"They are using giant nets to get all the fish out of the ocean. THAT is unsustainable!"

God dammit I wish i thought of saying that.
Can you imagine if all the fisherman in the world decided to kill all the fish in the world this year and then next year wondered why there were no more fish?

Damn net company must have started making faulty nets!

they also dump money fast when every god damb time they go to a new table the seats fill up with people using software to track them, make their decisions for them etc

make the rake 0 and the casual player still has no chance online these days

The problem isnt losing- everyone in the casino is a loser. The problem is its a straight downward decline and boring.

Variance being huge in poker is the only reason poker exists. Same for casino games.


"100 dollars on red please."
"excellent bet sir, here is $94.60 back, your change. Would you like to spin again?"

Or better yet, let's increase the house edge to 50% we will make ten times more money!

Yea that would last a long time.

someone said if they were a poker site they would rather make 5 million dollars a year for ten years then 10 million now and kill the games. I would too, although Im not sure those are exactly stars options- but the players themselves always wanted as much as possible as soon as possible. Well you got it, and a couple of years later this is what your stuck with.

oh borg.

There is so much in your post that I agree with:

1. mass multi tabling makes games toucher, so does training sites and all the other tools
2. stars should not change their business model
3. the players are greedy (whatever) and are trying to make as much as possible
4. Because of 1) the games are hard to beat these days and fish wont get anywhere and likely leave

Me unlike you I disagree that we should handcuff regs of todays games. I don't think it is a great idea to make pt and hem illegal and not allow training sites or any other tools.

To me this is a suggestion like putting weight on the fast guys in a football team. We should not handcuff them just because they are good.

It is somewhat natural that the game as a whole is getting more and more efficient and it will get even harder to beat in the future. This happens everywhere where you have a large efficient market.

So again I don't understand what you want to propose? Change the game? Male it better for fish?

I believe poker is a pretty good game. I don't think we can change it for the better. I also think multi tabling is something that is natural and folks with faster brains do it better than slow people. If you disallow people to multi table it would just destroy the game for other players than the ones that are complaining right now.

I think folks that bitch about the toughness of the game a delusional. Not because they are wrong about the games but because they think we can go back in time. Its like complaining that my car does not have a heart (like my horse).

We will never go back to horses and the games will never be as good as they used to be. It is part of the game to use the newly tools available to us. As well as the training, books and stats that exists today.

However there is one thing that is not part of the game that is man made and that is the way we charge for it.

Every time the games get tougher the rake gets higher. And today 80% of the money transferred is raked by the sites.

This is where your understanding is simply wrong. The rake is very high today. Due to the fact that the skill set of players is closer money is transferred back and forth and raked in the process. This creates much higher effective rake.

And that, and only that makes the games hard to beat. The only thing that affects the "beatablity" of the game is the ration between money won and rake.

My solution of fixing this would be to charge for winnings vs raking every hand. This by the way would do the same thing you want, which is to punish the regs (as they would pay all the rake).

The fish would have lots more money (they would never pay rake again) and all the marketing money would come from the regs as well. This would create a healthy economy where the ones benefitting from the game also bear its cost instead.

I would charge rage in 3 stages low % tage for winners, higher 5-tage for top 10% players and very high for top 3% players. This would would encourage winning players to move up to higher stakes.

Borg I have seen you bitching, complain and state things that are wrong (i.e. rake is lower today) but I have never seen anything constructive come from you. And you seem to love to pay rake.

How would you actually solve todays challenges?

when 80-90% of the money lost is going to the site at the micros who is spreading the net out?

Please show me the data for your net theory.

Most players crying about the games being tough are simply not aware where their money is going.

"This is where your understanding is simply wrong. The rake is very high today. Due to the fact that the skill set of players is closer money is transferred back and forth and raked in the process. This creates much higher effective rake."

and why is this? when you have good players playing 24 tables and ****ty players playing one the difference in skill becomes extremely marginal between players and the games tighten up and become extremely boring to play.

if you want to say the evolution of the games is mass multitabling,huds etc fine you're right
im still curious what happens in this country if and when online poker is regulated as far as those things go, but assuming they stay the same the games are going to suck no matter what the rake is. they might be a little better for a year or two with lower rake but eventually they will suck. thats the evolution of a game where edges become smaller and smaller over time. so being the games are going to suck anyway (if everything besides the rake stays the same now) stars might as well make as much money as they can now.

