lowering rake won't help

Well, I could very well be wrong but I don't think I am. Let them re-enter, what's the big deal? I bet that's happening ALL the time as it stands for a whole multitude of reasons. As for old regs, I think you're underestimating what moving on from poker means.. a lot of those people have moved on permanently but it's impossible to say how many would consider coming back to stars. Right now the # of regs isn't so much the problem as is their ability to open a ton of tables while intending to target/compete to play with as many droolers as possible.

It's not just about lowering rake. As I said, I also mean limiting the # of tables to allow fish to be shared by a larger pool of regs rather than individuals trying to get fish on each of their 12+ tables and seat scripting to insta sit with them. Seat scripting stuff should prob also be banned.

That's not a short term boost to profitability... it's a long term one and it boosts competitiveness by allowing more players to play against each other profitably. It increases the potential for each individual player to show a profit when the rake isnt brutalising them and limiting their opponent options. Right now nobody wants to play against other regs more than ever before. Softening the rake will increases the fun factor when people are more willing to gamble and play a little bit reg on reg. People (fish & regs) want to play in games they can potentially win in, not ones they break even (with or without rakeback) or lose in so the easier that is the better the games are imo.

yeah the best way to make casuals play more is to have super low investment capable of giving you super high rewards, not to have an actually competitive environment. An actually competitive environment means that casual players lose, and playing poker is only fun if you win, so mostly people will stop.

the fact of the matter is that the "reg" and the "casual" aren't compatible forces in poker. It seemed that way for a while because lots of people were telling people about how poker was so easy money and whoohoo I just won $3000 last night and all that stuff, so lots of casual people tried to become regs. Then they mostly failed and stopped playing. If you want them to return, give them an opportunity to win shitloads of money with as little money invested and skill required- turn poker into even more of a lottery, people play that alll the time.

If you don't like Stars go play somewhere else or play there less!

On November 12 2014 14:18 Liquid`Drone wrote: yeah the best way to make casuals play more is to have super low investment capable of giving you super high rewards, not to have an actually competitive environment. An actually competitive environment means that casual players lose, and playing poker is only fun if you win, so mostly people will stop. the fact of the matter is that the "reg" and the "casual" aren't compatible forces in poker. It seemed that way for a while because lots of people were telling people about how poker was so easy money and whoohoo I just won $3000 last night and all that stuff, so lots of casual people tried to become regs. Then they mostly failed and stopped playing. If you want them to return, give them an opportunity to win shitloads of money with as little money invested and skill required- turn poker into even more of a lottery, people play that alll the time.

You're basically saying that casual poker players are no longer interested in poker, which is false. There are just way more regs multitabling everywhere vs the number of fish. Sticking with the current game formats, a more competetive environment would come from just lowering rake as fish lose money to rake too. Everyone would find it easier to compete and good players would increase their winrate.

casual poker players are no longer interested in trying to become professional poker players. It's a generalization, but I've seen a huge change in mentality (among my casual poker playing friends) over the past 5-6-7 years. I was introduced to online poker like 10 years ago. Then I taught my friends how to play. Then I won some money, and some of my smarter friends also won some money. We played a bunch live. Everyone deposited money online and tried to replicate the success I and some more smarter friends had. Pretty much nobody did. Everybody quit online, and nobody wants to give it another shot.

Many still enjoy playing live, and many still gamble some, betting sports or whatever. Quite a lot play the lottery. Online poker though, there's no influx of new players coming there. Maybe a Norwegian just getting second in wsop is gonna make people deposit a little for the next couple months, but it's gonna dry up again soon, and the reason is that there's too much skill involved and people realize it. My friends who were losing players state "I just kept losing" as a reason why they stopped playing, none of them even thought about the rake as a factor. (Only I and a couple of the more serious minded people did.) They were just self-aware enough to realize that this wasn't a game for them..

