Why not giving everyone an option to join a VIP-club, where you pay a monthly fee instead of rake according to the stake level you play.
This has so many advantages:
1) Fish and recreationals won`t chose this option, so they wont scared away by some high entry costs. For them everything remains the same.
2) Players who join the club have a massive incentive to put in volume, because the more hands they play, the less are teh effective costs per hand.
3) Games like HU and PLO and other games that are virtually unbeatable right now, become actually playable again.
4) Plenty of room for VIP-concepts, like a yearly-fee, that helps commiting players to a certain site.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LT22
So, fish still pay rake and high volume regs don't pay rake but they pay a fee up front. Please explain just how in the world this would work. Maybe I missed something obvious
Edit: Most players would not be able to afford the monthly fee. 99.999999999%, maybe even 100% would not be able to afford paying for millions of hands for an entire year in advance. High rake cost works now b/c regs pay as they play. Who has $20,000 laying around to pay their rake for a whole year?
The dynamics totally changes. What a monthly fee really does, it sets the marginal costs per hand to zero (marginal costs = the additional costs of an additional hand), which is a lot closer to market equilibrium. For those of us, who studied economy, they know, that a market price of a product approaches the marginal costs of production in full competetion. When it comes to poker, it seems, that the pokerworld work like a huge cartel, because the price of poker is on a high level.
By the way, the rake structure we have right now, is not sustainable at all, because it leads to the situation, where one or two companies are printing money, while the other ones are struggling to death. Small sites deal less hands and therefore they have higher average costs per hands dealt, so they cant really lower the price. Stars therefor has no incentive to reduce the rake.
A monthly fee as I suggest, is a lot closer to the cost structur of poker companies. The very large part of their operational costs are fixed costs, such as wages, licence costs, developement, rents etc., while the actual price for the product, dealing cards on a virtuel poker table, is pretty much zero. So the concept I suggest really reflects the cost structure of a poker company and therefor it really can be sustainable.
From the players perspective, a monthly fee changes the dynamics a lot. Think about it. When marginal rake goes down to zero, you dont have to be this nitty anymore. We can play omaha again and I could finally learn how to play heads up. You dont have table select yourself to death anymore, and when you start a table and a regular sits, you can actually play and not sit out.
The price of the monthly fee will be a lot more transparent, and it should be in that range, that a mediocre grinder has incentive to join. I would suggest a price, that a regular who plays more than 20K hands per month, has incentive to join. If you consider 4bb/100 the effective rake these days (rake-rakeback) that would be a monthly fee of 800 USD.