This isnt football and this isnt buying a car instead of a horse.You say i want to handcuff the players and you don't put weights on fast football players?Thats a bad analogy for 2 reasons.

1)football at its highest level is played for millions of dollars by the best players in the world.Money isnt fed into the game by terrible players paying to play and lose. Its fed into the game by people paying to watch football on tv,at the stadiums, by jerseys etc.
Thats not how money is funneled into the poker economy.

2) you don't put weights on the fast kids, but you also dont give them tasers to help them beat the kids they already better then at a faster rate. You don't charge the ****ty kids thousands of dollars a month to play and lose, and on top of that clone the best players so they can beat the ****ty kids even faster.

This is a game of skill people play for money.If they arent entertained and they don't have a chance to win they won't play.Why do you think there is no money in chess or backgammon?Things change over time I understand that. But if the sites and players want to leave things they way they are rake aside it is inevitable that the evolution of online poker will be non existant and/or terrible games.

the bottom line is stars isnt going to lower the rake unless they have to, and they know they have winning players by the balls right now.

call them greedy and short sighted all you want but that's just the pot calling the kettle black.

Have you played lately. I don't find it boring at all. There are 3bet and 5bet wars going on and players are playing 50 vpip on the button.

Again I think you don't understand what you are talking about.

But if you are right and its all the multi table guys that screw it all up:

What is your solution? Bitching and yelling is easy. Id like to actually hear something constructive. Sounds like all you want to do is call us idiots and complain.

24 tabling nits? Thought 2011 was over :/.

It's still the same old. You increase your hourly instead of your winrate and you lower the variance because of volume.
Having some pro masstable instead of him playing 6 tables is actually to your advantage if you happen to be at some of his tables.

Instead of limiting amount of tables they should simply make tables faster.
Problem solved!

I think they have already done this, I find tables pretty fast these days. But I only play rush/zoom/fast poker.

I don't think multi tabling is a problem anymore. Everyone does it anyhow. You just can't expect to go play online and be among fish these days. Just linke you can't expect a fishy table at any 5/10 games these days (except maybe in LA).

But again I don't think that's a problem. To me the game has just evolved.

To illustrate why this problem is much bigger as it seems:



So at the micro levels where most of the fish are they lose 10 bb/100 to rake and another 16.3 bb/100 to the mass tabling nits.

This is no joke, our fish lose at least 26.3 bb/100.

Their bankrolls buy them very little poker/fun anymore and all the more frustration.




The PTR numbers are only from FTP and PP and most of the East Europeans started playing in the last two years, so FTP doesn't have a lot of them.

Market share of PP is estimated to be about 7% plus FTP we get ~12.5%.
So we can take the numbers from the sample and multiply them by 8 to get the amount won.
For Russia that is 472.8M, for Belarus 130.4M and for the Ukraine 105.6M.

Most of their profit was made in the last 2 years, say 80% of it.
In that case winnings per year for these 3 countries alone were 283.5M.



This is a very interesting post from an insider:

Think about what this means. 475€ = 617$ all of it in rakeback.
Do we really want lousy break even players at the micro stakes to take all the money out?

On pokerstars would simply increasing the rakeback for supernova's and elites possibly be a good way of allowing the high volume players/pro's to push past the absurdly high rake?
One thing I will say is I think its incredibly difficult to break out of the micros because of the rake and all this really does is stop the flow of players from low to high stakes without the aid of a tourney bink. If you enabled people to actually grind up from the nano's/micros you would get more people at the mid stakes, playing lots and generating more rake. Winners are, presumably, very good for the sites, long term.
I dont really understand why people are arguing that the rake is fine, why wouldn't you want to pay less rake if the opportunity arose?

bubble, awesome chart where did u get this.?!!!!!

How does it show that the money goes to eastern EU?

No they already get 70% rakeback.

The problem is that rakeback only is accessible to regs.

I would like to cut all rakeback for the regs and give the money instead to losing players. (it would go back to the regs that way but more fun for fish and regs)

The rake is a very bad model in our times, its is very unfair and bad for the game.

We should instead charge a fee for winnings, kinda like a tax. I would also tax big winners higher (i.e. in three steps)

That would encourage to move up. That would be much better for the economy.

As a whole there should be a cap on how much a site is allowed to rake via regulation. This is what we the players need to demand thru something like the ppa.

