Whatever scheme/plan you come up with can't reduce the profit of a site otherwise it will be a non starter.

Only schemes that would work are mass walk-outs,sit-outs or protests from a unity of regular players voicing their concern over the harmful effects of over-raking. Players really have to start giving more of a sh** than the sites over the future of the game.

Not adding any ideas but every bumped rake thread atleast raises more awareness

One glass half full comment:

As long as humans keep reproducing, the world economy provides some disposal income, and poker is still an interesting game on some level:

As prospective and competitive poker players come of age, there will always exist a learning curve for new players, whether they play for a year or a lifetime. Regardless of how intelligent or dedicated they are, throughout the learning phase the sites and the better players will profit....forever (albeit small at times - altered by a myriad of variables, legal climates, and sites' business decisions)

Also, as a casual player myself, I would argue that getting money on and off a site quick and effortlessly is more important than small changes in rake. My opinion is unfairly skewed, though, because I am a U.S. player, a recreational player, and most of this thread may not pertain to me on the same level.

Just curious has stars made any comment that made sense or contacted you to discuss? Last time I checked they were blowing smoke up our aS s saying the pots were bigger on average in omaha thus more rake....

The problem is...for people who are spending time stuying poker to beat this beautiful game, as of 2013....NOBODY IS BEATING THE GAME ANYMORE.

DUCY...

LOL

I agree with everyone here that the rake needs to be lowered but this is just a ******ed statement. People are beating all the games at every level, they just don't spend their days in NVG bragging about it. If you can't beat the games that's another story...

[x] bumhunting
[ ] beating the game

stars wont change the market they dominate.

The problem with the way rake works is that the low stakes games are relatively unbeatable.
This is a problem for the economy as the "pyramid" does not really work anymore. This means moving up is too difficult.

For it to change we need to demand it, or create regulations that prevent unbeatable games. Or a small provider could try to change the system. This however will in the short term always lead to less revenue for the site.

The poker community is not aware of this problem or is not voicing this problem. In my opinion this is something that should be a high priority for PPA to pursue. But so far I don't even think they are aware of the problem.

The games are still beatable, it just takes actual postflop skill as opposed to years ago when anyone with a preflop chart and the knowledge to valuebet the nuts could turn a profit. I honestly think we could see mid and high-stakes games get easier in the coming years, assuming the number of fish doesn't decrease: some of the current winners will eventually retire and move on to other careers, and it's much harder now than it was in the past for new players to break into poker, climb the ranks, and take their place. When I started playing poker I was able to read Super System, jump into the 25NL games, and start turning a profit almost immediately. A small profit, sure, but profit nonetheless. How many new players are going to have the patience to put in hundreds of thousands of hands at 2NL and 5NL just so they can develop the necessary skills to start eking out a few bucks an hour against all the 13/11s that live at 25NL now?

Add a slow roll button which, when pressed, makes your hole-cards do an elaborate and hypnotic dance around the table, before settling in the centre and revealing themselves - all done to the theme tune from Tales of the Unexpected.

This is the only realistic path to a second poker boom.

The game actually doesn't have to be 'beatable' to a certain degree to sustain growth and popularity, it just needs to APPEAR beatable. A good portion of below-average players need to regularly be aloud to go on heaters and this statistically cant happen while rake is so absurdly high.

Do not confuse beatable with beatable for u personally.

In order for you to beat a game u must be better than the players in the game.

On order for the game economy to be beatable there is only one factor: Rake. Rake in relation to money won.

So the only thing that defines if the games are beatable is rake. Skill is irrelevant.

This is what everybody is misunderstanding even people who read this thread.


Rake however is relevant to skill. With static rake (such as what we have today) rake increases with skill. This is why more fish = is more beatable games. NOT BECAUSE YOU CAN BEAT THE FISH. Its because the $$ won relative to rake is higher, the ratio is better.

u are describing whats going on today.

i really respect you but what u are saying here makes no sense.

i love this idea.

this is not gonna change the beat-ability of the game. for that all that matters is rake.

this to me is stating the obvious. poker becomes exactly fair at zero rake, with an equal proportion of winners and losers, with more skilled players experiencing reliable profits in cash games. however, with an increase in rake, more people lose money and the highly skilled players have more variance in profit.

well, duh.

i wonder how a no-rake poker room would do. no other gambling except maybe keno, just poker with no rake. would you be able to locate it in gambling-prohibited areas because EV = 0? maybe just make money on concessions, just have min wage kids for dealers and $12/hr bar cooks, have a working class image rather than high roller. typical bar prices. i've always wondered why there aren't any of those. like a poker themed diner. but with great games/stakes to attract the big names with a yearly tourney or whatever if there was a way to do that. and of sufficient size for tourneys. i dunno.

maybe like charge $20 to reserve a table above x stakes?

The solution is very simple:

Cap rake at a %-tage of money won either for the ecology or per individual.

I.e. define that rake may never be higher than 20% of winnings.

I like an idea like that extremely lot. The rake really would then be only a small cut of the winnings and losing players pay no rake. Not the idea that is going to be used on popular enough sites for years to come but it's extremely great as not only it's a small cut, also more players will win and losing players will lose slower. I am not even sure of how much it would cost for poker sites as more people would play more and higher limits.

These days the rake is generally half of the strong player's winnings, though many sites offer 0%, 10-20% these days, and only more if one does nothing but play poker at one site. The industry should keep at least the 50-50 level for the strong players.

