Oh it makes sense now. All this time I thought he was accusing me of liking double plays. Which I do approximately half of the time.

You were my inspiration to becomming the Calm And Collected poster I am today though.

I'm sure the total amount of times you've called me a midget or posted gifs of me in lolly pop land with the other little people of the wizard of oz is >20 and I took it in stride, small strides.

I think a table limit would actually be bad for all types of players as well as sites. If you capped the number of tables at 4 (seems like its about the max a rec player could handle) then you just have the pros playing across sites. Having to use multiple interfaces is going to slow down play and hurt the hands/hr per table and per player. It will also piss off the recreational player by slowing down the game. Pros will continue playing on multiple sites whereas rec players are primarily gonna deposit on one and play there.

clark is right about the fact that taking out the top percentage of a player pool wont shift winrates of the new top percentage to an equivalent level.

It will be like thoroughbred racing soon enough - ~20% gov't take crippling anyone with an edge.

However, I plan on cashing in on the short-run gravy train before that happens.

And, the question is whether the casino types or poker types will be running these organizations. Casino types, almost always, find winning players to be a threat and cutoff promotions, first, and, then, play altogether.

there will be gnomes and beards as well, but the legal ramifications for such will likely be elevated.

2005 is gone The new boom will be cool, but not that cool.

all i know is supernova elite killed holdem cash games. when poker finally comes back, overdone rakeback needs to not exist. i don't blame players for trying to get it, i mean, ****ton of money in it for you if you can get it, but every ****ing 100NL, 200NL and 400NL game full of 20 tabling table ninja rakeback monkeys playing 10/7 9/8 poker? yea great. thanks stars, ****ing *******s

And that's evidence in favor of the hypothesized ecosystem.

The right answer is likely in the middle, but that's an interesting data point. Then again, maybe the sites made more money - I'm sure they were looking at it.

training sites killed poker. made it really easy to digest a competent and semi profitable strategy.

pokerstars clearly made a lot more money. each player that successfully got to SNE generated ~181k in rake for stars. even if over the course of the year 50% of that rake comes back in RB and in the next year 70% comes back, that's still an assload of money stars makes just off one player

ya maintaining what you would consider a healthy environment along with catering toward the delicate sensibilities of casual players may not be the most profitable approach.

What do you mean by this.

i feel like the impact of training sites is dramatically overstated, especially compared to a strat forum like 2+2. a lot of ppl watch cardrunners vids and badly misapply the concepts to where they haven't gotten better at all, just learned a different way to play poker

i'm sure there are a lot of people who did get better through these training sites but certainly not enough to kill the game. a lot of sngs and tournies are still littered with dead money, bumhunting HU was still profitable going into BF, but when 6 out of 10 or 5 out of 6 ppl in your cash game have red or black stars underneath their name playing with 60 BB...i mean, i'd much rather play a FR game of nothing but ppl who watch cardrunners vids than nothing but ppl who are 24 tabling

if you have SNE for an entire year the estimated RB is around 70% as opposed to a variable percentage spending the entire year going from silver or gold chasing SNE

It's not as simple as just "do we make more money on Bob if we offer him a discount program".

As a whole, the available winrate went down because the number of depositors went down. I still did much better than most.

lol

To expand on this a bit. The fuel for the poker economy is depositors. While sites collect rake and this takes away from my winnings, they do not make money off of me. They only make money from people putting money on the site. Since I pull off far more than I put on, I'm not exactly valuable to them.

not really sure that huds can be any more than minimally blamed for that.

Yes.

And in the end, the only way for people like Victor (who sounds like a marginal winning player or I assume he'd follow Epi to Canada or Thayer to Mexico or invest in some IP masking workaround) to survive longer term is for a more balanced ecosystem.

unbelievably wrong

thats a poor assumption. if i had been a marginal winner i would be much moar likely to be grindin in canadia rather than grinding 2p2 and various other forums the last 2 yrs.

Ok, so what are you whining about then?

Which part. The part I bolded is 100% correct.

Ya, Victor was a limit pioneer.