as opposed to the current system where people who take money off the site pay 5 times less in rake per hand than the people the games are actually built around pay?

Besides most of these grinders are going to complain no matter what unless stars mails them checks every month for no reason and holds their hand while they walk with them to the bank

these are the same people who did nothing but complain when they stopped getting rakeback on rake they never actually paid

they dont care about the game quality and they can't think far enough ahead to think about game sustainability
i mean you honestly have people who think the shark to fish ratio can stay at 20-1 forever and the games will still be good if it only wasnt for those evil sites providing a service for money

this thread is about game sustainability
if you cant figure out why good players playing 24 tables and bad players playing 1 table is bad for game sustainability then you arent very bright

i never said online was easy these days but again you pay 5 cents rake per hand and get to play from your home
if you cant overcome that then too bad

the idea that nano stakes are infested with nit bots is pretty funny as well
get a job, save up some money and dont waste your time grinding for nickels



why do you think the games suck so much? people want to have their cake and eat it to

do you seriously expect sites to charge you 500 bucks a month, so they spend money finding you new fish while you siphon off thousands of dollars each month?

we were so spoiled with online poker for a few years yet people just couldn't leave well enough alone
the sites are without a doubt greedy and short sided but their greed caused them to give the regulars what they wanted- the ability to nit it up on lots of tables using all kinds of software and fleece the casual players faster

i could understand someone wanting to be the only one to be able to play lots of tables, use software etc bc one person couldnt deteriorate
the games and you would make thousands of dollars an hour
But the games were obviously going to go to crap once these became the norm

in the short run the sites and regs made more money
but in the long run how did that work out?

if regulars were smarter and could think long term that never would happened
games still would have gotten worse bc of the us govt and bc of improved poker knowledge but by and large regulars have themselves to blame for the putrid state of online games

where did you think all of this money was coming from anyway?



rake doesnt keep fish from going on heaters
heaters are short term things on which the effect of rake is negligible.
horrid boring games with no action keep the fish from going on heaters.

no rake @ stakes $25nl and lower imo

Setting the table limit to 1 wouldn't solve anything. It would certainly delay the problems we're facing today, but it wouldn't solve them. In poker good players stick around while bad players move on. Over time the good:bad player ratio will always tend to increase towards good players. Sustainability isn't about trying to get rid of certain players to artificially improve the games, but rather making the games as self sustainable as reasonable. In a game of skill that means having the house's profit interfere with the game as little as possible, but unfortunately for the sustainability of the games it'd be quite hard to even conceive a more intrusive system than the current one we have of high per hand rake.

As an aside, it's important to recognize that regulars aren't the ones who decided to allow the use of most any software that wasn't 100% playing for them, or to allow players to play 24+ tables. I feel your argument misses the heart of the matter, but if you're going to direct blame you should at least do it in the correct direction. The sites seem determined to blame everybody and everything except themselves for the consequences of their actions - I don't think we should abide that head in the sand mentality.

Obviously mass tabling is bad for the games since each shark can cast a bigger net drying out the ocean of fish much faster. It allows one players too big a share of the pie. There should be an extra levy associated with mass tabling than what exists at this time imo, or the max tables should be reduced.

I realize that such changes would go against Stars' business model ie. SNE but that approach was shortsighted to begin with. It's time for the sites to embrace new models if they are in this for the long run.

pointless thread is pointless

sites wont do anything until they have to which hopefully won't be for a very long time.

Rake keeps games from playing loose, which makes for boring games with no action, which keeps fish from going on heaters.

Here's a solution that may work to loosen games up, and not cut into sites' profits so much:

Idea A:
- ability to buy a "pack" of X hands at a given stake for a given price. Players playing on a "pack" receive 100% rakeback on pots won

Idea B:
- pay per hand tables, where you pay X amount of money for X amount of hands, and no rake is deducted from pots

The price of the "packs" or "per hands" could be based on the average rake generated at the given stake level. This would allow people who want to play more loose than the mean to be able to do so without being raped by the rake so hard, without cutting into sites' profits too much, since presumably many regs who would play a looser more "fun" style under better rake conditions are currently dissuaded from doing so by the per hand rake model.

this post is full of fail
"high" rake isnt why games have no action
you could make the rake zero and online games would still primarily be nitfests
in fact it would probabably make games even tighter since you would have current break even nits come back online bc now they would be able to eek out a small profit

there is no action online because of the skewed ratio of nits to action player whales
you're not going to suddenly see 6 way flops for 5x the bb if the rake is zero from a bunch of mass multitablers

the dealt method was even worse for the games as the action players games are built around were even further subsidizing the mass multitablers


you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about

I don't see how this is the case, considering that playing tight under these conditions would result in paying an effectively higher rake. Thus, it would give incentive for games to play looser (much the way a time charge does).

