archii a very pertinent article to read is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve

Also, I would not consider the 'economics' of rake changes in the sense of players going: "Oh wow. It's 10% cheaper to play. I'm going to play 10% more now!" As has been repeatedly observed the vast majority of players are completely ignorant of how much they pay to play. However - even in the short run there is an indirect sort of pseudo-supply/demand relationship going on in online poker.

The most obvious thing that stops people playing is they run out of money. A group of pre-rake breakeven players deposits 100bb at a game where they pay 10bb/100 in rake. They will last an average of 1000 hands. Drop the rake to 9bb/100 and they last an average of 1111 hands. Incidentally the profit margin is identical for the site. Of course it's nowhere near so simple. A group of -20bb/100 prerake losers playing in a game that's raked 10bb/100 go from lasting an average of 333 hands to an average of 344 hands under the same rake change - a substantial loss for the site. On the other hand a player who is a 9bb/100 pre-rake winner suddenly goes from losing his money to being able to play forever if he liked. In any case player volume absolutely will increase - that's not a question. The only question is how much. Of course the above calculations don't compensate for the fact that that losing players don't always just blow their roll - although it also doesn't compensate for additional deposits either. In any case both those issues start to get much more into the secondary benefits of profit model changes I was mentioning above.

The rake is way higher when you play live and most of the people still play it because (suprise,suprise!!!)- it is fun while for most of the recreational players online poker isn't.
Somehow almost none of you complain about the rake there.
It is like downward spiral the worse reg to fish ratio is the less fun they have and they quit so it makes it even worse for the fish that still play.
If your theories were true live poker would be literally dead but it is not moreover it is way more healthy than its online version.

I do aggree that especially on nano stakes the rake is too damn high (Ipoker or FTP takes like 1c from every 15c which is beyond absurd on micro stakes).

We had a case of a site with no rake ( if I recall correctly it was betsharks). At best they had like one table running. Simple thing people play where the dead money is and sites understand that so as long as there are recreational players regs will come.
Even now Pokerstars has the lowest rake and by far the best loyality system yet people still play on sites like 888. Why?? Because there is more fish playing.

The rake hasn't increased for a while but most of you see that your winrate is like 1/2 1/3 what it used to be while the rake stayed the same and you claim "sites are too damn greedy". It has been always like that.
The real problem is that there is less and less fish in the player pool and that's the real problem. Thats why you make less money than you used to.

Sure one of the reason it happened has been the rake however as live poker prove us over and over again the games can be sustainable even with high rake as long as fish enjoy playing. Thats what we should think about.

So what you are saying is plainly wrong.
The rake online is way higher than live.

As to your fish theory. If you are saying games are more beatable live than online because there are more fish you don't understand what makes a game beatable.

Again maybe read a few post in this thread and should become clear.

Poker games are always beatable so long as not every player plays the same exact way (since the game is not solved this is impossible unless we have only the same bot playing). As such every player wins a certain amount per hand. If that is lower than the rake than he is a loser player.

So to compare rake online vs live you have to compare

real winrate = avg win rate of winner (pre rake) - rake per hand

currently live this ratio is clearly positive and online this clearly negative.

More fish increase the winrate, so if you have a huge rake u also need crazy bad fish. Of course fish are always good for the game. Still the absence of fish is not the problem. As there will always be games that have less fish and u still need to make these games beatable. All poker games need to be beatable (at least in my book). As such the problem that needs to be tackled is rake.

So for me personally i play 2/51k live and 50nl online.

Live my ratio is (win:rake) 3:1 vs online it is about 1:10.

I have never seen anyone playing lower than 200nl online who as a better than 5:5 ratio.

I agree live is more fun, but I think a big reason why it has retained more fish is because even reg-fish probably play around 10k hands a year which means month/year-long winning-heaters are very common among poor players. Compare this to the 60k hands the same player would be dealt online and >99% of AVERAGE-SKILLED PLAYERS will lose over the same time frame. Whatever else is wrong with online poker, this can't be ignored.

