Actually I quite like arguing, I just prefer not to be doing it on a Sunday. I think with this kind of thing I'm never going to persuade POW, but lots of other people will read it and so I can't just leave him unanswered and have people believe him.

Happy flying!

There are some players that no matter what you do, will not be happy. POW, as someone said earlier ITT, if you don't like Unibets model, don't play here simples. Unibet is a breath of fresh air IMO, noHUDs, no seating scripts, no nit-fests, just poker how it should be. Couple that with the fact there is a 2+2 rep in Andrew, who comes on here EVERY day to listen to feedback, fix problems, change tickets etc etc. There isnt ANY other poker site that does this and its not surprising that while other operators are in decline, Unibet is growing. Unibet listened to what recreational players wanted and delivered and I personally wont play anywhere else while Unibet is still around.

Thanks for taking the time to sort out all those rakeback claims on a sunday Andrew

well how about the fact that unibet actually pay all of the tax liability imposed by uk bulgaria etc on their gaming revenue received from players from those countries , whereas stars sticks its fingers up to the players and reduces the rewards and soon will be introducing rake surcharges for those players so that the players will be paying half of the tax liability that stars should be paying. If stars want to do business in the UK the tax liability is a business cost to them , if they don't want to pay it let them withdraw from the UK market. will they ? will they hell, they make too much money from the UK to walk away from that market.

yeah , i'm currently 26000+ points and ~ 500e in cash and tickets in my account in two months without depositing .I'm not complaining and i certainly arent playing on stars.
How is that any better than a system that is a sub par reward system for micro playerswhose money ultimately works itself up through the stakes and over rewards those players playing huge volume simply to attain the high rewards.

Hi Andrew,
about the SNG Maydays promotion.. is there any way to look into the points already collected for this month? Can't really play as much as usual so it will be close for me to get the 1000 points. I just dont wanna have 980 or so in the end because i played a few after midnight or so and they mightve counted towards the next day already (as you can only get 100/day)

If there isnt any open source, are you able to look into my numbers for this month?! (acc: uCALLuFALL)

Cheers&keep it up!
Till

There are only two SnGs formats on Unibet. 5-handed SnGs and HU SnGs. One of them gets an crazy 33% extra rakeback promo.

You are a clever guy. Why not to compare SnGs Rakeback (or better: paid rake for paid Buy Ins) at Stars and Unibet? Its pretty easy because you always get 100 Point for one 1€ Rake at Unibet without crazy missions And poker isn't "just" cash game. There are some SnGs donks, too

(I would like to make some nice diagrams, too. But I have to finish my bachelor thesis until tuesday^^)

You should be able to find yourself on here, if you have a rough idea of where you are.

https://www.unibet.co.uk/poker/leade...ner-7-157760-6

?????!
Its pretty simple economics, Economies of scale. Ofc ps can do everything for a lot less. Their costs of operating use a wayy smaller % of income.

Yes. But the games are sooo good!! I still can't see the whole point of the argument. I'd still play if they gave even higher low vol. rewards.


Lol ur just trolling? 1%? Put your time spent in creating these 'models' into better use and there's a pretty high chance you'll be happier.

Hi Andrew, could you please exchange my 4e daily ticket to 4x1sng tickets.
Thanks! Alias VOODOOMAGICK

thanks in advance for converting my tickets.

question: what are churn rates? that term has come up a few times and I don't know what it means.

just one small point of criticism regarding POW's statements:
I suspect that literally zero Unibet regulars would be capable of reaching SNE on stars. getting SNE is really really tough. and if not zero, then maybe 1-2 tops. to me this suggests that comparing the top rewards% of the top rakers of both sites is irrelevant and misleading.

Viktor Blom playing from 13:00 to 23:00 BST on Wednesday is not too bad, thought he would just play a few hours in the evening

Hope I can catch him on a table that day

I would like to nominate this one-liner for "Rhetorical Question of the Year". It just nailed it. As much as I enjoy a touch of forum drama, our graph-making friend got owned so hard that I almost feel sorry for him.

Here's hoping a new week brings happier events and fewer rants. It's just not cricket.

I presented a model with 2 solid invariants:

- Stars reward model
- Unibet reward model

And a variable that can be changed to show the affect on rewards:

- distribution of players that rake certain amounts.