In any case, why the hostility? We're trying to come up with ideas and I threw one out there. Are you just here to troll everyone in the thread or are you trying to have a reasonable discussion?

Just becuase gaming style evolve and skills/software change, this doesn't necessarily mean there's a problem. The natural variance in the games would keep players guessing if rake didn't hold a mirror up to how bad they are.

TAG was always going to become popular, its brainless, easy, and an inexpensive way for the masses to gamble on poker, whatever environment pokers in, the games will eventually draw to this state, and fk me is it easy to beat!

AND HOW BAD ARE THE EXAMPLES OF RAKE-FREE SITES!! Im gonna open an online supermarket, sell all products at the rate I buy AND:

- spend no money on advertising or promotions
- give sh## customer service provided by a handful of inexperienced workers
- have an outdated and tilting website
- give it about a year

LOOK OUT TESCOS!

yes they were
when table limits were 2-4 tables regs and 2p2ers were constantly asking the sites to let them play more and more tables
theyre the ones who relied on huds pt table ratings table ninja etc
Theyre the ones who wanted sites to make it easier to use the software on the sites

sites gave them what they wanted

they were extremely short sided
somehow they thought "well i play 2 tables at once and make 100 dollars an hour so if I play 12 tables at once I'll make 600"
it doesnt work like that
and soon of course 12 wasnt enough

these fish don't come out of thin air
when you let everyone play double the amount of tables it doesn't magically double the amount of fish
in fact it has the opposite effect-fish bust out quicker and the games get more boring making it hard to attract new fish

and the more times you increase the shark/nit to fish ratio the quicker the fish get slaughtered, the tighter and more boring the games get and the harder it is to get new fish to play

throw in heads up tables (which was by far one of the stupidest things sites ever could have done- another thing by the way asked for by regs to fleece fish quicker) and it happens even faster.

if you want a sustainable poker ecosystem for the long term stop giving regs everything they want
ask yourself a simple question- what will make fish want to play more?
You have to make your customers happy. And the customers are the ones making constant deposits not constant withdrawals.

Believe it or not for the newer guys to online poker there was a time where there were 2-3 huge fish at every table-and that was on a tuesday afternoon
Even the regs played looser bc they werent on so many tables
The fish had lots of action and had fun playing
Its also easier for them to play bigger pots bc there were lots of them on each table
The chat function was used for more than just some idiot nit to berate a fish with "zomg how da **** could u call a raise with king ten off i just looked you up on table ratings and see you're down 85,000 this yr u loser"
Yea the guy with the disposable income to dump thousands on poker is the loser

There used to be actual conversations and jokes on the chat during hands
Some of it was some of the funniest stuff I had seen in my entire life

Now what do fish have to look foward to- the same handful of regs on every table timing out, tiny average pots, 2-3 way flops when there actually is a flop-whats the fun in that?

Blame the sites all you want
I cant necessarily say stars was wrong for it's blatant money grab before black friday-but they gave the regs and 2p2ers exactly what they wanted. Most of them were just incapable of thinking about the long term ramifications of what those things would do. Now people are FINALLY starting to see it and want to act like theyre being somehow screwed over.Theyre not. This was inevitable.

Think about how horrible the games would be in your casino if all the good players and all the tight players played on 20 tables and all the fish played on 1. The guys would quickly die out, the fish would find other ways to entertain themselves and the regs who would probably make more money at first, would be sitting amongst themselves watching tiny pots get played hour after hour wondering why the games are so bad and complaining about the greedy casinos ruining everything.