If there is no rakeback one gets 1/7 of the winnings, house taking a small cut of 6/7 out of the strong player's winnings. The rakeback would need to be about 2/3 for the cut to me a minor, 1/3 of the winnings of the strong player, and then the good players also would have a possibility to win something and in some games even the so-so players would break even, that's intuitively all really what it should be.

The best however is that the house gets its profits only from the winning players at the time they make a cashout. This way we can be sure we are getting more or less a real deal as the house gets up to nothing if it starts to cheat. No rake also means that one needs to only beat the opponents, and that's the way it should be, and pretty clearly so.

There's ways for sites to profit from running the games without distorting the results of the game through rake. A common idea is raking withdrawals in excess of deposits. The results of the games would not be so distorted by the sites' profit margins. If you can show a 0.00001bb/100 edge over your opponent then you can beat him and earn money in the longrun.

It's not that the sites profiting off the games is 'unfair' - they do offer a service that is desired and to pay for this service is to be expected, but rather that the method they use to profit from the games completely distorts the games themselves. This becomes more apparent as the edge between players approaches 0. Imagine if in a football match the operators of the stadium charged a fee by reducing the score of a team by 0.1 every time they made a play. The game would be ******ed and in many cases - in all cases where the skill edge was not completely lopsided - nobody would win aside from the house. That's the scenario we have in poker that's arisen as an unfortunate consequence of the fact that the score in our game is kept in dollars so a site taking points away from the score while the game is being played doesn't sound nearly as absurd as it actually is.

started on stars jan 1st new account, have played 40K hands, paid 2,300$ in rake, and recieved $320 in RB give or take a few dollars, thats bout 15% RB what a joke

It seems, you are thinking of business, while I am thinking of what's right, what's sane. You probably are not a poker player but a person who is making money out of the business in some ways like being an affiliate. The case is about the absolute truth and not about your business.

Why you make tons of posts? That looks delusional and even the same stuff you are writing repeatedly, in a lot of hurry and blaa blaa blaa. I am sure you suffer from delusion, not understanding at all what's common sense about the rake amount.

You somehow are fixed in some ideas that take over your common sense. You are tilting. Some of those things are about multitabling and it being bad when there is less fish per table then, and that's valid, but valid only as it is and even then it isn't clear of it being wrong in the light of a fair and "sustainable" rake.

Being built around the fish; I don't think on those terms but I am tens of years ahead. And again, it's not a high rake issue at all.

About it being unfair for some good players to take lots of money out of the site and pay only hundreds per month to the site (I pay less than hundred per year to a chess site and win a lot of games per month), I see you have a strong delusion there, presenting it as it being something morally wrong? The money you win should go to the site that is marketing to get fish in? You just get in such delusions and believe that is some all covering fact, that people should pay extremely high rake for marketing reasons - in the best of cases (in an intelligent world?) all it needs is a site's name at poker.com or so and a good software while banning rake greedy sites if necessary and let the word go around here etc. and prepare people for getting ready to play some tougher games if necessary and get the site going, and I have done that myself, just that the rest of you are all too scared to play a game with up to no fish for a couple of hours per week and get such a site going.

The marketing things are a separate issue from enormous rake stealing happening. It's just about the gaming and what's a fair rake (if I play one table online and pay $10 per hour ... but you don't understand because of your delusions), not about if some strong player is winning (you have an issue with that?).

It's a game played with money, there being no connection to how much someone plays and how much someone wins to marketing costs other than he is paying more of them than the players who play less and at the same time giving the site more action. It's about fair rake, it having nothing to do with how much someone plays and how much he wins.

A lot of things can be talked about from the losers' and sites' points of views but they are separate issues. I could offer next to perfect money management to all players, and the sites then too can.

Why is it that the sites can't run some tougher games with low to no rake? I am willing to play. It's just about doing things right, there being many options even on one site and all these issues are separate issues and have nothing to do with the too high rake being taken.

Heads up games bad for the industry; what about what's right? Well, you don't understand that kinds of things. Again, it's a separate issue of what's the best to be done with it, and at least the way it's now isn't right but it has nothing to do with the rake.

A heads up bot that's there playing all the time sitting at many tables, I have known some and I don't like it that they are taking money out of the weaker players exactly where I am myself even currently playing shorthanded (2 to 6 handed), though the bot isn't winning (break even) but that's bad enough even then. Then there are other human players that take sort of my money also. But again, the issue is separate from the rake case.

the sites need to ban HUDs and limit multi-tabling in addition to lowering the rake in order to get the fish back.

The rake structure is a complete joke and unsustainable, because you have to play at extremely high buy-ins to cover it. I don't know what the sites can do but I'm sure there's some math that can be done to make it much fairer than it is now.

Also the guys who are content playing for a tiny profit on a lot of tables with the help of software that fish don't use are killing the games.

Rake is far too low.

No fish even cares about it as its a trivial % of their overall loss/spend. If rake is increased, good players are forced out, only leaving idiots which drastically increases their chances of winning as player to player skill gap is a much larger factor in how much they lose than rake.

This extra rake can be used to bonus these good, depositing losers much better, and as the games don't run without fish anymore liquidity hardly suffers. These players deposit more as they win more, and rake increases as there is virtually no leakage to good players.

No one, and I mean no one in gambling cares about you winning. If you can make/have made any money gambling count yourself lucky to have lived in an era where it was relatively easy to gamble with an edge for large sums of money - your days are very much numbered when it comes to poker in my humble opinion.

There are few logical reasons left for rooms not just to start restricting long term winning mass multitablers en masse just like sports books do, and if you're a winning player who thinks rake was high before, wait and see how much you liked high charges to no play at all.