Actually I think you miss what creates a beatable game. There are two perspectives:

A single player needs to a) beat the player pool and b) beat the rake to be a winning player. Hence from a player perspective the skill of the pools is very relevant. In this light your sentence makes sense.

If you look at the ecology as a whole beat-ability depends on how high the effective rake is. Where rake = r = losses - wins. If you express this as a % than POW is simply saying that r is to close to 100%. Your sentence is illogical from this perspective. If you look at what a site is doing this is the perspective that matters.

In this macro perspective it does not matter how many good or bad players are in the pool. Except for the fact that players with similar playing style create higher ratio of r.

Of course a site tends to create an environment where r is maximized. That however creates an unsustainable ecosystem which ultimately leads to less r for the site. This is what is going on in cash games online where r is likely closer to 100% than even 50%. So the business model today is attract new players and new deposits and then rake it all away. Like you do with any casino game.

Player composition is only indirectly responsible for unsustainable games in that it increases the rake that is paid for every $ that is won. The problem are not the players but the way the rake is setup. Attacking the player pool is like confusing the symptoms with the disease.

I believe it is correct for unibet to support players that play little or lose. And not support players that play a lot or win. However first and foremost what needs to be managed is that effective rake is not too high so that many player can win if you want to create a sustainable ecosystem.

Stars has a system Where it's hard to win but if you win you get rewarded even more. That creates even more losers when what we need is more winners. However if unibet just circles the money around more and thus creating more rake, this won't work in changing the ecosystem. What needs to happen to grow the game is to have more winning players and r that is closer to 20% than 100%.

I think this is what POW essentially is pointing out correctly.

I appreciate having one person that doesn't outright dismiss my pov without any evidence to the contrary

However I think aswell as having winning players (which unibet certainly does) it is important to remember that not fleecing your bad players to the point they rarely go on upswings is equally, if not more important, than having winning players to sustain and grow pokers popularity.

Unibet certainly is attracting recreationals who play low volume, but it concerns me that as soon as they start to increase their volume, Unibets rake and rewards are alot more expensive than Stars, who are expensive anyway, and will negate any interest built up from their earlier, more rewarded experience of the game.

We're only at an impasse if you say I'm lying. Why should I want to post?

I can't just post confidential data on our player base to correct a model where I've told you several times where you're going wrong.

After I posted I realised I'd looked at this from a player's perspective only, and I think it's valid, but I tend to agree with your view from a site's perspective.

Until we have a very low-rake site (funded by advertising?) that enables a greater proportion of players to be net winners, I do think that Unibet's model is a welcome step in the right direction.

If indeed pokerstars, a well established room, has 85%+ of it's active players raking <50e over 3 months as you suggest (I'm not privvy to this info), then I guess I must concede that Unibet's model will have better value in this circumstance, and its doubtful this distribution will change much given how established Stars is.

That is of course, unless you're lying

Right exactly. But this is what Unibet is doing, is it not. Instead of dumbing the marketing value to the top winners they give it to the bottom of the player pool. That money will travel up top anyway. So this is good because it should create more winning players by turning losers into winners.

BUT this also creates more play, i.e. money is moved around more. So this only works to the betterment of the ecology (more winners and more winnings) if the effective rake is not too high. Else it actually creates less winnings.

For the site this might still be better if their objective is to have no winners and rake all deposits. Given losers more action and more play will make it more enjoyable and likely make them deposit more.

In either case supporting winning players has no value for the ecology or the site. supporting net depositors is beneficial to either the site + ecology or the site at the cost of the ecology depending on the effective rake.

IMHO Hence if you want to ensure longterm growth and success you must create a sustainable rake system and give all the marketing value to losing players. This is a concept that no poker site pursues because business is measured in hands played. Because every hand played generates rake.

The model of managing hand volume however is faulty because business is fueled by deposits and money taken to new levels by winning players.

So we need to manage:

a) the desire to spend money on poker. This requires a product that is not a marketing scam. I.e. when people think its a skill game skillful players must win >> effective rake may not be too high
b) support players that are net depositors

You need some winners because you need the game to be aspirational. You also need some high volume players because it helps liquidity. That's why we have a top end to the loyalty scheme too. We allow multi-tabling (though 10 table cap at games that have become tighter as time goes on), table tiling, table priority etc.

I agree that we should give more money to losing players, but it doesn't really work with a loyalty scheme kind of model. We do it in other ways though - see https://www.unibet.com/promotions/po...double-trouble for example. If you lose during the week you get entry to a very good value freeroll. We also aim the majority of our reactivation efforts at losing players.

