Skill levels and tools are improving, this is just a shift towards a more advanced game which is still sustainable, could even improve pokers chances of being accepted as a sport

Good luck finding a roulette table without a double zero in BC.

Yep, multiaccounting makes this unfeasable. I like the idea of rewarding disproportionatley, maybe in the form of losing/BE players getting easily attainable bonuses and promotions that equate to paying 1bb/100, and increase as player profits increase. Like PartyPokers marketing but giving far more value back to the BE players.

If regs complain this will eat their profits, they are being as short-sighted as the pokersites, look at the difference in graphs from the op between 1bb variance and 7bb variance, and thats for BE players! Imagine how much better off the health of the games would be, the number of bad players continuing to play year in year out instead of being skinned. Not only would the future of online poker be far more secure but you're winrates may actually improve

play online

This will never happen. Why? Because it will destroy the poker ecosystem completely. At the moment, people play all levels of rake, from a few cents per month (very occasional players at NL2/ NL5/ $1 SNGs) to thousands of dollars per month (SNEs). Effectively, this proposal would make occasional/ low limit players pay more, while SNEs pay massively less. It's like adjusting RB to 99% for SNEs, while increasing rake heavily for most bronzestars.

It's even possible to work out what the amount per month would be. For 888, they would need to set a fee of $21 per month to break even against now:

http://www.cardplayer.com/poker-news...ent-in-q3-2012

For Stars it would likely be much higher due to the larger games which run there.

But that doesn't allow for changes in composition. Occasional players who play less often would have very strong incentives to quit, as their rake would be >100%. This would decrease the size of the pool of players, meaning that fees would need to go up and only heavier grinders would be left, etc. You have a problem of adverse selection- for this model to work, you need some people who currently pay less under the rake model to go there, but they have no incentives to do so. Unless you give them some form of fee reductions, moving it closer to a rake-style model...

The problem will be exacerbated by two things. Firstly, you've made an almost invisible payment (rake) highly visible (monthly charge). Behavioural economics says that people won't like this. Secondly, the customers who you are now charging more to are the most marginal customers who are most likely to leave anyway (low volume players, as discussed above, get destroyed by regs).

Effectively, you've come up with a scheme which economists might term "inverse Ramsey pricing". This mythical room would be full of grinders initially, and pretty soon would have tumbleweed blowing through it as there would be no fish to support the base of the ecosystem.

For fish, really, rake isn't a big problem. The problem is regs. 10bb/ 100 rake is nothing when a fish is losing 100bb/100 or worse: even of players with 50+ hands against me this year (3120), almost exactly 10% (311) are -100bb/100 or lower. These are the fish, and the rake doesn't matter to them: it's only a tenth of their losses (even if you assume that rake is actually paid by all players, rather than the truth that it's only paid by the pot winners). The rake is most significant for bad regs who are in the -5 to +5bb/100 range pre-rake; and I'm not sure why poker sites should adopt a radically different business model to help them?

The answer to fish getting torn apart by regs is stuff like beginners' tables (eg, tables that no-one at PS silverstar/ FTP gold or higher can play at) and greater restrictions on multitabling. But I'm not sure that's a very happy message for lots of 2+2ers.

Lowering the percentage rake is obviously an idea I would love.

Aside from that though, one of the big problems mentioned ITT is that the micros have so much more rake taken out of them compared to midstakes. Why not just lower the amount of rake taken out of the micros? Either by reducing the percentage, or lowering the maximum taken, so that it is more proportional to mid stakes (after all, the main reason there is less rake as a percentage of winnings as you move up in stakes is because there is a cap. ie at 400nl, a 60$ pot is the biggest amount raked, anything above that is left unraked. But at 25nl, there are rarely pots above that, so there are almost no pots that have non-raked money in it, so lower the cap at 25nl to $.75 of rake or whatever would keep it more inline with what is taken at midstakes as a percentage.