I think, at the end of the day, many of these suggestions are good, but as has been mentioned before, the sites don't want people paying more attention to exactly how much they're charging in order for people to play poker. A tax on winnings or a per hand / time charge is certainly more fair, but it's much more obvious to players that they're paying a lot for a relatively simple service.

The idea that was mentioned in the other thread about adding some amount of rake to the sb and bb and raking at a fixed 5bb/100 is perhaps more promising, but for the fact that the sites wont want to give up what they're making at micros, and at micros the amount added would probably double the blinds, which again makes the rake much more transparent to the players.

I've checked my data and my last 80k hands of nl100 cost me 4,84bb/100

my last 50k hands of nl50 costed me 6,13bb/100

I paid on average 0,04$/hand on my last 150k hands which is obviously stealing, robbing etc

No they dont, Elites get close to that after some absurd amount of effort and even supernovas get around 35 % until you start getting to 200 k vpps, but you have to get to 200k to realise anything more, 199,999vpps in a year and you dont get that $ 2800 bonus ( which i think is another issue but besides the point ).

You can't impliment a complicated tax based system on cashouts, people will inevitably find a way around it or not cash out whilst they build a roll ( which you could do incredibly quickly without rake ), leaving a cashflow problem in the business.

I'm not convinced increasing rakeback or lowering rake would result in less money for the site, I haven't done any figures but I suspect the fact that you would create more winners who would, presumably start to move up stakes, and you would wind up with more players at mid-highstakes which surely must be a good thing for the site.

Everyone. Already. Knows.

Why don't people understand this.. Everyone is not stupid, people don't just login and click buttons and lose money. People are trying to win, people know the rules, people know the rake.

Everyone needs to stop with all the "fish don't know anything, don't tell them" bs. Where are these fish that don't know about rake? I want to play with them.

I think the rake charged atm is actually very reasonable. (for NLHE Cashgames atleast, not enough experience with other games) Imo they even should increase the rake in all matchups with a fish (full tables), but give the extra revenue back to the fish through all sort of bonuses, or use the extra revenue to attract extra fish. That way bad, breakeven, masstabling, shortstacking, bumhunting regs are punished, while fish and good regs are rewarded.

People dont seem to get that if you keep the sites profit constant, lowering rake will just transfer money from good regs, to bad, breakeven, masstabling, shortstacking, bumhunting regs. I don't think that would be good for poker.

fwiw at the moment the rake is far from too high. fe 2kNL 6max you pay only 0.45bb/100 after supernova rakeback, so all it takes is one 26/18 and you have a beatable game.
And at the micro's there's still plenty of fish and bad regs, so no troubles there. (cant imagine anyone putting in some real effort not crushing them if some SSNL reg can make 12bb/100 this way: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54...cience-963018/)

Obv feel free to launch your own site with lower rake, if you think thats gonna work. It could be an interesting experiment, but I highly doubt it will work unless you're willing to drastically lower site profit.

end the thread at post 419 from borg.

The most profitable type of player for a poker site is a Break Even Reg.

If every single player on pokerstars was a breakeven reg (before rake).. everyone would keep playing millions of hands, no one would withdraw and pokerstars would rake all the money.

A fish depositing does nothing to help a poker site.

Any money deposited by a fish gets lost almost instantly, and withdrawn by a winning reg. The poker site makes the bare minimum in rake from this transaction. There is only a small hope that the fish loses the money to a break even reg.. because he is the guy who can best turn that money into rake / profit for the poker site.

@ Borg, oh the poor sites that have spend money to bring in losing players for us to play. Well where do you think that money for promos etc.. comes from?? It comes from us not from them! Not only do we fund their marketing campaigns with our rake (which is obv fine) but they make literally billion/s per year to line their pockets with. That's a billion $ taken out of the poker ecosystem per anum by just one company (Stars/FTP)! I understand that Stars is a business etc... but I think if they are making that much then there's got to be some leeway for a more equitable business model. If our soundest logic or ideas don't trigger the sites to change then we as players must have clout of some kind that we can harness to effect some positive changes re. rake.

Btw, to address your argument that rake is just a minor reason that the games are bad, ok I agree to some extent. However, look at PLO. There's tons of action, a decent amount of fish but they're killing it by raking the hell out it. Rake, not more skilled players, not multitablers etc.. is easily the biggest problem affecting PLO right now. It is drowning in rake. So while I think that your point is valid for NL, I think that it doesn't ring true for PLO.

