Lol'd so hard

Over a beer a site employee told me at 1/2 95% of deposits went to rake. This was a few years ago and I don't know of any way to confirm.

This.

Extremely insightful post,coming from a LIVE poker endboss.
You guys can run your circles over and over,but they exist to take as much of everyone's money as they can.Their one and only concern is that how much it could possibly be?Maximum.

Of course they need the "fake pros",cause it keeps the DREAM alive.
The powerball also has winners,so just go ahead,dream on...

Bit ironical that the guys who are tricked the most in this is the crew,who should be the smartest,the regulars.
The recs mostly get out cheaply,they lose their little moneys anyway.
The "poker dream" is sold to the regs.
Well,there is Ronaldo,CR7,Neymar...etc but they are to target the $20 a month guys,not the aspiring pros.

Has anyone considered complaining to the gaming commission that PS is licensed with?

What does a commission do other than take money for issuing a licence to operate if they cannot mediate such disputes?

fyp for ya.

I'm not well versed on the SN/SNE fiasco, but it appears Pokerstars has done nothing illegal, and therefore there isn't any legal re-course.

It'd be awesome if Pokerstars lost a lawsuit for like 4 times the original amount owed to players.

The "Hoover free flights promotion" ended up in court - and that was just a promotional promise that wasn't delivered on - seems very similar to me..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover...ghts_promotion

Fair enough - however my gut feel is that the impact of survivorship bias would be substantially smaller than the impact of picking winning players!

@ Ike, Dan, ansky:

In your own personal opinion, as a result of the recent events, which will have the bigger (positive / negative) impact on

a) pokerstars revenues (longterm / shortterm) and
b) the overall state of online poker on a global scale in both longterm as well as shortterm (considering that PS's de facto monopoly is likely going to resonate globally):

1) the (permanent?) loss (of trust) from existing poker account holders
2) new sign-ups

Also, what is your own personal opinion with regards to which of hose scenarios seems more/less important to Pokerstars management, the average Pokertars employee and the average Pokerstars player?

Do you think that the global trend towards regulated ( and segregated) online markets plays a role in PS strategy regarding their shortterm / longterm revenue revenue schemes?

PS: micro fish rec/ref with ambitions to actually learn the ontricacies of the game speaking here.

But is ps not a site that gives you the opportunity to play poker if you choose/want to do so, and you have a choice if you want to pay the rake in the game you choose to play?, and if you do not you can leave, where is it written or said that ps is there to provide people an income?.

Is ps or any other poker site there to play poker recreationally/for fun or for people to make a living? or if you choose/are good enough also can! make a living.

And i guess that ps thinks it can make more money by letting recs play each other and that too much regs/pro's are not making them enough money and/or chasing the recs away or make recs loose their money so fast they just give up, because nobody likes to play against players that they have no chance of winning against in any game that is played for money if all they want is just play some poker for fun sometimes and not planning to make a living out of it, right?

And yet here are people talking like it is a duty of ps for them to make a living on their site if you deposit a 100$ on ps and after you played you have 200$ then you made a 100$ right? despite what rake you paid when you were playing, and if you can not win enough to make a living because of the rake and, after all, other extra's/bonuses are you then not just not good enough to be playing poker for a living?.

Hey I don't blame anyone for protesting against the changes, but the cold facts are that ps can do what they want within the laws and or regulations there are, and if they think they can make more money by changing their rules and/or raising their fee for letting people play on their site, then people have a choice to not play there anymore, but the cold hard facts are Amaya bought ps to make money and they think they can make more by these changes so time will tell if they are right.

lol petjax, not exactly the brightest chap

its shady of pokerstars to steal money of se and sne but it also seems like a bunch of pros crying about pokerstars making more money at there expense and there jeslous of this.guess what there a business if u cant beat the rake move down and make a living playin smaller r move site and shock horror other sites dont have decent rb.no one is force yous to play there.if they banned huds half u guys would be playin this big anyway.

I didn't say anything about players having a right to make a living etc. My point was that the site's T&C and actions have to be reasonable/fair. They can't enforce unreasonable stuff by simply pointing to unfair terms.