Comparing the success of zero rake sites to raked sites is unfair because the not only has the marketing been non-existent and zero investment been put into any zero-rake sites but its also the other extreme of having no income whatsoever.

What TV channel or bus-stop advertised Betshark, Betraiser or WSEX? And now how many of your friends or family have heard of Pokerstars, Party Poker and 888? I'm not saying zero-rake is workable but it certainly has not been done properly yet.

Simply LOL. The rake taken from the pot is higer live than online, period. The reason why you make there way more money is because the average live player suck a ton. Even the fish are worse than online just they can't spot it because they play fewer hands for longer periods of time.
It is still 0 sum game with even higher rake (cap 5$ is pretty standard for live games, you give tips etc also). BTW there is almost no rewards system so forget about rakeback,fpps etc. So the rake really paid is probably at least 2x of what it is online.

There is the theory you believe (cause your ego don't let you sdmit that you suck at poker and thats why you are losing money online) and you simply ignore every fact I provide because it doesn't supoort the theory you have. Solid thought process Sir.

BTW take a look at least once on the high stakes tables at pretty much every site. High stakes rake is like 1bb at best but no game run without the mark thats the fact. There isn't any reg vs reg action there. There isn't any rake trap but they refuse the action vs other regs.
Regs don't play for the sense of competition we compete for the money that site also want. I know stories about many sites that started to offer high rakeback deals for the regs and got literally crushed by them and after at best year fish went buts so regs quit (cause rakeback<<<fish) and site end up losing 60-70% traffic (Boss Media,Enet)or closed the network (Entraction)
Game can't sustain itself. Poker is all about picking the dead money from fish in fact even the reg vs reg battles are the competition to get a better piece of the money fish provide ecosystem with.

You still create you ******ed theories (props Do it right for living in his own world), but the way sites work now (FTP,Party,Microgaming,Ipoker,Bodog,MErge,888) is that they try to give regs as little as they can. I can complain about something that I can't change or try to change what I do can.
There was already a thread about better ways to improve the poker ecology without segregating lobby as Party did. There were couple of solid ideas that sites could try to improve to make the recreational players feel not hunted as it is standard nowadays.

It isn't 2008 anymore, regs matter verry little to sites. We can either try to find solutions that are good for everyone or still complain about the rake that sites won't ever change because they don't see a reason to do.
They offer poker to profit if the profit wont satisfy them they will stop offering poker at all or will do what Party Poker/revolution did to kill people winrates in order to make more money or make recreational player losing less (so they will be able to gamble with it on betting/slots). Some of you just believe that sites owe you that money and poker profits but they don't.

I don't think live poker is more fun at all.

One of the reasons why live is more beatable however is because the pre-flop raise sizing is much higher, and the BB and SB usually agree to chop

sort of like an agreement to raise enough to cover the rake and to not play HU pots where the rake destroys any profit

If people would start opening to 5x or more online, you'd see more winners

Sure but sites first let regs play mmultiple tables then they allowed to use tools like holdem manager/table ninja/table scanner to let them improve fish hunting, Then they created volume based reward system (SNE,rakebacks) and suprise,suprise the system can't sustain itself.

If you highly support the influx of predators and you don't do anything to sustain the amount of meat what the result will be??? Suprise, suprise after couple of years the predators will start starving and complain how unfair the situation is because there is little or nothing to feed them

For years sites did everything to improve and retain as many regular players as they could which from the beggining was ******ed idea.
The reason there is so few recreational players left is because for many years no one cared about what they want and why they feel that online poker is not for them and thats the result we have now. It still can be changed but we need balanced system where both regs and recreational player matters but not the way it was for a long of the time where sites were giving as much as they could for regs and recreational got nothing.

