Hummm, I mean, pretty hard to feel enthusiastic about such a rakeback decrease, especially considering that 100z (where I play 60% of my action) has such a high rake...

Love it when site reps are trying to point out why bigger rake is better for everyone.

Do these challenges all have a similar probability of completion? Or are some harder than others?

Is this system pretty much a luck based rake back system?

No, they have similar probabilities, albeit your playing styling will factor in. But lowering overall RB in favour of a more balanced redistribution, will essentially increase the rake at 100z... Pretty unfortunate, as I have been playing here for 9 months and have been thoroughly enjoying the experience - software crashes/freezes not withstanding -, but might now have to find a new niche as a 100z player...

And where do you get this idea? It wasn't in my posts, not that you'd know, because you aren't even reading them.

This is why effective rake is such a useful term. It's rake, minus rakeback, and plus/minus the difficulty of the games.

This change reduces effective rake. Sure, maybe it costs 1bb/100 (say) from your win rate via reduced rewards. But it increases your actual win rate by 1bb/100 due to softer games.

On top of that, it encourages weak players to come back and make more deposits. So in the long term, it means more players, and weak players staying longer.

That is literally the whole philosophy of the site, and that's why this site is growing and almost no others are. Encouraging weak players to come back is what works about Unibet.

Do you? Then why did you post in this thread, where there are no site reps trying to point out any such thing?

The points you get are proportional to the average number of hands that each Challenge takes to complete. The number for you is going to depend on your playstyle though, because that average is taken over everyone at those stakes.

Please see my earlier paragraph in this reply. Moving the allocation of money from rakeback to creating softer games does not lead to a net decrease. Instead it leads to a net improvement in game quality, which is more fun for everyone.

I have not been posting alot because i am on a small break from poker but i pretty much love the lower rakeback because in the long run it will be beneficial for the players and the site.

Will prolly start playing again in november, looking forward to the new client and bonus shop. Keep up the good work Andrew

So it's not too dissimilar to dealt rake if I understand you right.

Yeah. You represent unibet and say its better to give less aka make the rake bigger in the higher stakes. But we can stop this here because I aint changing my mind and neither are you. And why would I care if the micros are softer when you are making it more expensive to play my games?

Most of the challenges require you to see (a lot of) flops, so they actually encourage loose pre-flop play. Nits (like me) take forever to clear some of the harder challenges, so it's actually quite different to the dealt rake method that led to the problem of masstabling rakeback nits on other sites. You can't just fold every hand and rack up millions of points. You have to play to earn.

I'm playing PLO and a lot of the challenges are actually about folding bad starting hands pre.

Some are harder but they are worth more points.

Yes it does introduce a bit of a random element.

Some of them are "be dealt XYZ" and some of them are "reach a flop of" or do some other action like "3-bet" so there is a dealt element but not only.

I understand where you are coming from Andrew, and yes, I do agree with the overall philosophy of Unibet, but the fact of the matter remains that a 100z volume grinder as myself will suffer directly from these changes, despite a potentially net benefit to the ecosystem ; all of which I will have to factor in moving forward. Anyways, that is my feedback.

edit : these changes seem to encourage informed players to only play anything lower than 50z and higher than 100z on Unibet...

Please quote me where I've said that. It's not a matter of me changing my mind, it's a matter of you making up what I've said.

The general idea is that minor Challenges are preflop, and major are post. That's to stop people easily colluding to earn points faster.

Why? And why 100?

Why "potentially"?

Why?

Because the rake is higher on Unibet (compared to other sites) at precisely the stakes I play (50-200z), so lowering RB will have a direct negative impact on a B/E marginal winner (someone relying more on RB), while redistributing the anticipated cuts might or might not lead to better games (after all, it is impossible to determine the state of the game a few months from now, while cutting RB will directly increase the rake). So essentially, the attractive stakes at Unibet are and would increasingly be 4-10z and 400z.

My first deposit bonus is almost on the way to get expired and i've seen in this threat that it might get another chance.
May i have it a bit longer please?

username : minimal10

Thank you !

Thanks for breaking it down a bit more.

I agree with this part.

And I disagree with this part.