If this were the case, then I can't imagine why Stars / other sites wouldn't be more open to ideas that would net the same profit while resulting in way better action, such as time charges or per-hand charges based on their current bb/100 rake standard for a given stake. As it is, at least, the perception that many players don't know/care about rake likely contributes to sites being unwilling to consider other structures.

If these threads can stay focused on discussing and educating players on how appaulingly over-raked the industry is and generate complaints to the sites, they will take a revenue hit to retain a good image, especially if it's backed up with a good long-game to sustain the games. These discussions aren't in vein...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20624857

It's a shame so many poker players can't see past their own noses. In threads such as these we get a lot of bickering, mixed with a lot of 'I'm all right jack' type of posts mixed in with a relatively small number of productive, well thought out posts that I think are intended to enlighten the player pool at large.

I know I've learned a few things reading this thread and am grateful for the contributions of some of the posters. FWIW in 25K hands of Rush poker I am down a big two buy ins at NL25 - which I'm fine with since i just moved to Six max. I've realeaed $140 in bonuses so I gues I'm up. But I've paid $330 in rake. So it seems to me that better regs are not making any money off me but Tilt/(or their Pokerstars Overlords) are doing fine.

And I'm not complaining. I've had a lot of fun playing Six Max Rush. it's been entertaining. But I imgaine there's a lot of players like me who aren't very good, but want to get better and whilst we're trying to get better...the only folk really profiting is
the shareholders...albeit in my case in a relatively small way...but I imagine it all adds up.

I do find it odd though that If i win a $60 pot i pay 6 times more rake than someone who wins a 60K pot at High Stakes. But I'm not very clever so it's just a lot of numbers but i do think it's possibly a problem that money flowing up will slowly dry out. And there's not much cash game action at FUll Tilt past the Low Stakes.

If i paid less rake I would love to give some of my money to the player pool at 25/50 I really would - I'd get there faster that's for sure. And I know the player pool at 25/50 would love to have me cos I'm not very good and I'm not a grinder but I love to play the pokers on Full Tilt.

But I'm not complainging or moaning or opining and I'm never going to be the next Online Wizzard but there might be some guy a few buy ins up who might be and is waiting to stack me...and he's gonna have to wait a bit longer so sorry to him or her or them. But its just under this new system at Full Tilt I have to give them all the meat in the pie and make do with the pastry. (just wanted to say that I think every long post should contain one clumsy analogy so i left mines till the end so as not to offend the TLDRs.)

Just want to say I applaud Stars efforts to run a business and make money and for getting us our Full Tilt Money back. But this thread ain't about that.

Ahh me: if only poker players were like Fox Hunters and their supporters. Those ****ers knew how to mobilize.

In this interesting article I read the numbers from the sample were only from the last 3 year, so they represent 10% of the market instead of 12.5% (because FTP was gone half the time).
Meaning East Europeans made even more profit.

Knowing this we can make an assessment of how much the USA lost per year, which must have been ~960 million. This number is pretty reliable since the sample represents 10% of the population.

So we lost 960M from the USA plus another 170M from Italy, Spain and France.
We got back the East Europeans taking out hundreds of millions.
Only Russia, Bellarus and the Ukraine take out 354.4M per year.
Plus other countries like Poland and Rumania make a difference of > 1.8B per year!

Canada, the UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Switserland, Belgium, Norway, Australia, Austria and Sweden have to bring in the 1.8B extra per year.
Obviously that is not happening so the poker market is rapidly declining.

This is the single biggest problem on line poker is facing right now!
Surely my numbers won't be 100% correct (had to guesstimate rake and RB%), but the problem is clear nevertheless. This situation is very alarming.
The decline will go faster and faster, because it has a huge snowball effect.







* Come to think of it that number is not so reliable, because of all the phantom deposits. Also the sample represents 10% of the global market, but that percentage is probably higher for the USA market. So the real number must be lower, but no doubt it's still big.
It makes the hundreds of millions Eastern Europeans take out even more meaningfull and adds even more profit, since they were underrepresented in the sample.
If that was by 20% it adds another 25%, etc. They make somewhere between 600M and 1B.

I"m getting 80% rakeback at a site online that takes usa players and pays them within one day thru moneygram.

Also max rake is 3.50 a hand in a full game so at 80% rakeback comes out to about 80 some cents a hand.

I always put money on lowest raking sites in the world.. and everybody should do so who cares about rake cuz one will someday/ maybe take off.