Yeah, and who has lost a few grand in Warcraft? The top 5% or 10% make money from poker. Does that make it acceptable to charge orders of magnitude more than any other online service.

Both Wow and poker involving a coding project, huge server farms, payment processing, fighting cheaters, and a large customer support network. They are similar in many ways. There are costs each have that the other doesn't, yet they share many characteristics.

I don't know, I guess many people here are ok with the high charges because they're making money. But aren't you worried the fish are getting sucked dry?

great go play wow and see how much money you make

fish are getting sucked dry because of skilless twats 24 tabling twats infesting tables not rake

great even the people who lose at poker would be driving and paying 10 bucks for 30 hands in rake if they wanted to play poker if it wasnt for the cheaper games online

i think this thread might have collapsed in on itself

playing 24 tables is tough, def requires some kind of skill

can someone explain the rake increase of 05?

I play at stars and wanted to know if it increase there...

big sites couldnt care less about the "pros" imo
and only the pros really care about rake.

Feel free to go play world of warcraft instead of poker.

I hate this comparison between online poker and WoW and it just insists on being brought up in these threads. The two businesses are nothing alike - absolutely NOTHING is similar.

OK, one by one from the 'points' you have made:

a coding project - you can have this

huge server farms - and this, but only cos they are super vague
payment processing - WoW charges $15/month subscription that is all one direction with likely zero chargebacks highly automated and 100% legal, that is its only payment processing, online sites transfer millions upon millions of dollars every single month, they have to deal with a lot more chargebacks and other fraud and it all happens in an environment where its in a grey area of legality (in the case of US customers) - i dont see how you can possibly think the costs involved and the sheer scale of numbers are identical

fighting cheaters - this one is so lol i dont really know where to begin. Firstly, im not entirely sure how you cheat on WoW but if its like hacking to steal someone magic or whatever the site can just instantly recredit the hacked person, any other cheating is a flaw in their coding and again would be easy to spot and fix (i suppose botting might exist, but all it would mean is there is more magic in the market than otherwise or however the hell WoW functions). Online poker however its way more complex, from tracking down colluders/botters/multiaccounters/hackers there is a lot of data that has to be taken into account and they have to be a lot more careful than the WoW people because they are legally responsible for their decisions (see thev0id suing pokerstars) - in fact ive read that Stars spends over a million dollars every month just in security.

a large customer support network - ive no knowledge of WoW's customer support, do they even need customer support? "dear WoW support, my dragon has been lost somewhere in the magic island of somewhereia, please help me find it".

Man, im bored arguing with your stupid comparison. How about you compare online poker to Facebook, cos they dont even charge people to use the site.

Here is the thing, if you want to pay less rake there is a really really easy answer, play less tables for less hours.

Haha, ''stealing someone's magic''. Golden.

"Blizzard has got over 2,000 people doing customer relations across the globe. They’ve got that huge infrastructure of staff and servers. "-2007. Since, the game has increased its player pool and that number is most likely higher. But yeah, your insinuation that don't need customer support is spot on.

I admitted Full Tilt has costs in certain areas that WoW doesn't. Cheaters are a huge pain in the ass to them, compared to WoW who only have to deal with Chinese gold sellers and hackers.

However, does Full Tilt have to keep 100 engineers and 100 artists on the payroll? Did it cost them 50,000,000 to create their code base (hint, no it's a small few million dollar project).

Tell me this. If Full Tilt or Poker Stars offered a "Galaxy Membership" where players paid $1,000 to avoid paying rake for the month, would they really go out of business? Because I'm paying four times that now, and everyone seems to be ok with that.

The poker sites are greedy, and hell I'm greedy. I'm not a genius poker poker like some on this board. I don't kill the games for 5 BB/100, I'm mostly between 1.5 and 2.5. I would love for the poker economy to continue growing and still be there when I'm good enough to make more. Poker sites taking hundreds of millions of dollars a month out worries the hell out of me.

true
skill such as not getting dizzy or miclicking
no real poker skill though

The rakes are too high.

Making good decisions quickly is a skill in any endeavor.

