Hi,

i was just wondering why not more people play on RIO? I understand that games dont run often but we have been begging Pokerstars for years for better rake conditions and RIO gives you that. Its really easy to get 40% rakeback after a few hands played only. And its def possible to go up to 50% rakeback with the normal rakeback program. Then they also run additional promotions as well every week which you can easily get to 70% RB with not a ton of play. So why arent more SSPLO guys playing there? Is it just because games dont run that often? Im pretty sure if enough people go to play there regularly that could change.

i have the feeling people just dont like playing generic anon players. and also RIO promised to be the poker player peoples champ but then they just copy the rake structure of any other site and rakeback isnt better than lets say party or net rake compared to unibet. even stars probably has comparable net rake on the lowest stakes. so why should i play boring anon games with insane bingo splash pots if i can have decent traffic, mtts/sngs and comparable rake elsewhere.
i really believe that if a site would offer lets say 2-3% reasonable capped rake through all stakes there would be a constant player pool. unibet is a small site but has 2-3% on lowest stakes (with like 0-10% rakeback only) and i see these low stakes games running at all times even at hours where party pool for example is just dead. sites always claim small stakes players dont care about rake but that doesnt seem to be true looking at a small euro site like unibet or party when they introduced leaderboards

Im sorry but that is simply not true. You get 30% rakeback through STP from the first hand you play...its really easy to get another 10% (and even more) through legends reward program + they have promotions every week that are worth 10-30% extra. So you are just flat out wrong. RIO has the lowest net rake paid for any site ever. period. Party gives you far worse rakeback and you have to play far more to get a worse deal than that. To get the 40% you have to play a ton.

allright shillboy. with leaderboards on another site i basically get 75% rb and thats fine for me when i can play username games with good traffic and tournament series. but whatever floats your boat man. you wanted to know why people dont play on RIO and i tried to answer, youre tilting man.

ps: i dont think thats true for every stake btw. RIO probably has worse rake on some stakes even with rb since their basic rake structure is 5% with bad caps and some competitors have a better basic rake structure on certain stakes so i wouldnt be too confident about your claim.

pps: well i checked RIO rake strucutre now and its even worse than i thought...5.75% for NLHE and really bad caps is just about the worst wow

Lets factcheck RIO has 4.5% rake with 1.5€ cap at 10 plo and 2€ cap at 20 plo
Unibet has 3% rake with 1.5€ cap at 10plo and 2.5€ cap at 25 plo.
Unibet gives almost no rakeback. If we assume a 10 plo grinder who plays 2 hours per week (that is very low volume) he will get 30% from STP 12.5% from diamonds reward tier (and another 2% from the streak if he plays 2 hours for 4 weeks in a row). That is 45% RB roughly without any additional promotions. RIO runs promotions every day / week to boost traffic. It should be pretty easy for that casual grinder to get at least 10% extra RB from all the different promos. So that is 55% rakeback easy. How can 3% rake with the same rake caps as RIO and almost no rakeback be better than 4.5% rake with 55% rakeback for a casual 2 hours / week grinder (it could even be much more rb if you play more)? The answer is: Unibet is certainly more net rake paid for every player type!

well than it must be something else...maybe you read me first post and youll get an idea why.

This is so dishonest because you dont take into account the very high RB that RIO gives...why doesnt this go into your head?

you dont get that im trying to tell you that it might not be about +-20% rake in the end, but all you scream at me is rakebaaaaack

i found the games to be pretty tough, that is why I prefer to play on other sites

I perfectly understand your other arguments against RIO but almost your entire post was about pretending like they have high / bad rake. That is dishonest.

This. I use their training services and think they are great. No doubt they want to build a great site with a great structure but the people they’re attracting are people who are really into poker. Playing people who are into poker probably doesn’t do well for your win rate. I’d happily pay slightly higher rake to play worse players

I hear this pretty often. I have played over 100k hands on RIO since they opened Feb 2019. I find the games to be soft and beatable with a decent winrate.

I would like to share my current rakeback situation on RIO. I perfectly understand all the other reasons that you dont wanna play on RIO but this "high rake" nonsense just bugs me. So last week i raked 150Euro exactly.
I got back 27Euro from the legends rewards program and 32.6Euro from Splash the Pot (since Hearts is supposed to be 15% RB and STP is supposed to be 30% you can see that i actually ran bad in STP and still made excellent RB). I got another 15% 22.5Euro from the direct rakeback promo and another 20Euro from the booster promo.
So in total i got 102.1Euro in rakeback from a total of 150Euro raked. That means i got 66% Rakeback. That is while running terrible in STP. My current rewards tier is hearts (which only the third highest) and is supposed to give 15% and STP is supposed to give 30%. So if i ran better in STP or had a higher rewards tier i would have gotten even more. Additionally there was a leaderboard promotion where i did not finish once in the paid ranks this week. So how can people argue that RIO has high rake. It has the lowest net rake paid anywhere. Even your 3% capped PLO rake sites cant compete with this. PERIOD. I added a screenshot to provide some proof https://ibb.co/BB8z6SY

