Completely agree. Everybody has been whining that online poker is dying out and it clearly is if it is your main source of income. The reason why poker boomed in first place is because it was mainstream and cool, but the longer you do something the more normal and boring it becomes plus the fact that players just got much better too. Clearly pokerstars as a brand can leverage their position by having such a great poker reputation

Poker is not meant to be a job, it was a good opportunity to make money for a while and it still is quite okay for a small group of players, but as a whole poker should be clearly taken as a hobby because no pokersite or live casino owes or has to guarantee you anything. If they want they can up the rake or shut down the game completely. They are in it to make money not to please you.

The house always wins, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are taking the steps to maximise their profits.

If a reg plays 100k hands at zoom and breaks even to rake then he quits and they lose a customer forever. If that player wins then he potentially moves up in stakes, rakes more and has an incentive to play for the next 10 years.

If a recreational player plays cash games and losses to stiff competition and rake then his playing experience is absolutely miserable. He then starts playing Pokemon Go instead. Again the same result happens. Stars losses a customer.

Coca Cola could start charging $2 for a can of coke tomorrow if they wanted to. It's there right to do so. But, they don't because they know that the rise in price will not compensate for the decline in demand.

Finally we got somebody who can enlighten us on what activities were meant to be a job and which werent. Great!

With the amount of people crying about it getting harder and harder to be a pro on these sites, are you quite certain that the rec players future is really going to be an experience like the one you describe? And like I mentioned, poker is a gateway to the casino and sports. They actually don't want the poker player sitting at the tables all that long. In a perfect world the GUI and marketing entice them to slide on over to make a wager or play some blackjack as soon as possible. Those changes will continue to evolve over the next few years.

yes they do maximise their profits ... everybody acting the "old PS" was some sort of charity, is just delusional.

your examples also show, you don't have any clue what you're talking about. a coke for $2 per can (to a reseller) isn't the sweet spot for them, so it wouldn't maximise their profit. they could also sell for a few cents and be just above break even and would sell tons of this sugar crap, but this wouldn't be the sweet spot for them either.

your poker examples also aren't any good. if you grind zoom break even, you're not a winner, end of story. sure less rake would technically make you a winner, but weaker opponents would also make you a winner. so basically you blame the poker room and other players, that you aren't a winner. though luck!

you also imply, that a 'regular' is a winner. so we have to think about what money he brings out of the system, not what rake he generates. all the mass grinders claiming 'i paid XXXX in rake' bend the truth, b/c if they are net winners, this money came from other players (net depositors)

and yes, recreational players lose their interest, if they feel they are the target. and this is one of the reasons, why every poker room - btw the whole rec player model isn't new and everyone surprised that PS finally jumped on that wagon must have been living under a rock or in a "i play only on PS and will grind forever" fantasy bubble - changed a lot of stuff.

bottom line is, you don't need any theories about how rake influences each player individually. if you have less money coming in, you try to prevent, that 'too much money' is brought out of the system. i can't name any poker room or network, that didn't improve their poker ecosystem (aka the money they make) in the last 4 years, in a way, that didn't had some negative affect for regs


thing is, if you want to be a professional (online) poker player, you need to think like a freelancer

- how saturated is the market
- how long will their be enough money to be made
- how many people do the same job, for less money
- what alternatives do i have

just to name a few questions every aspiring grinder should answer, but most never did

and basically online poker was way too good, to last forever. when the american fish poured money in, way too many people went pro. obviously black friday accelerated things, but a boom is always just for a limited time, so a decline in interest (and therefore deposits) was inexorably anyway. so DuumaPomm has a point and rafiki made some very good arguments about poker as a profession as well.

There was something from OPR in the PokerScout news feed today on all the reasons cash games are in a decline - the article basically covered all the stuff that's already been mentioned in this thread already, but they also had a long-term cash game traffic graph, so that part was new ...

http://www.onlinepokerreport.com/215...ic-pokerstars/




They've had quite a few cash game promos this year too ...

(no mention of how this decline compares to other sites)


PS. Have a nice weekend everybody!

And you too!

An interesting article. There is a comparison with the rest of the poker CASH GAME industry as a whole:

• I think the main problem might be that new depositor cash game players are not being retained to re-deposit for cash games despite the cash game promotions. I fear this is because too many microstakes grinders are still at PokerStars nitting up the games. Perhaps even more emphasis on the rec players is required somehow. Along the lines of what Unibet is doing perhaps.

One table max would fix it...

Can anyone link to the site with Spin data? I couldn't find it on google. I'm remembering a post from about 6 months ago where someone linked to a site with data that with a few simple calculations indicated Spins were likely 3-5% of PS total revenue. At the beginning, assuming they had never grown, that would have put them at maybe 10% of tournament revenue. If that's true the idea that cash games declined 9% in 2014 solely due to spins is to say that all spin traffic was cannibalized cash traffic. That's not at all likely, especially given the reputed marketing spend on spins even for the first year of rollout.

What is much more likely is that spins have contributed little to the 23% 2016 decline. The obvious explanation is cannibalization by casino/sports and reg attrition due to openly hostile anti-reg measures enacted since Nov.

Can anyone link to or provide spin traffic data?

Always see this and makes sense on the face of it but is that plan really worth 5bn?