I'm not sure whether you're just trolling at this stage but, just in case not, here's an example of a (UK) ruling to illustrate the point.
http://www.lexology.com/library/deta...7-5f9669591a0a

http://www.nsdpoker.com/2011/03/nlhe_6m_pros/

Is that it?

You said you made up the numbers, but they alarmed me so I wanted to see if that was anywhere close to reality.. thankfully it isn't

Those who win at 4bb (not PTBB) over 250k hands only have a 1.3% chance of losing.

It is wrong for both Stars and the players to look at the share of deposits kept as rake and winnings because the figure is meaningless for running a poker site or choosing to be a player.

In any game in which at least 1 'reg' chooses to play (i.e. the rake is not too high to prevent a game running), the subsequent winners' win-rates are set primarily by how many regs choose to sit at a table, which is set by their our choices about their hourly rates.

In the case where regs do not value their time very highly, win-rates will drop and rake as a share of deposits increases, without the poker site making any changes.

If VIP-subsidies are removed, rake as a share of winnings (if you can find any practical, unbiased way to measure it) will be reduced at the new equilibrium. Banning HUDs, removing stacking/tiling functions, table caps could all help with this.

Additionally, and obviously, if the max-NPV 'rake-share' for the company (if the company controlled it) doesn't suit some pros, they'd still be right to go ahead with it.

-------

I really like the idea of finding a way to set rewards equal to the VIP level of the lowest ranked player. It elegantly solves a lot of problems, and makes the idea of varying rake by number of players mostly redundant.

I disagree wholly with the bolded part of your post.

Rake+fees = gross revenue.

Deposit costs = cost of funds

Based on a few years of running a poker business, I would suggest that the figure tells a great deal about gross revenue and the cost of funds, (both deposit transactions costs and allocation of marketing spend)

For example, when rec deposits get blown out in 15 minutes, there is very little rake generated versus the cost of getting those deposits into the poker site, which is an operating expense. Unless a site can generate gross revenue to cover the cost of attracting deposits, the model will fail. FWIW, if the rec funds blown out get churned a bit among more skilled players, then the negative metric of a blowout is less important. The figure you denigrate accounts for both the depositing player's rake and the churned rake generated thereafter, it is a good proxy for a quick look over time.

FWIW, one reason I like seeing bitcoin in the poker model is that the lowered cost of deposit funds as an operating expense reduces some friction between the interests of both a site and winning cashout players.

No, post I'm thinking of was on 2+2 and dates back to at least 2008, possibly earlier. And may also have been examining LHE rather than NL, since that used to be a thing (ask your parents). The particular #'s aren't that important; point was simply that what most people THINK is the "long run" (whether 12 calendar months, 100K hands, whatever) is actually laughably short-term.

Amaya had a meeting with players they can say "We had a meeting with players." So, mission accomplished from their end.

Wow this would be much higher than my estimate of about 80% at that level.

I don't think that has changed much over time tbh.

I agree. Talal doesn't post as often as some others may, but he is one of the handful of posters that are extremely well informed and on the ball.

I think it's probably quite easy to confirm, or otherwise. I will make a start...

With regards, to the rake >> winnings hypothesis: Despite Negreanu's comment about my perception of the rake:winnings split...

“David [Baazov] loved the idea of me facilitating meetings with the players. It won’t necessarily be the same guys. One of the people they specifically wanted to speak to was MeleaB. He posted a lot of information on his perception of the numbers and the truth. If he had been there, he would have seen how far off the numbers were regarding how he thought the pie was divvied up between players and the company.”


...I don't believe I've ever been specific in any of my posts regarding precisely how "the pie was divvied up between players and the company", but certainly for small stakes and below- albeit only performing very rough mental calculations- I would imagine in excess of 90% goes to rake for the small stakes games, and I would imagine that well over 95% goes to rake for the micro-stakes games. It should however be fairly easy for us to estimate given access to the top winnings' winrates in those games and by making a few assumptions.

The following example uses very quick and rough assumptions that may or may not be accurate. Others can probably improve upon these assumptions and reach a closer estimate. The purpose is just to show how I think a rough answer can be arrived at.