Andrew that is pretty cool and something I have never seen before.

You should start up a rake free poker site for all of us. Would be awesome of you. Just have to figure out how to sustain your company....

How come the World of Warcraft model can't work? Or at least were you prepay for every 100 hands at a stake level like a time charge.

I personally think we should all support Full Flush because they have THE MOST COMPETITIVE RAKEBACK RIGHT NOW IN ONLINE POKER INDUSTRY.

And they have good reputation for always paying.

They just paid me about ten grand btw.. past few months .. and have more coming..

Obviously. That's how the system works.
So the way to become 'your own boss' is to put in even more hours and pay even more rake? Thanks for the advice!

Why would anyone introduce a monthly payment system in World of Warcraft, if all the customers were currently paying way more through a time charge system? At least half the user base doesn't understand how much they pay.
Instead they blame their inability to play for a full month on other people being better at pvp. Or that World of Warcraft online is rigged compared to World of Warcraft the board game.

not to undermine your post, but that's 2 month of mtts (or even less if you play big volume) or 2 weeks of sngs for most actual grinders

If anything sites are increasing effective rake by reducing reward programs to regular multitabling players.

1. Set rake too high
2. Not enough upswings
3. Lots of bad players leave
4. Popularity decreases rapidly.
5. Increase price to make up for less customers
6. Even more bad players leave.
7. Loop 4,5 & 6.

There's a myth that because fish aren't aware of rake, rake pricing doesn't affect the player pool. It does, it directly affects the health and popularity of the games, but this affect isn't felt for a while because of variance.

All the self-hating players usually jump in now to say its the player's fault for killing off the fish too fast. That's the point of the game isn't it? To beat it, and find more and more edges? Player skill levels are all relative, everyone gets better, just some faster than others.
The sites have 1 job, to provide a secure and healthy environment for this game to take place.

Most sites rake models are designed to attract new players, butcher them, rinse and repeat. Completely unsustainable but will make them large amounts of money in a short period.

I agree with op

See ***TexasHoldEm.com - Official Site Thread*** - Arizona based subscription site.

The word ecosystem can't be emphasized enough. Poker player = dodo bird.

Oh and lol 2012. It's funny how these issues have been brought up so long ago. Would be interesting to see how OP feels at this point in time.

OP got banned for confronting a site about their rake model in a certain thread, mods called it trolling apparently

Online poker has some problems and there's alot of finger pointing atm, but the fact remains that if a game is priced so that even the averagely-skilled players dont have a chance of winning over a reasonable sample, then there's zero chance it will grow in popularity.

The graphs in the OP really do speak volumes about the effects of rake pricing on the game.

20% decrease in volume in the industry every year since black friday.

And this trend will continue and likely increase as operators are actively trying to convert their existing poker customers into other forms of gambling.

One notable exception is Unibet. This site has more then doubled their traffic in the past year. I've been on the site for the past few months and I can see why they've done so well.

in case nobody noticed it in nvg, stars just employed soft koth system on hu tables across all stakes, including nl50, without prior notice

while some form of koth seems like a reasonable idea, doing it without decreasing rake at lowests stakes is just a straight up money grab, as reg v reg matches are pretty much unbeatable, with rake being 23bb/100 at nl50 and 15bb/100 at nl100 (from my database, numbers may vary with different playstyles).

this may also prove to be terrible for mid stakes, as hs players get so few rec players while opensitting that it may be worth it to battle for tables much lower, we already see nl10k regs holding tables at nl400. Employing koth should also include limit to maximum amount of stakes you can opensit - but then again, this would probably mean less reg v reg rake.

Usually new players or break even players get easily offeneded when they preceive their skill is coming into question or being attacked, hes just saying dont be too results oriented and that your 10% roi doesnt mean much over such a small sample period(you may be proud of it and think its a mind blowing stat), and it doesnt matter how long it took you, its easy to tell your a rec/novice by the lack of information in your post to begin with

OP made some really good points, but its been 3 years ago since this thread was created why havent these points been brought up during pokerstars annual "brain trust" meeting where they supoposedly meet with some player committee and discuss ways to improve the site, or is it just some wine and dine retreat where they discuss how to F players further and the commitee nods their heads in agreement

The real answer is Amaya could care less about whats good for players and if it gets bad enough they ll just sell Pokerstars to the next bidder....hope im wrong