To buy the worlds biggest poker site for that much money just to try and use it to get in on the already crowded online casino/sports betting market seems strange, surely thered be a more efficient way of getting a casino/sports betting site if thats what you want?

I think they feel their management can guide them to bringing online poker back into a lot of markets that lost it or never had it. And then subsequently bring the sports betting and casino gaming along in the jurisdiction that will allow it. I agree with you that in the short term there's really not much to all this an investor could love. But 2-3 countries added every couple of years could be quite significant (or a big one like Russia).

You are thinking of spinlyzer.com. The site is still up, but they 'appear' to have gone silent since PokerStars plugged the computerised-auto-observing-of-all-spins leak [which hoovered up an estimated 95% of spin HHs].

No doubt the scum who used that site will now be more quietly running a Spinlyzer-MkII clearing house where they each contribute their HHs to an archive which processes them & supplies cleaned up compiled stats to subscribed members. The PS population of active Real Money players is a river of constantly changing individuals who flow through the site & who [nearly all] disappear out the back end never to be seen again. One can picture it as a network of rivers of mainly young, males [call 'em lads] with some spending money trying to determine if their leisure Euro, GBP etc. goes on poker, football betting on the Euros, or the latest game on Steam. I think PokerStars may have been hit harder than most sites by the decline of European currencies versus the USD. I have no evidence for this of course, but I do know that PS made a fuss about it in one of the Q's last year [Q3?].

Where these lads put their money while they are active on PS is dependent on a slew of factors including who's popular on Twitch right now & what do they play [e.g. JCarver going mad for the spins in tournament breaks], "Will this spin format work on my SmartPhone, cos 6-max cash is doin' my head in on that screen", current banner promotions in the client, 'challenges', external promotions, how the lobby is structured [pretty colours & fancy names for tournaments etc.] & so on. The story is far more dynamic than the cannibalization notion suggests.

To me the future of online poker looks like it will increasingly be experienced by the lads demographic on a SmartPhone/tablet platform where it competes with many other games & PS are attempting to adjust to this.

A simpler way to put it is that the regs are not wanted by any site & PokerStars has failed to keep up the illusion that they care while putting the boot in hard. The brand is simply not perceived by users as "my Pokerstars" quite as much. What I've noticed is sites like Unibet are the new darlings with a dedicated following who enjoy the feeling [illusory or real] that the games are more level with fewer scum taking liberties with the T&Cs.

PokerStars has taken a deserved beating due to their very poor handling of their core customers - the communication failures & overall arrogance has been rather breathtaking. Being the industry leader means people notice the 'glitches', miscommunications & non-communications a lot more than with the also rans who are also nearly universally doing a terrible job. Thus there is an opportunity for other sites to gather up the waiting hordes of ever-changing net depositors. A comparison of the mood in the PokerStars & Unibet threads is telling.

I wonder if one day PokerStars will start throttling the play & closing the accounts of poker players who net withdraw too much [as some other sites/skins do]?

I entirely agree with you. The worldwide live & online gambling market [betting, casino, poker, lotteries, parimutuel racing etc.] in the combined red, grey & black markets amounts to somewhere between 500 Billion & 900 Billion USD & it's growing with no end in sight. This is fuelled a great deal by the uptake of banking, credit & mobile devices by populations who had no access to these services/tools half a generation ago. It's huge.

Russia [Putin & buddies really] needs dollars desperately & is very eager to syphon off [tax] as much of their share of the USD as possible. They've been rather ham-fisted in their methods of accessing/controlling the flow, but I'll watch with interest their attempts to manage the processing of funds [TSUPIS] & who gets the licences to operate besides Liga Stavok. Lots of lobbying with bulging attaché cases stuffed with dollars & offshore accounts galore for the beloved leaders & their cronies.

The USA market might be easier to break if they don't experience much of an economic recovery soon - encourage the decision makers at all levels to regulate & tax what they can't possibly prohibit.

Amaya earnings went pretty much exactly as expected, and on page 12 they flat out say what several of us in here already said: They don't care about pros, they want to cater to rec players: http://www.amaya.com/pdf/amaya-q2-20...pres-final.pdf

So Poker revenue flat, casino/sportsbook on the rise. They strategy now is to bring the existing product to new markets and grow it that way.

it doesnt take a economics genius to realize what they teach in econ 101 ---

MC = MR for profit maximization.

why don't we make 0 table limit while we're at it?

Nah that doesn't sound as fun and it wont fix it as my suggestion would. Thanks for your input though...

fyp
Thanks for your input though...

Yeah...enjoy your gill net im sure it has no impact on the fish and no limit cash will be fine.

cliffs:
Stars ban hundreds of botting russian-eastern euros, number of active players go down and winrates go up

Followed by people making articles about stars losing traffic as if its the end of poker.

we must organize

strike strike strike strike strike
(what i mean by strike is boycott boycott boycott boycott boycott)

Did this happen recently?

Fairly sure they're totally fine with that

Be sure to demand a seat on the board and a say in all major decisions. That is always an effective position...

that YoY graph is awesome. I think it clearly illustrates that poker was "a new popular thing" for a while. It was awesome to watch high stakes games and small-mid stakes games were booming. Everybody was quite bad and game was loose and fun. But as with most things new and cool becomes old. Clearly poker will still be around for a while but the mystique and fun around it is long gone.