By altering the 'player distribution' in my model to different states, it clearly shows that in all 4 cases (even when the player base is skew to more low raking players), Unibet will pay around 65% of what Stars rewards does.

Andrew isn't grasping that when testing a rakeback model for value, it needs to be tested with different 'SCENARIOS'. So what Andrew perceives as 'made up data' is actually different 'player distribution' scenarios being plugged into a model to test Unibets value overall, given different player fields.

I'm not here to win a popularity contest. I'm here to tell you that unless Unibet's player base is almost entirely made up of players raking <50e/month, then Unibet will be paying back around 65% of what Stars offers it's customers in rewards.

And anyone raking over 150e/month will be picking up this large deficit cheque.

and I feel sorry players that swoon for 1-liners instead of taking a closer look at the price their less-skilled players pay for poker.


My intention isn't to derail a helpful support thread or argue with anyone so any questions please pm me and I'll answer. I've presented my findings and it's up to you all to decide whether you think its good for the game for Unibet to rake in this manner or whether there is an alternative healthier model supporting players at all steps and stakes in the game.

POW I appreciate your effort but the discussion is quite unnecessary. One of the most profitable sites there is has ZERO rewards and no tournament guarantees, so Unibet with their rewards going to mostly recs is just great. And for people reading this; don't PM me asking for the site, it's open to Swedish citizens only.

hey Andrew, would you mind changing that 1 mtt ticket to 1 sng and perhaps extend those UO tickets since I doubt I will clear them all in time. thanks

Well, thanks for your altruism but I'm happier playing at Unibet than I've been for years (before the muti-tabling rakeback fixated Poker Trackers - a club you pretty much had to join to win at a decent clip - invaded online poker in huge numbers).

At almost every other site (including your beloved PS) a HUD and other apps are mandatory for serious players, but I've found a new love of the game in having to use reads and notes instead of HUDs and databases (despite being a DB developer), and as a result I'm improving a lot as a player.

It's telling that you're still avoiding the most obvious and financially important difference between playing at Unibet and PS, which is the softness of the NL games, and are obsessed with rakeback, all of which makes me question your true intentions. I wonder where you'd recommend players to find your "alternative healthier model" (there's no need to reply).

I wonder if anyone taking you up on your selfless offer of help via PM might be offered a RB deal at another site perhaps, because, quite frankly, your opinions are so one-sided you come across as having ulterior motives.

Anyway, you've presented your "findings", so thanks for allowing normal service to resume in this thread, and goodbye.

I'm actually disagreeing here quite a lot. I think players like me are very valuable to unibet. I don't mind playing HU, 3 handed etc and i've often seen it when i'm starting a session( played 6-9 tables on unibet ) that the player pool suddenly grew by 25 players and as soon as i quit (due to beeing removed so fast from the tables this happened quite often) it went back pretty fast to the original size, especially before or after peak hours. Because i can't use a HUD my edge won't be that high, too. I think this should be honored somehow, especially on NL25 where you're raking the most and where winnings are pretty small compared to higher stakes.

During the time of the 500€ playthrough bonus this was really the case. But since i've played this one through and bonuses which accumulated during that time too, i actually feel like i'm getting punished by doing that.

I totally overlooked that because i don't play PLO and i kinda feel different now. This is really Robin Hood'esk. Kudos to Unibet!

PS: would really like to see the real world data.

i just looked at https://www.unibet.com/help/products...oker-at-unibet and there the rake is 5% at plo25. on the german site there isn't even a plo or banzai tab.

About the rake, I would still hope that Andrew would give a smaller MTT rake a chance. Also the fact that there's no rebuys (which are not usually raked) even makes this a little bit worse. Unibet currently has highest MTT rake in the industry and this is a partial reason why MTTs are still failing, to say the true.

Good to see that new missions bring up some smaller tourneys, but promotion-wise MTTs have been quite neglected. No need to start it with huge boosts, instead of 10k€ or 20k€ campaign you could make one 2k€/monthly campaign that stays if it has desired success (as I earlier brought up a tournament leaderboard which had different tournaments around each day which allows you to promote them).

