker economy being based on perception of pros), you are confusing the sustainability of your winrate with the sustainability of the business from the sites perspective.

The site doesn't give a **** about you winning. they care about how long they can keep raking games. you want to drop the rake by 43% straight off the sites bottom line so that average players can go on heaters and withdraw the money from the system instead of it ending up in the sites hands.

A poker site wants everyone to lose exactly the rake per hand with zero variance and your suggestion widens the distribution of winrates. Your concept of sustainability is exactly the opposite of theirs, and you have ZERO bargaining power as a net withdrawer.

Until you define the 'problem' meaningfully this whole discussion is a giant waste of time.

And for that they need a sustainable poker ecosystem.

No, they want higher variance so that losers stay in the game longer by deluding themselves about being winners.

Maybe they should make 50bb the standard cap on NL buyins to encourage that.

Interesting thread -bmked.

Grunching but the poker ecosystem isn't isolated it's interlinked into the rest of the world economy.

One important way that differentiates poker and attracts players is the fact if you play better than your opponents then over some 'reasonable' time frame will come out ahead. Online poker mustn't become a game in the words of 'Prez' below else it will just die down and diminish.

A site can very easily measure rake percentage and its effect on their income on a short term basis. However, it's more difficult to measure rake percentage and its effect on increase/decrease on overall player base.

I agree that there is some optimal rake percentage, smaller than what it is today, that will grow the player base sufficiently to overcome the short term loss in rake income.

But that's hard to do, so I don't see a site's motivation to do so.

A friend of mine coined my favorite definition of rake. It's like an uber-shark at the table, with a super high win rate who never has a losing session. Why would you ever play with a player like that?

No way I pay a cent more just because you are too lazy to stop sucking at poker

This thread is pitching the arguement that lowering rake has a disproportionately positive effect on the sustainability of the games as it would near a tipping point where average-skilled players (vital for keeping the games running) can be far more easily deceived by variance because thier will be a huge increase in winners among them over a decent sample size.
This will have a massive impact on the future of games at micro-low and ultimately mid-high as money can trickle up from the increase in shot-takers with false-confidence in their winrates.

So this is in the sites interest to forecast the effects current rake prices will have on the popularity of online poker years down the line.
The inevitable lowering of rake (seems to already be happening slowly) after the games die out is shutting the stable doors after the horse has bolted. Just look at online poker's popularity and reputation even now, and this when the games are still good n healthy at low stakes!

Granted the parameters of decent-deceivable sample sizes and standard deviation are only estimates, but they are educatred guesses and not pulled out of thin air. The graphs generated from these numbers aren't guesses.

I'm happy with my winrate and happy to pay the rake, just want to be able to say that in 10 years time.

u?

Very interesting points being made ITT

I see a big problem with the above post...

Lets cite the example of player 'A'

A is a solid winning reg at heads up. To get to the point of beating heads up he played lots of hands at 6max; and at full ring.

The point is that the areas under the graphs will be filled with the same player 'A' who is succesful at Heads up, 6max and FR. Or more to the point 1000's of player A's - These are not all individual players. And whilst i have no actual model; i'm going to hazard a guess that we can assume

a) The majority of winning heads up players play, and beat, 6max and FR
b) The majority of winning 6max players play, and beat, FR

Means we can reduce this figure by at least 2/3'rds to ~8%

This is the best option bar far. I've seen this idea floating around 2p2 for years, why hasn't blizzard/world of warcraft done anything? Why hasn't any other company tried this? Are companies waiting for legislation before joining the bandwagon? I don't understand. Is gambling really that taboo?

Every time I see a thread like this it gets me all worked up. There's basically a few poker sites that have a strangle hold on the entire market, and they're killing the golden goose by constantly searching for ways to make record gains either by increasing rake, lowering rb and bonuses or a combination of the two. Record earnings year after year in this market is impossible. These poker sites need to accept the fact that they won't be making as much money as they did in the past. Instead of of doing whatever they can to maintain short term earnings which is effectively stunting future long term sustainability, they need to focus on sustainable earnings/growth. And by doing so, they need to implement a biz strat like $60 client $14/m thereafter.

Everyone says the party days are over. They are. Not just for players though, they're over for sites as well. The party is over/ending. Sites need to come to terms with this, they can either run the business into the ground, or they can begin to implement smart, logical business strategies that are focused on long term sustainability.

I think the market it ripe for blizzard/world of warcraft to come in and save the day (and make a **** ton of money in the process). I think there's some similarity between the games they offer and what poker has to offer. Fun, entertaining, addictive. And I believe it will more so if blizzard comes into the picture because of all the extra money they'll leave in the poker economy by charging client/monthly fees. Blizzard could practically wipe poker stars off the fkn map if they wanted to, and based off of what blizzard has done with warcraft, I believe they can.

at -9bb/100 worth of rake I wont be a winner anymore or maybe 0,5bb/100 so no thank you

Would making HUDs illegal help make the game more beatable?

i think i'm going to write a blog post about this after finals. a company needs certain economies of scale to become successful, and blizzard is one of the few options, and given their success in a highly competitive industry, one of the best options.

they should charge more for advertising and people viewing and internet or television shows so that instead of a rake, there could be money added.

that would be epic and truly be a more sustainable poker ecosystem

Even if HUDs were made illegal that would create a market for HUDs with anti-detection measures (like Poker Edge). So now a few people willing to risk it will have the edge over a large majority.

HUDs aren't going anywhere. Better for the sites to offer their own HUDs, cutting out the third-party guys like PT4 or HEM. Or maybe they'll team up directly with them.

It's not like HUDs aren't available to everyone. They're hardly cost prohibitive.

... based on nothing except your own conjecture. you haven't shown at all that 'average skilled players' keep the games running (they don't) or that allowing players to go on rushes is in the sites best interest (it probably isn't if they withdraw the winnings).

The average player you model is breakeven pre-rake, but that more accurately describes a bad reg than a recreational player, and these are exactly the people ruining the game as they resort to tactics like bumhunting table camping grimming and shortstacking.

you are also way off on your estimates of winning players % and have plucked 80bb/100 SD out of thin air.

numbers on screens are scary and the reason im losing!

Making games beatable is not the problem. They are plenty beatable. If you make them more beatable money just gets transfered quicker.

That would deplete the economy even more. If we want a sustainable economy we need a balance between what the winners get and what the sites get.

Rake adjustment can be a tool to adjust the balance but the key question we need to figure out is what is that balance and how can it be enforced/controlled etc.

But a rake of 5 can be just as good as a rake of 10. I.e. in macau u can have a different rake than in vegas. In a limit game it needs to be different than in NL etc.

Simple solution is to cap the rake at a %age of winnings. That would be a formular that works always and regardless. It would work in any skill game. If the games are tough, less is won, less is made by the sites.

The sites and the players would now want the same thing: poker games where lots of money is transfered. The sites would also get paid on how much money is transfered vs how much is wagered.

zoom/rush is the death of online poker imo

When a large proportion of the average skilled players stop playing or improve, the low number of fish cant cope with the high ratio of skilled players, thus the games slow down and die. Haven't you (Smellmuth) experienced this decline first-hand at the mid-stakes when the av-skill players refuse to play eachother?

Assuming that keeping average-skilled players playing will sustain the game. There must an optimal frequency heaters over a length of time that keeps most players unaware of their losing edge to the house.

Im not saying I have these figures exactly right, but pokersites have certainly got it very wrong! There's a reason a roulette table has 1 green zero and not 4.