When online poker comes back regulated in the US hopefully the sites think long term - we will all be a lot better for for it.

it was inevitable players would get somewhat better and try to learn more
i mean it wasnt just going to be a printing press forever
when i first played online i was making 5k a month and i didnt know what the hell i was doing

a lot of it was common sense but people were in denial
i knew a lot of people online and in real life who made way more money than i did and pissed it away on nonsense as though the money train would roll on forever

Instead of realizing they probably wouldn't make a few hundred k a year playing a card game, they bought expensive cars, jewlery, would piss ten grand away in a weekend in vegas etc

Being young and having the ability to quickly turn a few hundred or few thousand dollars into a constant 6 figure income without actually producing anything is an exteremely rare opportunity that doesnt last

if you cant objectively look at the fact that something is not drastically off with people with little to no skill bankroll or value making hundreds of dollars an hour playing a game it's either bc you don't want to believe it or you arent that bright
I would love it if games became super soft again but Im not counting on it

When money is easy to make, smart people find out about it and it becomes less easy
When you speed the process up by effectively reducing the amount of easy money by 90-95 pct (even before they improve at all) you get a situation where it quickly dries up

if fish could still play with a few other fish at the table there money lasts a lot longer, they have more fun, and they redposit
they also go on more heaters

but thats impossible these days
lobby's are clogged with bum hunting scum
the second a fish sits down at a table it within seconds fills up with bum hunters

when you drastically skew the ratio of good players to bad players this is what you get
denying that is just being silly

and lol@ these rake free sites
where exactly are the fish supposed to come from to these rake free sites? what were they supposed to advertise with?
what were they supposed to pay their customer service reps with?

im not saying the were run perfectly but its pretty naive to think they will be successful
fish generally don't know or care about rake
good players do

give fish cool **** to come back and play and make the games fun for them

if it was that easy to just come in and undercut the sites on rake and make piles of money it would have been done

your supermarket example is an interesting one to bring up
how would you make money giving everything away for free or at a loss and spending money on advertising?that sounds kind of like pets.com

what do you think a rake free site that spends a lot on advertising is?An out of business supermarket that spend a ton on advertising and sold eggs for 10 cents a dozen.

im not trying to be hostile but when someone says something silly like the rake is the reason the games are so tight im going to say i think they are wrong

actual rake (rake paid-rakeback/vip prgrams) is actually much LOWER per hand now online than it was 5 years ago but the action was much better then

when people arent playing tons of tables they play more hands (live games are much looser than online and rake per hand is significantly higher)
when there are multiple fish at a table more flops are taken multiway

hell nyc underground games charge absurd rake and you would be hard pressed to find looser games

as far as time charges-i think time charges are the fairest way to take rake- and i say that as someone who would probably pay less rake in really good games if there were no time charges and it was just raked per pot

there is no reason that the people who actually keep the games going should pay more in rake than the people who don't, and unquestionably huge fish play a lot more hands, win a lot more hands and pay a lot more rake in non time games. additionally they get a lower % of rb (if any at all) and on some sites there is a dealt method which screws them even harder.

two simple questions

1)do you play live at all?

2)if so what do you think would happen in your local casino to the game quality if all the good players and supernits could somehow play 20 tables at once and all the donators played one?

This is definitely not true for micros. Five years ago, pots under $1 were not raked. The rake increase at micros had a huge impact on the games. Remember "Micro Mania" at Stars? That's when they increased it the rake. This rake increase punished the looser players and tightened up the games significantly. This meant that there were less players taking shots at lowstakes, thus affecting the "ecosystem" and, if not causing, certainly greatly contributing to the state of the games today.

FWIW I'm a fish who took shots and lost money at lowstakes while making money at microstakes. After I realised the effect that the rake increase (I'm specifically talking about the Micro Mania rake increase) was having on my game (going from crushing to slightly winning), I started taking poker much less seriously, and completely stopped taking shots as a result.

Borg at first I thought you were a troll and a site apologist but your last few posts make a lot of sense. You're right, it's not just the sites that have been short sighted but the players as well.

I also agree that poker is like a gold rush and that unless something is done soon that it will be bone dry in short order.

