That's still tons for a casual player. I remember playing 50NL at maybe 20 hours a week 6 tabling and I never got to platinum and probably payed about 600 a month in rake. So what good would that be for a 1 or 2 table player who plays 10 hours a week?

im not trying to be a dick but the ONLY reason online is so hard for you isnt the rake
30 an hour would be ok in the 2/5 game at the borgata with a 500 cap, but if youre only averaging 30 an hour in a 1k cap game you have a lot of holes in your game

also saying how many hands you played in those 2 months would be a lot more helpful than saying 2 months

the other mistake people make is they honestly think if the rake was different or didnt exist everything else would play out the same exact way which simply isnt true

why do people suggest things like this without even pretending to look at it from the sites side

this post reminds me of the idiots who call up talk radio shows and say **** like "i have a great trade to propose-boone logan and chris stewart for felix hernandez. then the yankees should package eduardo nunez and chris dickerson for justin verlander and miguel cabrera" and think they have just solved the teams problems.

if the sites wont make more money with what you propose there is 0 reason they will or should do what you propose

there are some very smart people on this site
everytime stars changes their rake or rewards sytem within a few hours someone crunches the numbers and gives the exact breakdown of how much rakeback you get at each level

if the sites let people choose traditional rake or these new suggestions within a few hours there would be a chart or calulator all the grinders would use to see what made the most sense for THEM
the sites would effectively just be giving them money and getting NOTHING in return

even worse was the montly fee idea
they would be giving them money and after the break even point be letting grinders play rake free where they would take money from fish, letting fish play less hands and in turn pay less rake in the long run.Notice casinos dont give blackjack players the option of paying x dollars a month and then playing as many hands they want with 0 pct house edge and they dont give sports betters the option to pay x dollars a month and get to bet vig free because they arent idiots and they don't have to.

Agree with you. No rake would make the game much softer.

Obv. I have holes. But that is not the point. The point is that the rake is turning a perfectly fine result into a losing result.

I think these are great thoughts, but I think the model is too static in example one and too expensive in model two.

Why do you think this is too static?

It pretty much decreases succesively the average rake costs per hand the more you play. It cant be more dynamic, I think.

this is what happens when you try to play lag on microstakes...(rakeback = 100%)

Poker Stars and Full Tilt are not going to move away from the Weighted Contributed model and nor should they. Any system that would involve making a daily, weekly or monthly payment as has been suggested will never be implemented. It draws too much attention to the actual rake itself which is not good for business. It's so much simpler and less conspicuous to have the money skimmed off the top as the hand plays out street to street.

In trying to look for and discuss possibilities for tweaking the rake i think folks have to understand that Stars and Tilt love the way rake works at the moment. That said there's a lot of wiggle room within the current paradigm. As many have pointed out the current system is both unfair and unsustainable. However Online Poker Rooms don't care about what's fair, only the bottom line. We have to accept this and understand it and work within these parameters.

The rake can be re-structured however, without hurting Stars or Tilt's bottom line. Maybe take a little less from the micros and low stakes and a little more from the mid and high stakes - redistribute. The initial loss to the mid and high stakes guys may well be offset by the increased number of players able to move up stakes and join those games, thus making them relatively softer...a good thing for all.

Who knows maybe if the rake was lowered it might lead to more people playing those games, more often and for longer. As we know the player pool does not merely consist of competent regs and incompetent fish there's all those guys in the middle who have watched training videos and learned a bit about the games and enjoy playing and know about the rake and don't play 10-24 tables 6-12 hours a day. We want everyone in the games, we don't want to turn anyone away or put anyone off.

I can only speak for myself here but when i started playing i never knew about rake, and as the years go by and the more i learn about poker, the Poker Sites, how they operate and how they apportion the rake, game by game and stake by stake the less i want to play and I'm older than most online players and I'm not that computer or internet savvy but i found out the same stuff most of you younger guys found out...so maybe it's okay to assume that there's a significant number of potential players in my demographic that are being turned off the game for one or more reasons the relatively high rake (for micro and low stakes, for PLO, for Split Pot games and for limit holdem) merely being one of many.

ive posted my chart at my blog with a few comments.

Same story as with pechkin.



my nick over there is the same as here.

For what it's worth I did the exact same thing and experiment and my graph also looked pretty much identical. It's one of the big things that led me to quitting PLO and going back to HEM. PLO is a game of small edges, yet the rake means you can't really afford to push small edges. It's absurd.

This. Also reduce the rake in PLO and FL games, and for the love of god, reduce the rake for low buy in SNGs. 15% rake and 0 rakeback for a 1.5$ player? This is ridiculous, and the main reason I'm never playing in Stars.

Compared to MTTs where rake is very easily beatable, in micro NLHE, in FLHE , PLO and micro SNGs the rake is breaking the game. For ****s sake. And the expences are ridiculously tiny.

Yes it is true that MTT rake is much better.

I have a 50% ROI on mtts and pay way less rake (I think like 20%).

this is true. However I believe rake must go as a concept. it can be used to collect the money. But if you have static rake what happens to

- 2 players of similar skill playing with each other for large amounts of hands
- the PLO problem where (lots of small edges need to be pushed)

^

thats my hem graph tho.

In the micros it's also a problem that the rake cap is relatively higher than what it is on the higher stakes.
nl10 has a rake cap of 15bb, and it's not reached until you hit a huge 300bb pot.
At nl100 the cap is 2,8bbs. You reach this cap fast which makes these pots cheaper percentage wise.

So imo, set the rake cap to 3bb for micro stakes.

15bb cap is a lot, yes.

Now, listen to this: at pokerstars.FR, the rake at 10NL is 6.5% and is capped at 30bb (3 euros) per pot at ring games (5 to 9 players). At 5NL it's 6.25% and 40bb (2 euros) where 3 or more people are dealt cards. How about that? It's like having no cap at all. That's highway robbery

we know french games are unbeatable.


i bet people are complaining about not enough fish in the game.... :-)

at the end pokerstars will win

Thats just ridiculous >.<

there are plenty of fish, but the rake still sucks when you figure how much more you could win if the rake structure was at least the same as at the .com site (which is still too much).

and for breakeven players and small winners obviously the effect is that they are turned into big losers by that rake, while the fish bust much faster. the fish well will dry up pretty soon

Poker sites don't care about restructuring rake simply because they know everyone who complain here will surely head to their tables and play just the same.

I'm a serious micro stakes player and it hurts to see how much money we lose simply because we don't play the stakes (or volume) required to reach higher VIP tiers and their rakeback benefits. Take a $1.50 SNG grinder's sharkscope and see how much he has paid in rake over his life compared to how much he actually profited - it's highly likely that he never got past SilverStar or equivalent and so never got any decent rakeback - and crap merchandise doesn't quite cut it as well.

I use to defend rake reduction (10% for tournaments is outrageous) and a better VIP/rakeback scheme for micro and low stakes players, like a permament "deposit bonus" that is limited to a few hundred dollars but refills every month for example, but without drawing much attention to it (like many obscure iPoker/Merge/Ongame rooms did in the past). That way casual/recreational players still won't notice how much rake they pay but also won't be dried up so fast, and the more serious players will feel good about playing more.

what stake is this? 10nl or 25nl?