The games are dying because there are no fish. The fact that mediocre regs wont play me has nothing to do with rake, they wouldn't play me rake-free. If a fish showed up they'd all snap-sit in, and they'd all crush the fish. The skill distribution is not normal, its polarized, and that also has nothing to do with rake.

to sustain the games you have to sustain the dead money, and you can help do that with lower rake but you can also do that by raising std dev, and thats what the sites are choosing to do - not surprisingly, since that doesnt affect their bottom line nearly as directly. But, it affects yours, and thats what you are mad about.

edit: and they don't need you but you need them, so theres not much you can do about it. the idea of 'sit out protests' will never work because each additional winner that joins the protest gives additional incentive for some mediocre reg to sit in. prisoners dilemma again.

OP's intentions are entirely self serving. He doesn't care about a "sustainable poker ecosystem". He simply wants to win more money.

The fish don't pay all that much in rake, since in general they play far fewer hands than the winning grinders do. Reducing rake doesn't make the fish's money last much longer, but just means that the winning grinders get to keep more of it and the sites less. And the sites don't really care if some of the winning mass tabling grinders get pissed off and leave.

below is the text from my blog to make it more visible. its blogpost and my nick.


All right, I wanted to add a few charts.

First off a nice guy from 2+2 simply sent me his database. It is important to understand that the data in my DB contains:

- Hands I have bought. most of the 50NL+ data comes from that source
- Hands I have received from a user on 2+2. All of the stakes smaller than 50nl comes from that source
- 50 NL data I played myself

I think this is relevant because the data 1 user sees vs the data dataminer collects will be different in that data from the data miner will be more broad.

Another thing to note is that the Nr. of hands is higher than Nr. of hands I actually imported. The data you see is aggregated user data. I imported data into poker tracker 3 (takes a few days) and then exported the user data into a different tool that lets me run data better and do my own calculations.
So one hand that I import can potentially be seen by 9 users and thus get me a hand count of up to 9.







So this is the overview.

Lets look at a two questions:

1. How many winners?

There is no simple answer to that. In fact I don't think I can answer that question unless I had all the data available to me. But I can show you what my data says;




The above chart shows all players in my DB ( I certainly dont have all their data)

The games must be easy to beat. But the avg hands per player is very low (180) and over that sample its pretty much luck to win or lose. Im not sure if the fact that I have 80k players will even it out or not. To really answer the question we would have to look at all the data (which is impossible unless you are a site). However this is in line with what others report.







The above 3 charts show data for players that have played more than 2k hands. You can see that less than 1% of the players I have fit into this category. You can also see in thes chart how many players lose because of the rake and that in a natural game 70% of players actually would win.

2. How much is raked vs won

So now lets look at how much money are people actually taking home.

The easiest way to understand this as a %-tage:







This is the amount of money transfered by the poker hands in my DB





To me this is the most essential chart about the poker economy. It shows the true size of the economy (well in my case the hands I have imported) and it shows where the money goes. It was really eye openeing to me and explains why the rakes in different games can actually so different without being a problem. I was really surprised when I played in Macau and I saw all the pros from EU sitting there. I could not imagine that the rake (5 times as high as in the US) could be beatable. But it is. The reason is the same for Macau compared to Vegas as 50NL compared to 4NL. Simply: the games at 4NL and in Macau are easier.



I still think the rake is too high at 4NL, but at 50NL its a big problem.
However changing the rake a little (like stars did last year) is not going to be a solution. I am sure that this chart would have looked much greener in 2006. So it wasn't a problem back then. If we change the rake today we have the same problem tomorrow. The way we rake is a structural problem that needs to be solved.

What could we do to have a system that workes well for 2006, 2012 and forever in the future.

I think there is a simple answer. Stop raking hands and rake the money transfer. Have sites keep a %-take of the money that is transfered and make that more even across the levels. We could still rake hands to collect the money not as radically so long as we make sure that the balance overall is not broken (i.e. via regulation).

