I'm just saying the games will be totally legit. No way to ever change the opinions of the conspiracy theorists, so that part is irrelevant.

Yeah I totally agree that part of the motivation for doing this is to make the fish lose more slowly. It's not going to turn them into winners though.

ya but you can win a lot at the lottery. if you start to win at poker, they just take it away. i was killing at poker when is signed up. ran my account up way high. all these morans kept going in with crap and i had aa and i had a full house and this guy went in with just a pair and then i got a flush and this guy tried to bluff me. it was great, let me tell you about this other hand....

so i cashed out 2k.

then i went to play and all those moran players going in every hand were gone. no all i saw were dudes only going in with tough hands. i think they were bots. and then they seemed to know what i had. like, if i had a full, they folded, but they snapped off my bluffs proly could see my cards. then when they needed a card, they always hit. like this dude went in with just a draw. and he hit.

so ya, im done with that stuff.

Yes, yes, yes. Lifecycle is extended, rake goes up, reinvestment in player give backs goes down, gaming taxes on those give backs goes down, cost of acquisition goes down.

but this creates many more conspiracy theorists. it shifts anyone on the fence. and lets face it, just about all of us were on the fence at one time about online poker.

buzzwords!

you forgot ecology, environment, economy.

Re-hosting this (i took this picture a few minutes ago.)

Look at the monthly payments, jesus ****

you dont have to turn them into winners to get them to spend more $. you just have to make them more convinced that they could be winners.

also, it will probably turn the low stakes players who are casual students of the game (like a weekend reg who plays 10 hours a week, but holds a day job and deposits $500/week to play nl100) into breakeven players or winners while those players are in the losing player pool as things stand. from my memory of the weekend games (of which I didnt play regularly ever) there are a lot of semi-regs that dont play at other times and werent winners but werent awful either.

Is that 84 payments of 743.99 for a 10k loan? Is there anyone on earth dumb enough to take that loan and yet have the ability to pay it back?

seems legit

and how the hell do you do this when they know if they start winning the site is gonna make it harder?

Yeah, all those crazy buzzwords that have been around since the beginning of business and are components of profit.

FWIW, the formula for skill matching isn't as simple as BB/100. It's skill matching, not win matching or variance matching.

Payday advances are a huge and depressing business.

Native American business that operates on Reservations though!

the same components that routinely require government bailouts in the billions?

Why u so mad

Can you elaborate here? The way you worded this seems...scary.

would be shocked if thats even legal.

well, for one sometimes people succeed at things that are difficult. secondly, making it harder doesnt mean making it impossible or even making it more difficult for a long duration if the difficulty is too high. thirdly, see clark's post 2 below. lastly, you seem upset.

dont forget ROI

yep. at least if they write it sensibly.

Those loans are totally usury if done off the reservations.

If you had access to billions(?) of poker hands with perfect information on every player, and all the stats that were in HUDs, plus even more stats not in the HUDs, plus had teams of PhD level economists on your staff, do you think you could get pretty dang good at identifying player skill level based on the above information? I do.

Is usury even illegal if done between two consenting private parties?

it means there is no way you can win long term. iow,

Local ads for tax refund advances have been airing almost nonstop in my area. Never bothered to look up their take but it has to be a hugely depressing amount.

its definitely in the billions as pokerstars used to have those X billion hand promotions where they handed out prizes for a few weeks and finally gave out some huge ones at the end.