And how much do you earn an hour by playing at full tilt you to play on Full Tilt? How much do you earn an hour to play on world of warcraft?

lol i 24 table MSNL and i assure you there is plenty of poker skill involved. your strategy is somewhat dictated by how many tables you have/how much time you have to make decisions but i assure you have a lot more poker skill than a lot of 6 tablers or whatever and play looser and more creative or w/e

and how much does this actually have 2 do with the costs and prices of ftp or whatever the provider?

well, in summary, ok OP may be a bit semidecent but surely he is off to a good cause so he should get more love. the rakes are way too high and by no means justifiable by the expenses, and this is because in the poker biz there is no market pressure for various reasons. so the least we can do is voice our support as i do here....

lolol tell me you make more than 6 tablers because of volume
looser and more creative is laughable

of course i make more than 6 tablers due to volume? otherwise i wouldnt be doing it, obv

idk how you can say that, obviously someone who plays 6 tables has more opportunity to be looser and more creative but i mean over like 300kish hands at MSNL with prob 90% of the play being 15-24 tables with a split of about 85% 6max NL and 10%FR and 5% HU my vpip is 24 and I assure you that is much looser than a lot of guys who play a ton less tables. the creative thing is subjective and i cant really prove that with some stats or anything.

everything

that is looser than most guys who play that much for sure and is not typical at all

i was responding to someone who said the rake is killing the games which is beyond laughable (unless your talking baby limit games)

so they should just charge based on their expenses and not based on the value of what they provide you?


personally i stopped playing sit and goes b/c i thought it was rediuclous that a great player makes as much as the site does per tounry
with cash games its not close

oh and i was also a ****ty sit and go player (winner but pretty worthless waste of my time) but the fact that the best sit and go players in the world make barely more than they pay in rake was obscene
the best cash game players can crush the rake

curious...
do they rake world of warcarft now???
editz:
nm... i just saw the time charge on pg. 13.
pretty +EV for pwning gnomes imo.

omg, pnycjeff, isnt it a bit demoralizing that you cant profit off all these "skill less nits." i mean, if they have no skill, should you, mister smart creative soul reader make super expert plays and out trick them at every turn? oh wait, you dont. bc you cant.

BECAUSE THEY ARE BETTER THAN YOU.

HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHA

but really, i agree with u. i would like to take part in your lobbying endeavor. but i am more a proponent of honesty. so i think we shoudl call it the "ORGANIZATION TO BAN ANYONE BETTER THAN ME"

would yo ulike to be a co-founder with me?

lol they are better at playing 24 tables without falling out of their chair not at poker
8 nits at a table on full tilt oh what fun poker
time to draw blood from a stone

I could make more playing 4-5 tables at a time with good game selection than I could 24 tabling dog**** tables (and more than most people who do so)and do so without stunting my growth so even as games get harder my winrates dont drop too much and I don't to worry about a small rake increase wiping out all of my profits (im mean it would really suck knowing that if rake by increase by a little bit i would have to get a
job)


Now Ill give someone like leatherass all the credit in the world for playing so many tables so well, but those players are few and far between

ive said many times raise the rake, they will almost all go broke and i will make more money
ive seen the numbers quoted for rake vs cash game profits and they are laughable
if youre paying anywhere close in rake to what you make in profits in cash games you flat out suck and should blow the owner of whatever site you play on for giving you the opportunity to make a living

i have no problem with people better than me
a lot of players are better than me
i have a problem with people who either
1)either flat out suck
or

2)can play decent poker, but decide they can make more money 24 tabling nitting it up to profit thru volume

crying about rake. Not one person has mentioned the fact that these sites provide a platform for people to play ****ING BREAK EVEN POKER and make 6 figures in a year

What your actually paying for doesnt matter at all? Yea thats ****ing logical
If tomorrow every site had to pay their respective gvts 95% of their profits and tripled the rake as a result would you feel better knowing that they had a much lower profit margin?

hell please find me another business where i can pay so little in overhead relative to what I can make in profit (with no travel time or expenses as well!)

Honestly I think a lot of people here are spoiled since Im sure for most of us no matter how we go about making money thru poker it comes relatively easily.