Because of this part. The money is, on average, redistributed towards losing players. Those players then, on average, lose the money to the rest of the player pool again.

Them losing that money raises the win rates of everyone else in the player pool. Almost no money has actually left the ecosystem.

I admit that some has, as those losing players are now playing a bit more, so we rake a bit more. But in return, those players are more likely to come back and make a deposit of their own, and the games are more fun meanwhile. That leads to smaller losing players (who won't benefit directly from the change) enjoying it more, and depositing more again too.

The reason that weak players churn faster today than 10 years ago is that they lose much faster today. We removed HUDs, trackers, table selection, one-alias-for-life, etc, all in order to keep weak players around longer. This is another change along the same axis, and it's effectively revenue-neutral for the player-pool.

I don't like to talk about competitors, but I think we need to in this case. Compare this to PS. They've cut rewards, increased rake, and it's not obvious if or where any money is going back into the system. In our case, it's going directly back to the specific players that it will help the most, and that's to the benefit of literally everyone.

say a rec player loses 200 euros on a NL 100 table, and gets a small portion of that back in form of a ticket ( which is most likely going to range from somewhere as low as 5-10 dollars or w/e ), does that mean he is ONLY allowed to use that ticket on the stake he lost the money in ( in this case NL 100 ) or can he use it in micro/lowstake games like NL 10?

I agree that you (Unibet) is doing a better job at redistributing fairly and thus creating a fun environment. And until this specific decision, I was completely sold to the Unibet brand and believed that the precise philosophy was/is what might save somewhat online poker.


Well that is the part of the equation that is iffy, as the previously RB money is now being re-filtered through a higher raking game (at 25-200z and compared to the competitors).

Anyhow, thx for taking the time to answer

Sure, done.

You started out by assuming this was the case. I'm glad to see you have now actually read part of one of my posts.

The amounts that players lose in order to qualify are going to depend on how much other players lose that day, so I'll disregard that part. But your example isn't good - someone who loses 200 at NL100 isn't going to get a reward from this. The plan at the moment is to reward mostly NL100 tickets to the biggest NL100 losers though.

In any case, it doesn't matter much because people move up. The money at NL4 doesn't just stay with NL4 players, people will play NL10. We encourage that too, as you can see by our rake structure and our promotions, particularly this month's.

Yes, but the biggest losing players don't tend to play for 100 hours a week. They lose quickly. Those are the ones who, on average, receive this money.

I don't think it's an iffy proposition to assume that this money will be redistributed in these games.

I also don't think it's iffy to assume that the people who are credited this money have an increased chance of returning to the games. I think that because our other measures to ensure this have worked. Here's how the entire industry has performed since we relaunched:



For the majority of this time, the majority of sites have concentrated on offering high rakeback and ignoring the fate of casual players. Here's the same graph with our progress superimposed (note that although the scales are of course different for each line, they cover the same magnitude difference):



Concentrating on keeping casual players around for longer works.

And I think thats the key for keeping online poker alive. Regs are paying by getting rb cut, but thats a longterm +EV for everyone as games are going to stay soft. People here are just too narrow minded to realize whats good for longterm, you cant just take money from recs and expect them to magicly redoposit again and again.

So you are saying making the rake in higher stakes is good for the economy. And thats just poop. I don't care if the games at lower stakes gets easier when you are making my games harder to beat by increasing the rake. It never gets back to when the losing player still loses it in the micros. Done.

The quote from me has literally no connection to me saying what you say it does. I mean... I'm lost for words here.

You simply aren't reading what I wrote. You have made up a whole new system that has nothing to do with what I am talking about.

Please read my posts. You are passing judgement on your own system, not on mine.

Does rakeback structure for HU SNG has the same U shape like cash games?

Dissident is here!(...and polarizing)

Yes. The difference between HUSNG and cash is just how you earn the points. In HUSNG you earn them directly based on the rake paid, in cash you earn them via Challenges which are only proportional to the rake paid.

The value of the points doesn't change.

Starting a sentence with "so" is a tell for cognitive dissonance. Considering that what you wrote after it bears no resemblance to what Andrew stated, I think that point is clear.

Kudos to Andrew for showing more patience than I would.