This bad beat brought to you by Vaseline!

lol, good one

i also highly doubt advertising is the way to go. Income from it is somewhat limited so it will never be able to even remotely replace rake and then it will likely be annoying for casual players, which im sure is the main thing sites are worried about. So not a good reward vs risk ratio probably.

Pokerstars takes about 14BB/hundred in rake off it's $.5/1 HULHE tables and about 7BB/100 off it's $1/2 HULHE. If anyone can offer a successful justification of that model they may be up for a Nobel Prize in economics.

Agreed. Have you ever played on southpoints free version. Before sitting down you had to watch adds for like 2 min. It was horrible. And in between sngs as well.

I thought it was a crappy business model.

No I have not. Facebook and Google have managed to do ads quite well. Why not copy them.

After a couple of days reading and thinking about the rake problem, I have now come to two conclusion. PokerStars and their owners are greedy people that don't understand **** about PLO. Poker communities best hope is the man behind Zynga, Mark Pincus.

Zynga has a poker platform with now maybe over 40 million users and it's RAKEFREE. OK, so it's only play money for now and real money tables online cost more to run. BUT if and when they decide to start online poker. I'm sure of two things, one the rake will be much lower than the poker industries standard is now and two, the amount of new fish will make everybody happy. Only person I can see to be a little bit sad over this is Isai Scheinberg.

Forbes isn't though as optimistic as me
http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanva...ll-never-work/

Pretty sure Zynga signed a deal with Partypoker lol. Am i wrong?

zynga was going to buy ongame or something, but didnt.

Yes in October

The rich pokersites dont want this to happen, so they just buy up the competition, and make sure it never happpens. Hmmm.. what can we do about that?

There are a couple of good articles out there (google it if interested) explaining why zynga-poker wont make a huge impact on the online poker scene. What i love about zynga poker though is its recruiting potential, by simply making poker easily available for a ton of ppl.

Yeah, this is the main problem with the rake system. The cap for rake at 50 and 100NL is the same as the 100/200 game, and it's not sustainable. Players can't move up through those levels if they start at the micro's, and the average player who wants to sit with $100 bucks in front of him can't afford the rake. He also doesn't get any bonuses from the site, those go to the rakeback multi-table pros.


The problem is that the very levels that most recreational players want to play at are the most expensive, so the fish have been being charged too much money compared to other gambling options at their disposal.

One thing I might propose is to charge an hourly rate, or even a per hand rate, that is commensurate with the buy in. The sites can start by not gouging the poor to give to the rich.

perhaps instead of all this rabble someone should just go out and create their own poker site with a sustainable ecosystem.

Yeah this is the problem with the rake and why 100NL and 200NL is becoming unplayable. We were spoiled for a while because it took a long time for the fish to go broke. The rake for these levels has always been unsustainable, and it's time to revise it so the average Joe who wants some action can lay a few hondo on the table and play poker.

are people nowadays just playing to loose and see too much flops so they pay too much rake because of that? Isnt it better to give up blinds and lose extra 14BB/100, but overcome that with strong range of hands that are left when you arent folding, than play a wide range of hands and make mistakes with that range while also paying ****ton of rake in between, even if its slightly more +ev?

The rake today is higher than it was in 2006.

You might think that is a lie. if you look at pokerstars you can actually see that the rake table there today is lower than it was in 2006. But today the relative skill difference between players is closer, much closer.

So money gets moved back and forth between players without being won/lost as much vs 2006 but rake is still being charged. Thus the rake per hand is the same but the winrate per hand is lower, thus effectively rake is higher. Rake is relative to money won. I.e. in PLO games are unbeatable in some lower stakes games because the rake is higher than what you can win.

Hey poker sites this rake size is fair and just for a sustainable poker ecosy....


"TLDR PAY THIS OR DONT PLAY"

i'd love to see a poker site that charged a monthly fee instead of rake, i think $10 or $20 a month should be enough. i dont think it should be much more costly than running a large mmo. Maybe even have a high tier for large games at like $100 a month to cover extra transaction fees.

+1 but sites right now make a zillion times more $$$ charging rake per hand than they would if they did what you're suggesting...

Rake is just an unbelievable amount of money. They'd have to charge like $500 per month for a microstakes membership and much higher for higher stakes just to stay as profitable as they currently are. Fish would never ever pay that even though they're totally happy losing $40 of each $100 deposit to rake. Sigh.

