Quote:
Originally Posted by Green Plastic
I'm not sure people argue that it causes losing players to deposit more, but most would say that it causes losing players to lose more slowly, letting the house rake more and giving them more enjoyment for their $.
I'm still not following how you got to your conclusion. Can you state it another way or explain it further?
Totally agree. This is against the spirit of poker and it's going to derail online poker in the long run. What do you think is going to happen when top players tell their friends "i don't play on [site] anymore, they ban you if you do well?" The word will spread to everyone eventually, even recreational players want to think they could make a huge run and the idea of getting banned will scare them. This is an example of trying to maximize short term profits at the expense of long term sustainability.
Overall, interesting post, looking forward to seeing what comes from it. Thanks for posting.
Hi GreenPlastic,
1) I would not say anybody argues this, however, it - irrationally - seems that people who think that "more losing players" = good seem to then infer that "less winning players" = good as well. This could really only be true if "less winning players" would imply more deposits from losing players, which is - in my view - very clearly not the case.
2) This is due to the fact that the skill distribution in poker is somewhat logarithmic. What do I mean? The relative skill difference between 2 fish can be huge - there are -5bb players, -10bb players but even -30bb or higher players (the theoretical maximum for how bad you could be if you really tried is probably much higher again) whereas for winners, the relative skill differences are much smaller. Emprical evidence for this is the excessive bum-hunting at some sites.
Now, if the above is true, then a site with "100% fish" will have a significant skill difference between them, i.e. the delta between the biggest winners and losers will be huge (think of PartyPoker in 2005). A high delta however means that the percentage of deposits that is converted into rake is going to be low, as most of the money will end up in cash-outs.
If you mix in a lot of grinding "sharks", then the relative skill difference is likely to decrease as more and more sharks will be in hands against each other. [of course, if you would just add 1 shark, or very few sharks, to the mix, it would increase, the point is that after some line is crossed, more sharks will decrease the relative skill differences across the poker rooms]
Again, using your poker gut feel (or even looking at HM data), you would oberve that at "sharky" sites players seem far more evenly matched on average than at highly "fishy" sites.
It would be absolutely stunning of course if somebody had access to the data to observe this "in action", i.e. whether the relative win-rates (the delta) on sites that move against winning players actually increases - if so, it's of course good for the remaining sharks, however, for the poker room, it means less earnings despite the same daily deposits coming in.