Here are the top long-term winners in the NL100 FR games that I play:



The average WR for the Top 20 players is 3.6bb/100 in a game where the effective rake is close to 3bb/100 (if I'm not mistaken.) So, for the biggest winners in these games, effective rake is ~= winnings (actual rake > winnings) and for the vast majority of winning players, effective rake >> winnings.

The vast majority of winners (post RB) are between 0 and 1bb/100 winners (between 100%/0% and 75%/25% split), so taking all the winnings as a whole the rake:winnings split is possibly close to 80%/20% [I think it's accurate to say that the marginal winning players far outweigh the biggest winners] in favour of effective rake and we haven't even started talking about losing players yet. If we assume losing players as a whole (100% rake, 0% winnings) play equal volume as the group of winning players (just a rough guess for the ease of the calculation) then we get a 90%/10% split in effective rake/winnings.

Again, I stress I may be mistaken somewhere and people are free to correct me, or revise the calculation, but this has long been my intuitive belief of the breakdown at these stakes without having performed anything other than quick mental arithmetic. If anything though, I think I'm perhaps being conservative saying 90% of depositors' money goes to rake at this particular stake.

Now all of that is for the relatively lowest raked small stakes (and below) games. Relative rake is far higher at the micro-stake games so I think it's safe to say the rake:winnings ratio is even higher in those games.

So, if we wanted to figure out a close approximation as to how much of depositors money was going to rake/winnings in cash games across the site, then I think all we would need is:

*Average WR for winning players for each game

*Effective Rake paid for each game

*Percentage of volume played by winning players:losing players for each game

*Weighted average ($) between each game type

Of course the rake:winnings ratio is going to decrease the higher up in stakes that we go, and it may be quite different at the highest stakes. (I have no numbers to hand but some high stakes players, or anyone wishing to spend a few minutes researching, should have a good idea of the split.) By eliminating/severely reducing high stakes volume, the overall rake:winnings ratio across the site is going to increase (possibly by a significant amount if sufficient money is being won at those limits) so it's easy to see how, say, a [possibly short-sighted] management team might want to make those changes.

If these numbers are anywhere close to being accurate, with Amaya pocketing 90%+ of net depositors' money, then it's not too hard to see why the current eco-system may be "unsustainable", as they claim. And I don't think their solution of sucking up every last puddle is going to improve things.

That's a really important point that I've made in a number of posts too. A TOS isn't the last word in how a site is allowed to operate. Regardless of what players agree to in a TOS, what a site actually can do is going to be trumped by any laws, regulations or court rulings that exists that the business is obligated to operate under.

PokerStars constantly makes statements that make players feel that their TOS is the final word, but it simply isn't.

MealaB - do you have a "cigarette packet" calculated view (thats a good thing imo) on what the volumes for 2016 will be for most 100FR & 200FR players? decrease, increase, stay stable?

I personally feel very strongly that overal volume and gross revenue are linked at the hip, I whole heatedly do not believe they have considered that <platinum star volumes in 2016 are going to radically decrease because of the top tier loyalty program adjustments and the knock on impact this has on existing total rake levels, or fake rake if you will for 2016 (that they expected to sustain but in reality their changes craft a fake rake element to their historic data)

Ansky, DoubleD, Ike - in the meeting... did they allude to the fact that they have considered this? and this was something they wanted?

I don't think they've factored in how hard the volume is going to fall. ie pseudo rake will **** with their gross revenue? If so, did they indicate they wanted this? which would be quite commendable if that was the case. in a wierd kinda way. I just hope they've modelled this with a really strong degree of forecast accuracy or I think we see some panic station business decisions coming our way in the future.

I've determined that when one finds themselves writing something like this, it's pointless to continue whether the other party is trolling or not.

Either that or they did the simple thing of working out that new depositors don't redeposit.

In this thread the one thing people have not bigged up was that the three delegates seeing the data essentially accept that today poker s unsustainable. They don't agree with all the changes made but they accept the basic premise that significant change is needed to have a sustainable poker ecosystem.


This was arly in the OP, it relates to a very long and quite good thread on that subject but for some reason people have chosen to ignore the main point.

Under the old VIP system online poker is unsustainable. Tweaking VIP may not solve the problem but the main point that all have ignored is that as was is unsustainable.