The transition is not a simple one because poker is still gambling to most of the people who play; that is, casual players don't play to make a slow and steady profit (duh). And so they don't notice nor do they mind the slow and steady rake, as long as they get a big win occasionally. So while 95% of players and all sites see poker as more or less the same as slots, 5% of players see poker as a strategy game that they can play for profit. The rake ultimately controls whether the game can be profitable at all though, given a decent approximation of the average skill level of the player pool.

As for the PLO rake, well, sites are in business for the casual players. The sites realize that they can rake more effectively from PLO because the game has more swings and the pots are bigger, meaning the rake will have less of an impact on the "gambling high" in this game compared to NLHE.

Either casual players are going to have to start wanting to actually play poker for the love of the game (and not for the love of gambling) or good players are going to have to accept that poker is no more profitable than monopoly.

What you're saying makes sense and I'm sure I've probably said something very similar but it just occurred to me that it's actually logically flawed. You're spot on on the average each fish deposits per month. According to Arjel the average deposit is €67 or about $90 a month, a number that is likely more or less similar amongst all the sites. But the logical inconsistency derives from the fact net depositing players - fish - are the ones who bring almost all of the money into the poker economy.

If the average deposit is $90 per month - then in order to match their profits today the sites would need to charge an average of $90 * percent_of_deposits_converted_to_rake to match their current profits. The percent of deposits converted to rake I've seen thrown around is 65%. That would be an average fee of $58.5 per month. But that assumes nothing changes. In rakeless games players would last *much* longer. And presumably the word of mouth would also massively change the game. Instead of so many players complaining of rigging, cheating, blah as a means to explain their losses - we'd have games where roughly 50% - perhaps even more given the bottom heavy nature of the extremes on the skill curve - are walking away winners.

I'm also assuming that $90 deposit is an average per active player, and not per deposit. If it's per deposit then the requisite monthly fee would be lower, perhaps much lower, as the $0 deposit/month players would bring the average down.

You just prove that you have no clue what you are talking all the time.
I just don't get why people follow that but I guess I should never underestimate the power of carefully worded nonsense.

We have a current system where net depositors are raked less (e.g. they deposit 100$, lose 80$, rake 20$, Would say that is fairly close assumption) and regs that play way more, don't deposit, just take the money off the economy and they "pay" (which isn't true but for the sake of discusion lets pretend that regs do pay the rake) way more rake. Isn't it fair system???
So basically you want to heavily increase the rake for amators while decreasing it for proffesionals when the whole game is based on the amators existence and play
Now you tax every depposit it instantly increase the costs for fish aka net depositors that will have to pay the fee every month while effectively decreasing the cost of play for every reg on the site.
Do you even understand how ******edly stupid it is???
In an enviroment that there is less and less net depositors every day you want to force them to pay way more to play while decreasing the cost for every reg that play there. The games round around the marks, don't they?

Seriously please stop posting cause you have no clue what are you talking about.

I don't see people posting about taxing deposits.

Yeah I oversimplified it. What I ment is the monthly subscription fee. If the average deposit is like 100€ or so it would effectively increase their cost of play why decreasing it a lot for regs.

Do it right was reffering to the subcritpion model based on the avarege deposit data but effecitvelly it would mean taxing the net depostiors heavily while decreasing costs for regs which is utterly stupid. It was kinda early when I wrote my post and can't edit anymore

The solution for this could be a player club, where everone has the option to join. As a club member you pay a one month fee according to the limit you wanna play. A reasonable fee could be something like 800$ per month if you play 100NL and lower. 300$ per month, if you play 50NL an lower and so on. Also a 12month-fee option could be nice, and reflects higher vip-levels. The Per-month fee should be a little less than the net-rake spend for 20K hands per month. So it will become a serious option for part-time grinders as well.

What a monthly fee does, is that it reduces the average rake-per-hand by the amount of hands you play, such as VIP-programms do with their increasing rewards.

As a club member no rake per hand is paid, so therefore no rakeback etc...

The non-members are charged a per-hand rake, so most recreationals wont notice and they wont be scared away by a high-entry-fee,

What I like on this suggestion is, that "dead"- games like lowstakes - HU and lowstakes
are now more attractive. I wouldnt even mind to play regulars HU if there was no rake-per-hand paid. Tables wont break that quickly when the fish busts, and it would be more fun afterall, because table selection is really annoying sometimes.