Now lets look at the 2k winners above. Over 2k hands already 20% of players become losers due to the rake alone. Those are the small winners. Think about turning these from losers to winners. That would make way more loyal customers. It would broaden the economy. If we could then also prevent rake abuse we should get a very healthy and growing economy. Think about the share of winners that the rake will turn to losers when we play 50k+ hands.

I think this is something that we as players need to focus on. We need to demand two things:

1. the right to play
2. the right to a fair market

When I look at regulation it is very important to me that part two of this equation is thought of as well. I hope I can make some of you aware of this as well.

+1

When we make the game sustainable the regs dont have to worry about their winrate. Sustainable means lots of fish and fun for everyone, sharks and fish.

@ knirky, interesting read but your winners vs loser graphs are way off. You do realize over small samples per player the results are inaccurate. The true long term winners at each stake is way smaller than you have showing.

I would like to give them the option of sitting at a table where no one is allowed to sit at another table at the same time.

this.

And this is the most ridiculous thing i've ever read

You can't charge someone more rake because they're good at poker, if you keep going down this path we all end up breaking even, can't tell if your trolling or just delusional.

its very hard to get an accurate number because there is a survivorship bias. although the more hands a losing player plays the likelier he is to be losing, the bigger sample you have on someone the likelier he is to be a winner. I suspect you would see similar numbers over a large sample. The real number would be a statistical challenge to back out, you would have to estimate actual LT lossrates for players with small samples and extrapolate, and your results would be very noisy.

They have that on 888 (the Pokercam tables)

this is absolutly gross.

what about nl100 and nl200 ?

Saying recreational players don't pay as much rake as grinders is obv true. Thanks for stating the obvious . But saying the fishes money wouldn't last longer if there was a major rake reduction is untrue. You are vastly underestimating the impact rake has on the poker economy specifically at low stakes/ micros.

Pokerstars is basically a broker. They bring all sorts of different people together to play a game. Poker stars charges a transaction fee for each hand played of each game. They deal millions and millions of hands every month and the transaction fee % compared to the stakes most average people play (low/micros) is absurdly high. They money that would otherwise go into players pockets, goes into poker stars. Players don't ever get that money back. It's gone. Think about it. Thank about all the millions of hands they deal and the % they get from each of those hands.

Poker sites like poker stars needs regulars. With out regulars they don't have a poker game. Right now, the situation is most regulars just eat it, they bitch and moan but they keep playing, cuz what else are they going to do? The thing is, REGULARS FAIL TO REALIZE THAT THEY HAVE THE POWER, not the poker sites. The moment regulars begin to realize they have bargaining chips vs the sites, then we will see change. We are paying the most rake, we are keeping their lights on, they depend on us, without us, they are nothing.

I think it's time for more than just a site wide sit out in protest of rake/ bonus changes. I admire what the PPA has tried to do for poker legislation in the US, but I think their efforts would be best served to negotiate with poker sites regarding bonuses and rake. A disgruntled grinder can simply be dismissed by a poker site. It would be extremely hard for a site like poker stars to dismiss the PPA. People in large numbers works.

edit: on my phone, sorry for my grammar

So, form a union of poker players for collective bargaining purposes?

Don't have enough data. I need a few hundred hands at least.

I actually bought most of the data just cuz I was curious. And it was quite expensive so I only did it for two levels. 50nl and 1knl. The other data is from a 2+2 member.

signed

that is grotesk to say, think about all the things pokerstars has done for the community.

Do i think the lower stakes are overraked? yes i do but i cant go and ask them to take the money out of their pocket and put it in mine. Thats not how businesses work its just not going to happen.

nice thread. subbed. Lower the goddamn rake.

You can lower the rake OR up the min buyin on 100bb and remove cap games. This ss/ratholing crap is a joke. All the money is going to the operators before anyone even has a chance to win at these stakes. It's fundamentally flawed but not a lot we can do as the operators and russians love it.

The sense of entitlement is strong in this thread.

The entitlement is valid and logical. Poker needs to be a game where long term winning is easily possible otherwise the game we love is lost and grouped with slot machines as just another way to gamble.