We, pro players, are like hookers we want our clients to be happy. The business won't sustain itself if we are unable to give them fun. The problem is that recreational players don't think that online poker is fun anymore. However when you check the life scene,sites like zynga poker it is way better so it only proves that it is not about poker itself but it is about how the online poker runs. Thats something we can work on.

Correct. You win. Rake is higher live than online. Bravo.

However looking at rake on a per pot ratio is idiotic (IMHO). By that token rake at high stakes is huge and at micro stakes its low. In reality its the opposite. Rake at micros is huge and at high stakes non existent.

The topic is of this thread is rake for a sustainable ecosystem.

So I am assuming you think the rake today is perfect? I'd love to hear some constructive concept otherwise.

Again the opposite is true. Regs get all the rewards and fish get none.

Or do you u think super nova elite is a fish?

How would you construct a good VIP system?

[QUOTE=knircky;37764255]Again the opposite is true. Regs get all the rewards and fish get none.
[QUOTE]

Not really true.

The regs may get "more rewards" but its what theyve earned and compared to the amount of hands they have played most vip systems now are not very good for regs. However gargamel is spot on in saying that sites are trying to get rid of regs and give them the least possible.

Fair Play technology on Rev., getting rid of rakeback on Merge, getting rid of high stakes on Merge, Lowering rakeback on FTP, annon. players on Bovada, and the list goes on and on. These are all ways of trying to lower regs winrates/keep the fishes money in play longer.

And live games are almost not even compareable to online. My online winrate is astronomically bigger than live. (live is too small a sample to really compare though)

I saw it here mentioned like at least once that it shouldn't be rake based/volume based at all.
Just as an example what would you preffer:
-fish sit, loose like 60$ while raking 50$ overall and 25$ go to a site and rest is distributed equally among the players that played that table.
-system where recreational player gets more cause we don't want to risk him quitting from playing

If it was up to me all of the money from rake would go to fish (or at least the players part cause doubt that sites would resign from their money). I'd rather get no reward but have the fish happy with the chance of him/her coming back.

The problem is that for a long time regs were getting way too much and it is still the case on many sites. Sites started to cut the rewards the problem is that they don't spend that money on avertaising etc to get the money they simply try to protect their profits by taking bigger part of the pie but it isn't sustainable same as "reward regs heavily" system.


So as an example now 60% of the rake generated go to sites (and affiliates) and 40% to players. The problem is that from the part that go to players recreationals get maybe like 10-15%. So if was up to me site (and affs) would get like 50% of rake at best and from the 50% left to distribute among the player 60-70% would go to attract and keep existing recreational players happy. So regs would get way less for a while same for sites but overall the ecology of the system would have some future cause way more money would go to get the dead money into the system.
(BTW thats are just my estimation duuno how the exact % look nowadays, just tried to show that current system where the money from rake is distributed between sites and regs and fish gets nothing isn't sustainable).

If you see my previous post I am giving "fish" 100% rake back and regs hardly anything unless they generate action or start tables etc.

Also compared a few peoples database and my rake structure seems to be the lowest out of any popular site.

For anyone who missed the test sessions I will be doing more over the coming weeks and the plan to launch is 15th of April (mainly because I am on holiday in France for a week before the 15th)

sounds interesting but i dont understand it quite.

this is exactly what i would do as well.


Sites give all the rewards to grinders today who tend to be winners .

lol. If you open to 5x at micro stakes you will likely see a slightly lower amount of flops and pay more in rake when you do see a flop. $4nl through $25nl you will not hit a rake cap of $3 if two full stack players are all-in.

In your dream world of $500nl live poker, yes raising to 5x will hit the rake cap earlier. Basically, your point is not relevant to micro-small stakes online poker.

Compare the rake at a 1/2NL online table and compare the rake at a 1/2NL live game. Online <<< live. Factor in rakeback at the online table and ****ty comps at the live table and the discrepancy is even larger.

If you want to get a valid argument against his point, you should state that you believe the rake is too high at micro/small stakes.