I find that at the moment almost every promo that the sites run and the incentives they give are all geared towards making you play more. Happy Hour, Supernova, 90 billionth hand etc... None of their promos seem to target improving game quality. What about instead of giving bonus happy hour points for playing short handed they give you bonus points for playing 50% vpip? I think that things like that could liven up the games making them more fun for the recreational players.

well, they kept improving game quality for multi tabling / bonus bots. the marketing dpt said its ok, so what could possibly go wrong?

one big issue for me is getting penalized for doing things that are good for the sites, for example starting tables. I play 10-game and Stud8 on FTP and Stars and often the games aren't running. I simply have to play a reg i'm breakeven against headsup to get games going. But playing HU on stakes like $1/2 Limit or $50 NL isn't ever going to be profitable with the rake being as it is now.

Double FTP's for playing at <= half the max players on tables is a very good start, but the extra 5% RB just isn't enough. Without the extra 40% RB from the DMI bonus games will just not be beatable at this moment.

Actually i don't care about fish. I'd happily play mix games on a rakefree site against regs only. It's basically what i've been doing since the reopening of FTP, sitting with the same guys on 10-game tables day after day. Problem is that the weaker players of them will drop out eventually if no fish is there.

Many excellent posts in this thread.
The problems are clear and in theory the solutions are obvious also.

If one pokersite decided to decrease the maximum amount of tables traffic would drop significantly and their most "loyal" customers might go to another site.

For that reason it should be accompanied by a welcome back bonus for all the players that stopped playing too soon, a free sample for all of them. Costly, but nothing is more effective than sampling.

Obviously that would boost traffic and players would move up again instead of down.
Which will allow the mass tablers to play at higher stakes against more fish per table.
In a healthy system build up from the bottom.

The welcome back action could also be combined with a better rake structure to make it even more effective. You don't get a second chance to make a first impression, so pokersites should try everything to get our fish back. Otherwise they will literally be cannibalizing their own business.


As a kid I used to have guppies and as soon as there were new guppies born I had to put them seperate to prevent them from being eaten. If I put a moonfish in the aquarium all the other fish would stop breeding. Pokersites could learn something from that.

im not a site apologist at all
i think the sites have done many things that were short sighted at best
some (ie allowing heads up tables) were so incredibly stupid and provided them no benefit at all, while insuring fish got killed faster and they collected less rake in the process
But they did all of these things at the players requests

the players have been even greedier and worse for the games
we can call the sites greedy all we want but at least they provide a service for the money they take in- what do we really provide?
why should sites only charge a few hundred bucks while providing us with people to makes tens of thousands of dollars a month off of? i mean it would be nice but logically why should they?

as you pointed out everything they give out now is geared towards making the games worse

random weeks where vip points are doubled just make the games worse during those weeks
iron man challenges rake races happy hours etc
it just encourages the grinders to play more


squibz-fair point in the micros but the point still stands
any time players are allowed and/or encouraged to play more tables games get significantly worse
you could make the microstakes games rake 0 against and the games would still suck and be boring to play as long as people are playing 20 tables at once
people arent staying out of pots bc of the rake- they are staying out of pots bc they are playing a ton of tables at once and its hard to play a lot of hands when that happens
additionally people also play a lot more hands when only playing 1 or 2 tables at a time bc good starting hands are fewer and farther between
i also dont know why people expect to be able to have a 1000 dollar bankroll, play 20 25 dollar tables at once and be able to make a lot of money and move up in stakes quickly

if tomorrow stars made rake zero and let people play 48 tables, and for every table over 24 you got some kind of cash bonus game quality would be at its all time worst

as for "This rake increase punished the looser players and tightened up the games significantly."

that's not why they tightened up
loose players are going to play loose
they tightened the games up because to get a large % of that rake back you had to put in a ton of volume so you had the tighter players playing on even more tables and more hours (and playing even tighter than usual) to accomplish that

when stars increased table limits from 6 to 12 to 18 to 24 (or whatever the exact numbers were) games got worse and worse
when they started giving you higher rakeback based on the volume you put it they got worse and worse because it made people grind more hours to hit the top level of rakeback

cake had great games for a while
but then they decided to start running rake races and promos where people were getting 80-300% rakeback of rake they actually played (this is not a typo-cake used the dealt method and there were 24 tablers with 10 vpips that won almost no raked pots at all and got triple back in rakeback then they actually paid in rake from pots they won) i specifically remember one player with the name ingelol who sweemed to be on 24/7 who was nothing but a liability to the site- and he was encouraged to play 24/7 and did nothing but take away from the sites bottom line in every way possible
the games quickly went to ****

the more any site allowed and incentivized people to play lots of table the worse the games got every single time- and almost always that incentive was LESS RAKE paid per hand

