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.

I think this is a great idea, but the model is too static. I think it could work except the fees would have to be so small that the sites would lose 95% of revenue.

Given the licensing cost it might also be hard to make this work when you start.

I think there are better ways to solve this problem such as what DoItRight or i have suggested (essentially paying a %-age of winnings).

because the people who select this will obvious benefit from it to the detriment of the players in 1 as well as the site.At some point you reach the break even point of the old record at which point you are effectively playing for free. Playing for free and taking money out of the poker economy hurts the sites a lot.

As for HU- its stupid to have it as it is. Letting people bum hunt and fleece fish for free would be pretty dumb on the sites end.

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?

Like I said i think its dumb to offer it at all. But if you're going to offer it whats the point of offering it at cheap rake? Its not like good players would play each other all day making the sites more money. You would still have lobbies full of people refusing to play anyone who can count to 6 on the first try, so if you're the site you might as well get your cut too.

So the fish who like to play HU disappear. That's a real wise choice for the sites. I realize this may be a difficult concept for some, but there are fish who play exclusively HU. HU has more action and doesn't have 5 nits isolating them every hand. Many of their donkey tendencies are actually LESS of a donkey move at HU.

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.

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.

Wages are not a fixed cost, but I digress. I still don't understand your fee. Are fish paying a monthly fee? Majority of rec players (and even posters here) are not going to understand the up front fee and why it benefits them. It's going to be super difficult for people to pay a whole month in advance.

No, the fee is an option you can choose. For those who dont want to become VIP/member, everything remains the same.

So the site still rakes every pot. Then they give people in this VIP monthly fee club 100% rakeback?

There is no real point in changing something that has been around for so long that is perfectly fine. If the rake is too high then all you have to do is lower it..not change the whole system...

That subscription fee seems like a horrible idea no offence

rake was perfectly fine when you could play 7/8 stats and profit from that

+1

full disclosure before I speak again:

I've made most of my money in poker from MTT's but I dabbled in cash on the side and could beat the cash games 6max up to 200nl. I could 4-table the games and make around $20/hour, which is about what I make at 1/2 NL now.

After BF I moved almost exclusively to the cash games online and became a loser at them. There were four regs to a table and their skill level had surpassed mine. Many of them had awesome rakeback deals and were playing every table that was open, and I began to feel they were making money off me because they could pay blinds and get FPPs and bonuses at my expense. My style, since I play so few tables is to play upwards of 30%, which means I'm actually paying a lot more in rake since I'm winning more hands.

The casual player wants to play a lot of hands, but the more hands you play, the more you win, the more you pay in rake.

I'd be so happy if they would charge something like 25cents per hand, that way the nits would pay the same amount as the lags. Every hand you are dealt is worth the same as every other hand, so why are they charging for winning hands when they don't have to. It's a computer program for pete's sake, you shouldn't follow the live model if you don't have to.

I don't know if I speak for the public or not, but as a marginal winning poker player I will stick with the live game until there is a rake system overhaul. The system now is very flawed imho.

The vast majority of sites are now "contributed" rakeback meaning each player gets their fair share. I know there are a few exceptions, but almost all switched to this calculation. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

Just to be clear: if I were starting a poker site right now, I would charge each player an amount per hand, like an ante. That insures that rake scales across play style and number of tables. I would also base the fee on the number of hands per hour, that way it also scales across types of games. That means charging a lot less for the limit hold em game because the rake in that game is clearly unsustainable for a game that could be very popular.

Charging fish an up-front fee per hand will piss them off.

Charging per hand would make the games LESS sustainable than they already are. If you suddenly turn a bunch of breakeven nits into losers, the game is less sustainable. You're not creating incentive for nits to play if you charge per hand. You're creating incentive for them to quit all together.

If the premise of your argument is "fairness" and not sustainability, sure you're on the right track IMO.

the current method of raking is fine imho, and i have yet to see a good alternative. The discussion should instead be about how much they rake in each type of game and how to spend this rake. Do we even want rakeback/promotions that primarily reward fulltime players f.ex?

If I were to start a site right now i would be all about creating a nice fish-friendly environment and to focus a ton on attracting big time gamblers. Surplus rake income would go towards advertising and creative promotions to ensure a steady and hopefully increasing influx of new players. And no rakeback deals and grinder-friendly loyalty programs.
The rake would be low enough to ensure that some of the best players at each stake win a decent rate. So big-edge games would be raked more than small-edge games. Compared to f.ex PS anno 2013 i guess this would mean that some games would be raked higher and some would be raked lower, but probably not a big change.

