Quote:
Originally Posted by Mason Malmuth
4. At the next tier, but still small stakes, raise the rake.
I'd agree with this if poker rooms took the moral obligation to persistently redistribute a substantial part of that rake via promos aimed at casual players, e.g. Stars' CardHunt at NL10+.
However, it looks like Stars has decided not to make such promos permanent, but instead, rotate 'new' NLHE variants that only took a few hours to design, i.e. Split and Showtime. I feel that not enough R&D was invested into them, unlike Spin & Go Max and (to some extent) Power Up (though the latter doesn't have as much power to retain casual customers because of its complexity and slowness - now, the $15 games are barely running, the $15 regs often have to move down to $7 even at peak hours just to get a game).
The most recent creation of Stars' 'genius' researchers is Spin & Goal, which took quite a lot of programming because of the new mechanism of awarding free bets as prizes, which doesn't even work in all jurisdictions because sports betting is unavailable in some of them (incl. Russia), and which apparently caused a crash of the poker servers on the day of deployment (June 1).
I don't think Stars' researchers are industrious enough to be paid so much. Sadly, this seems the general state of the poker industry in general, not just Stars.
More rake is better when it's efficiently invested into promos, talented researchers and, importantly, accurate programmers (the amount of spelling errors in the names of variables that I saw in Stars' log files made me cringe), but not when the surplus is largely pocketed by the poker room, like by Stars after the deployment of Power Up.
I have some hope that RunItOnce Poker will be reinvesting the collected rake more efficiently.