I dont remember mentioning this exact problem before, so here it goes. If you played Banzai and made some money over (lets say) 5 euros, you "have"/can play with the money earned over the fixed buyin if you reentered the game some time later on the same day. Thing is that, in my case, I earned some money and took it out. However, since the client was expecting me having some sum over 5 euros and currently there was less money in my account, the client gave me an error of insufficient funds. I am pretty sure that would go away in few hours, when the buyin requirement goes down back again to the fixed price of 5 euros. But it probably should not be that way...
So you can tell that to developers, Andrew

As far as I can tell, POW keeps claiming that all players raking above a certain amount on Unibet are suffering. Well, I rake a lot on Unibet and I don't get much less than I would from stars, if at all(but i don't rake at SNE level, and don't want to). So POW's claim is false.

Btw, highest rakeback/rewards isn't at stars, it's at ipoker and lots of random smaller or less reputable sites. And then there are also sites that have significantly less rakeback, e.g. 888.

Hi Andrew,

Please can you change my 25nl and 4nl to 7 x 4e SNG and 1x 1e SNG.
Alias TwitchStream

Thank you.

I don't really want to prolong this debate, but... Well you don't know the real figures, so it's a moot point.
When I first saw the somewhat U-shaped rakeback graphs a while ago, I have to admit I was surprised and confused. It wasn't a model that made a lot of sense to me, as I always presumed that rakeback graphs would be somewhat linear. But I'm not running a poker site. I don't have access to the figures for player numbers, deposits, rake or churn and neither do you. All I care about is being able to play a fun and rewarding game on a fun and rewarding site. Maybe Andrew's model (for which he will have complete and accurate numbers) won't turn out to be great in the long run, and will need to be tweaked on occasion. I think it's fair to say that Andrew knows what's best for UnibetPoker better than you or I.
Maybe one day I'll reach a rake-level where I think "Unibet is no good for me any more". Right now, it seems the model is working very well for the majority of players, and that's why traffic is evidently going up.
If I thought there was a problem with rake or rakeback, or the games were dying, I'd be the first to ask questions or make suggestions. Lots of sites are screwing their players in one way or another. Unibet seems to be the antithesis of most sites. So far at least, I like this model. YMMV. Peace.

tables just paused again, and this time at a moment where it's really bad: right in the middle of a crazy late-night heads-up game with big stacks.(we were the only 2 players in the pool)

there just has to be warning of maintanance or whatever it is. I've played on a lot of sites that were much less legitimate than unibet and much worse sites overall, but none of them randomly shutdown my table while i was in the middle of a battle

A short morning post before some meetings.

I think this is a good point too. By raking much less at NL4 and NL10, players are more likely to move up, where we rake them normally. That was always half the intent behind the low rake there (the other half being that it keeps new players alive for longer, making them more likely to get into the game).

On top of that, by allocating more of the reward money at the lower end player, those players will stick around for longer and the games will be softer.

Sure, we could probably make it 60% rakeback, all at the top end, but if you want that you can go play on iPoker or whoever against tables full of regs.

Do you still need this?

Sure, done.

It just means that someone isn't playing any more. There're lots of ways to measure it, but mostly I care about monthly churn (played last month, not this month) and daily churn. I tend to think of churn rates as akin to compound interest rates - small improvements make big differences.

There's also reactivation, which I just define as the opposite of churn and again works on different timescales.

POW being irrelevant and misleading? Say it ain't so!

I agree, none of our players are going to rake $200k in a year. We don't have highstakes SNG and we don't have the traffic at NL400+ to rake that much. We actually don't have much less NL400 traffic than PS (last time I looked it was about 50% of the hands), it's just that they have lots of traffic above it, particularly at NL500 zoom.

To be honest, I'd have preferred 5x 2 hour evenings, but it turns out that I can't have everything I want.

I don't particularly trust your numbers here because:

You got this part really, really, really wrong. I've already said you're out by a factor of 2-3.

Thanks for telling me what I'm not grasping, Mr. "decide your output before you enter data".

Quite laughably untrue.

Why is it that you don't reply to any of my points? For example, difficulty of the games, value of missions, looking at any points in the payout scale asides from the absolute lowest point, etc. It's because you don't have any good responses.

Our aim is to keep new players alive for longer and to make poker fun again. This means we choose to pay more in rewards to the bottom end than any other site, about the same at the top, and less in the middle than most.

By having a higher proportion of our site as newer players, experienced players will come by themselves.

We pay out just as much in the loyalty scheme as we did on MGS. We pay out more in promos etc than we did there too. We pay out more in total bonus spend than PS do. You would like us to pay out a lot over every segment, which you want because you don't understand economic realities (or you choose to ignore them).

Sure, done.