ANYTIME ANY SITE GIVES A HIGHER % IN RAKEBACK BASED ON THE VOLUME OF HANDS A PLAYER PLAYS THE GAMES GET WORSE

If people want the games to get better for the long run they need to start thinking about why fish play and what makes them happy
Everyone wants to win but its a lot easier to justify losing and redepositing when there is good action and you have fun
Nothing has been done to make the fish want to play more- in fact a lot has been done to make them want to play less

unfortunately you're the exception and not the rule
and the sites are ass backwards in a lot of ways
sites will reward players for playing lots of tables at once, nitting it up in seats that would have been occupied anyway most of the time, but dont reward people who start games so they can collect rake on tables that otherwise would have been empty -it makes no sense

they give rakeback to heads up bum hunters-why? they do nothing but suck money off the site and every single hand they ever played would have been played anyway by someone else bc they only play the worst of the worst

sites should be encouraging people like you who actually start games instead of people just taking up space adding nothing to the site

they should also just ban players who are just hu bum hunting leeches
that add no value to the sites bottom line

I remember when bodog increased its hu rake
The max rake went from 50 cents to a dollar, but i played mostly 2/4-5/10 and it actually effectively quadrupled the rake collected per hour heads up since many pots that werent raked previously at all now were raked at 50 cents or a dollar
I stopped starting tables because it was nothing but a monkey suck barring an absolute drooler sitting, and I wasnt going to wait around all day for one of those

I even told their poker management how stupid it was to have their heads up tables at all
There were players who would use their 3 and later 4 table maximum to sit at 4 empty hu tables and only play awful players heads up

I guess being they didnt want to get rid of hu tables they figured they might as well rake the crap out of the games instead- and as much as it sucked for me I couldnt exactly blame them if they were going to keep hu tables.

Something you need to take into account is that rake turns certain postflop spots that would be profitable into much less profitable or unprofitable spots. If you don't believe me you can check out some situations in StoxEV. Since even fish like me use StoxEV, leakbuster, etc, to work on their games, it stands to reason that the "leaks" caused by the rake are gradually eliminated from ABC play, whether or not most players are conscious of rake being the reason for playing X range vs Y range is not relevant. This tightens up the games. For example, without rake, you can cbet RangeX in a given spot profitably, but with rake, you may only be able to cbet Y% of RangeX profitably, which means you can bluff less often, thus leading to a tighter preflop range and less postflop action. Under these conditions, mass tabling becomes attractive because many of the "interesting" spots are no longer interesting because they're no longer profitable, thus less time needs to be spent per table as the edges are fewer and further between.

To add to my previous post, a per-hand flat-fee instead of a per-pot percentages discourages mass tabling and encourages looser play since suddenly many unprofitable postflop spots become profitable once again, thus allowing players to play a looser style with more postflop action. In this environment, it would become unprofitable to "ignore" many of the smaller edges since the rake would be paid regardless. The 10/6 would pay the same per hand as the 40/2. In fact, it might even be the case that playing 10/6 is no longer profitable because the cost per hand is too high for such a tight range. The cost per hand could be calculated against whatever the sites are currently raking per hand on average, thus the sites lose no money, and playing looser becomes more profitable than playing tighter (because of the rake), which would mean that mass-tablers would need to adapt their games into the new "action" environment.

that's a valid point. Specifically, when i'm playing HU stud in the hope of starting a new game, often there seems to be a silent agreement with the opponent to steal/defend the bring-in slightly less often than optimal to save on rake while still creating the image of an inviting running table.

But like i said, atm with platinum edge + dmi-bonus + happy hour i'm getting 70% RB so it's fine. But after DMI, the games will be dead.