Oh yeah and this week was coming of 2 weeks in a row where they gave 101% rakeback.
On pokerstars in the good old days you had to get SNE (which was a massive grind) to get 70% RB levels. Here you can get that as a casual player with 10hr/week grind. Please do not spread this "RIO has high rake" nonsense anymore. It just isnt true. RIO has better rakeback than pokerstars had in the glory days.

The software experience is clunky.

Although i personally disagree, i think thats a reasonable opinion to have. The only argument against RIO that really bugs me is the "RIO has high rake" argument.

66% rakeback of 15bb/100hands rake is not better than 20% rakeback of 6bb/100hands. They make it sound like a great deal while having one of the highest formal rake % in the industry. You have to figure out what you’re paying in net rake and it just might not be that big of a difference - if at all. In the end it’s not worth it to play versus stupid anon avatars called Clyde and Rory. They had the chance to create a fair and fun site for players by players but ultimately they got in line with the other corporate oligopoly rake leechers. It’s same same but worse

ok since you're so keen on numbers ill compare sites for PLO10...

RIO PLO10: 4.5% 1.5€/15BB cap = 12.2BB/100hands rake = 4.14% net rake

GG PLO10: 5% 0.3$/3BB cap = 10.1BB/100hands rake = 3.57% net rake

Party PLO10: 5% 1$/10BB cap = 13.2BB/hands rake = 4.52% net rake

Unibet PLO10: 3% 1.5€/15bb cap = 8.1BB/hands rake = 2.77% net rake


playing at RIO with 66% rb = 4.15BB/100 rake
playing at GG with 40% rb = 6,06BB/100 rake
playing at PP with 60% rb = 5,28BB/100 rake
playing at UB with 15% rb = 6,88bb/100 rake


while rakeback especially on party can be higher for other sites the difference is still not that crushing but more like 1-2BB/100h. and note that for other small stakes like PLO5 most other sites than RIO have lower rake there.

but this comparison makes it clear that you either have high RB from leaderboards or something or youre paying absurd amounts of rake at these stakes.


*numbers based on primedope rake calc

Why don’t these sites just lower the rake and enough of this rake back stuff?

Keep in mind i got 66% while running really bad in STP and not participating in the leaderboard. Its possible to get 80%+ on RIO with all the additional promos they run every week. In normal weeks im usually over 70% rb. RIO has lowest industry rake. period. If you dont understand that you probably need to go relearn how to do very basic math.

you are not living reality. sorry.

I just checked my database. Im paying 13bb/100 rake on average. I calculated the average rakeback through all the promos (which actually was a lot of work because they have so many). And i got around 75% on average. So paying around 3,25bb/100 in rake. That is the cheapest anywhere ever. period

Even in the old days small stakes plo was always seen as a huge raketrap in this forum. So now that we have such a cheap option, why isnt there more excitement for that?

i can only recap what i already said: if its not the rake (which might be the best out there for some players at certain stakes although it might be close compared to PP or GG with leaderboard money) it must be something else that eliminates the small monetary advantage from rake: competition, anon tables, software, splashpots...
i personally would never play an anon random fake name site, it just feels artificial and i love reg- and rec-battles over days and weeks and its a great motivation seeing someone play a higher stake who used play same stake as me. competing in a certain pool of player gives a sense of community and competition. usernames and custom avatars are fun and bring individuality to an electronic game. playing anon takes too much fun out of poker for me and i think there are a lot of player who feel the same.

I cant say why RIO struggles with building player pools. But if they offer the best price on the market and still have a hard time, then its reasonable to think that the games and software arent as competetive as the rake.

I've tried RIO a few times, but always end up giving up on it. The net rake is very good and I think the software is one of the best on the market. The game quality and game liquidity are the problems for me.

If you play non peak times like I mostly do, there are often no games running at all or a tiny pool at a stake level which may not be the one I would ideally play. I haven't got a big enough sample on there to be sure but from both a results basis from a small sample and just observing the game when playing the games seem significantly tougher than the equivalent stakes on other major sites.

They need to find a way to attract more rec players, which will in turn lead to more regs playing on the site. I'm guessing they haven't really got the budget required for significant advertising directed at recreational players, so some sort of partnership with people with a big social media presence in gaming/esports/sports may be their best bet.