I don't know if this has been stated before but limit tables for winning players at levels where their win rates are X bb per hundred. Force them to move up or play 1 table or 2. Also it's crime that 50NL and 25NL have nearly the same rake as 400NL? 25NL should have the rake capped at .75 cents. I don't either will happen as the sites are just too greedy to do this.

The thing you're missing is that it's not like you can just spend your way into oceans of fish anymore. Online poker has evolved and there are thousands of competent to good players. It's simply not a particularly fish friendly game anymore. Weak players get skinned extremely quickly and efficiently. They lose a ton to the rake as they tend to play too many hands, and as much if not more from other skilled players taking advantage of their poor play.

The reality in today's games is that a fish's money would almost certainly last longer playing video poker, or blackjack or other games against the house. The house + regular edge in poker is vastly higher than most any other game that somebody is playing to just gamble it up in. While online poker has been rapidly declining, public organizations such as ARJEL (who is responsible for gaming regulation in France) have shown that spending on other gaming has actually been increasing rapidly enough to not only cover the decline in online poker but surpass it. In other words if $10 less is being spent on online poker, other gaming is seeing $15 more being spent!

This is why I think swapping to a system that doesn't directly charge players while the game is being played would be more desirable. You artificially decrease the house edge, even if the house does ultimately still take just as much through other means (such as a rake on withdrawals in excess of deposits). That makes it easier to go on hot runs, and also helps keep weaker players around in the games much longer which is ultimately great for everybody, not the least of which being the weak players in question! There's also the word of mouth issue. A 'rake' which taxes net winnings would result in a massive increase in the number of winners. Online poker's word of mouth right now is just toxic. Ask a casual player and all you're going to hear is rigging, cheating, stealing, blah. Not only that but they seem to just love to complain about it to anybody who will hear them! Multiply the number of winning players by several times over and you would naturally also indirectly massively improve the word of mouth regarding online poker. And this is just scratching the surface of the benefits of such a system!

the problem with a system taxing the withrawals is that for the room to take the same amount of money from the system, they'll have to take 75% or more of the net winnings of the players. Nobody is going to put up with that, even though the rake right now is about the same.

I've been playing 1/2 HULHE a lot over the last year. Do you have any idea what my winnings would look like rake free? I would be up over 20K right now. Don't take 75% of it, take half. **** fine, take 75%. I'm ok with even that excess.

But the point is taken that fish might have a gripe or two. Until there's some kind of empirical evidence this argument will not be settled and cannot be. I think most pros, especially small stakes grinders would go for a cashout tax system. Most fish would likely abhor it. The truth lies somewhere in that expanse of possibilities and no one can claim to know it until it has been proven so.

you are ok with it now.

what many forget is also the difference "no rake" would make. Probably more than 1/2 of players would win! All the winners would win somewhere between 50-80% more (whatever the rake is).


As an example over the last 2 months I have won 26 buy ins at 50nl online. That is before rake. After rake I basically break even (maybe down a little). Live I play 2-5 with 1k buy ins. I make a little over $30 per hour. I pay 30% in rake. This is a much better outcome. The difference is my bankroll. Online I only keep a few thousand. Live I play with 20-30k.

Now I might not be the best player in the world but I should not have that much trouble beating a $50 game. The only reason its so hard for me is the rake. If the rake would be a %-tage of what I win like do it right suggest I would be playing much higher and so would many other players that play even better than me. That in turn would make the lower stakes games easier and the higher stakes as well. The players that should rather play blackjack now could play poker again.

I think a possible solution will be some kind of a mix.

Example 1:

Current rake system remains, but players can buy 100% rakeback, paid daily, for one month, for, say, 50$ for games up to NL5, 90$ for NL10, 200$ for NL25, 400$ for NL50, 800$ for NL100 and above. This is purely optional. Sure, it will hurt the sites a little, but it will allow some micro grinders to exist and enjoy the games, instead of slowly losing, and blaming the inevitable fatal downswing on a rigged game.

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Example 2:

Current rake system remains, but every player can opt out for 100% rakeback, paid daily, upon registration, with the condition that he will forfeit 75% of every cash out above his initial deposit to the poker room.

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Obviously for both of these examples players still qualify for promotions, BUT don't qualify for any other kind of rakeback or first deposit bonus etc etc, and don't give earn the affiliates money.

That is pretty much the system I suggested about 3 pages before with the exact same numbers. I really think this the best way to do it. Here people dont like the idea, but didnt bring up any reasons why thish shoudnt
work.