Comparing your personal winnings:rake live at decent sized stakes (I'm assuming 1/2NL) to your winnings:rake ratio at micro stakes is not good. Live has a better ratio because of three main things. First, you are playing bigger stakes and hit the rake cap on big pots. Two, you're not winning a lot of small pots with cbets; your edge is coming from idiots stacking off with A2 on Axxxx board. Finally, the games are easier. Online players NEVER complained about the rake when the games were soft. Similar to how you incorrect perceive live rake to be lower/acceptable.

As mentioned by somebody else, online poker is only as sustainable as fish willing to part ways with their money.

Yes suited KX and through any two is quite common without odds oop live, online these days you are lucky if you find one player playing that loose on your table. Live you will usually have 2 through 4 players that loose at a typical 1/2 NL table.

This is definitely declining considering the fish just get eaten alive online. They can't even play small considering how many good players are at the lowest levels as well. Maybe with a rake reduction the better players can move up and fish can live a little. Or maybe the future is reg vs reg.

without a doubt if they are going to restructure the RB programs to be casual player/fish friendly and kill the regs rewards systems they should be also lowering the overall rake also. The rewards for everyone having even just 25% lower rake would be immense and would make much more winning players and if they were able to do something like a 50% cut on rake in general you would see the games flourishing in a quick time frame. MANY more players would be able to be winning and you would be receiving much more regulars on the site in time. This would even be turning a good amount of casual BE .players into regulars. I just don't see how they can't realize this.

Can it be really different if most sitees let the regs mulitply by x amount?? So fish play 1-2 seats and average reg around 12. There are people now on pokerstars that play 30 tables which is ridiculous.

Thats like a downward spiral. There is less fish so regs to increase their profits play more tables and at the end the ratio is even worse and the profit are worse.

So let say that pokerstars decrease the table cap to like 9. You would be amazed how much better the games would be. Additionally regs wold play looser if they would play fewer tables so fish would get more action and maybe there would be some chat going. Simple solution and we would have way better enviroment.

Perhaps a system that viewed muti-tabling as a privilege, not a right, would be effective. Say after your first table, you're welcome to join as many other tables as you like that have empty seats, but if someone who is as yet not playing at ANY tables joins the waiting list for one of your auxiliary tables, they get your seat, i.e. you get booted when the big blind comes around. There could be an option that you then automatically get moved to another table with open seats. Players already active at one or more tables could still join waiting lists, but would not show up in the lobby list and any no-tables-as-yet player who joined the list would immediately jump ahead of them.

I think that it would still be possible for a player to play as many tables/get as much volume in as they do presently, but now in effect recreationals would have priority when it comes to quickly getting a seat at a table of their choice, while high volume players would be forced to either cut down on volume or play in tougher games on average, and the ability to table select would be impaired but not removed entirely.

In addition it should be possible for a table to clone itself, i.e. if every player wants to spawn an additional table with the same line-up, they can do so.

about mass multitablers wrecking the game... why not just limit the time bank (esp preflop) so 24 tabling is not possible. having a 2 minute total time bank that you need to push a button to activate which is topped up ever x amount of time

i dont think shorten the timebank is the solution.. maybe for NLHE but there are games which are more complex and take more time to evaluate hands/boards/villains ranges...

yeah I agree with this, the biggest problem is at 100nl and 200nl where you get a lot of pots that are raked the maximum but the pots really aren't big enough to avoid taking a big rake hit

I'm not sure if I'm being biased or not due to my results at that level, but I started finding those levels to be unplayable, with 4 guys at a 6max table playing too tight to ever hope to cover the rake

one of the problems is that 100BBs is an awkward stack size where it's not really profitable to float two streets or make speculative bluffs, I'd like to see .5/1 play 300-500BBs deep so that you have enough room to float one or two streets and can bet higher to cover the rake

the other thing we might have to live with is the fact that fish will always quit playing when the discover they don't win, so poker might just not be a sustainable game, all that has to happen is people realize they are losing players and quit, which is what they are supposed to do