Then Norway like most other countries have made depositing kind of a bitch, which is another restriction which casual players care about but which regs aren't affected much by..

lower rake:
-> money leaves the system slower
-> bigger potential winrates for everyone but positive effect heavily weighted towards regs since they play far more hands than fish
-> regs win more in the short run by being able to keep more of their winnings
-> this allows many new regs to enter
-> new regs dilute out the positive impact of lowered rake so that each single reg's winrate goes down again
-> overall you end up with the money AYA left on the table by lowering rake going towards feeding a larger number of regs
-> shit business decision for AYA

imposing a cap on nr of tables allowed:
-> regs automatically now account for a smaller % of hands played on the site
-> fish/reg ratio automatically decreases on all tables
-> reg winrates go up
-> regs get a higher % share of the fish money by being able to win the same amount of it in fewer hands thus less % being churned by rake
-> new regs enter and existing regs cheat the system by multiaccounting
-> shit business decision for AYA

both models present a zerosum method of distribution between fish money going to regs and going to the site. the idea that the site can act in a way that simultaneously benefits regs and the site is a tough sell, wishful thinking likely not grounded in reality. you want to believe it's true just like someone scared of death wants to believe in heaven. reality is AYA are operating their business smartly.


edit: the cool thing is your idea of imposing a table cap has merit and it would work if somehow every reg in the world formed an agreement where they would all play max 4 tables. But then ofcourse if everyone else is only playing 4tbls and the fish/reg ratio now suddenly gets good, that creates huge incentives for one reg to cheat and 24table. ----> Multiplayer prisoners' dilemma problem (aka Tragedy of the Commons).

I think the mistake in your reasoning lies here:

lower rake:
-> money leaves the system slower
-> bigger potential winrates for everyone but positive effect heavily weighted towards regs since they play far more hands than fish
-> regs win more in the short run by being able to keep more of their winnings
-> this allows many new regs to enter

You are assuming that out of nowhere winning regs are gonna instantly appear and take a big slice of the pie. While certainly many new regs will come to the game, most will be bad at first and even then. The extra money regs win will go to playing bigger stakes instead of directly to the poker site. Every reg wins, casuals lose less due to being charged less rake.

There is absolutely everything to gain for the players if rake decreases, and you are assuming a lot right after the sentence I bolded out.

Maybe we are thinking about different things though because you keep mentioning AYA, and I don't think pokerstars will ever decrease the rake. What I hope for is new sites that can somehow compete and are secure enough.

I mean, in a rake free environment I would battle regs everyday and I'm sure most every other reg would do that as well, then poker will be fun again.

im not assuming it will happen 'out of nowhere'. as i mentioned in the op and the post you quoted, it's a longrun trend. existing regs will benefit immediately in the short run but those benefits will disappear over time.

this is exactly what has been happening for years, and people have pointed the finger at training sites but the fact is easy money doesn't last. more people eventually get in. training sites might make the process faster but it's inevitable either way.

also just to clarify: ofcourse if you decrease rake there is a net gain for the group of players, nobody's saying otherwise. my two arguments for why this is not as good or viable as people might want to believe are:
- this gain comes at the expense of AYA (amaya gaming group) so it's never going to happen
- the gain, while great in the short run, is not as good as it sounds in the long run because it will attract more and smarter people in, and incentivise existing people to work harder (like you said yourself). you won't be the only person having more fun, playing more and battling harder. many people will and that will promote more convergence towards optimal play so that nobody is winning a lot again, just a few losers being instaskinned by a massive sea of piranhas who have to share out tiny scraps of meat between large numbers.

I also don't see AYA making a move about decreasing the rake, I hope other companies could develop another form of revenue as to not dry up the games in the long run and still make a good profit by charging little to no rake.

Sure the games will attract more and smarter people in, but also "dumber", you still make money from breakeven regs, and if they themselves make good money in a little to no rake environment it will even make them comtemp and not try to improve. At least I know that if I could make easily double of what I make right now I probably wouldn't work on my game as much if at all, I'd much rather spend that time enjoying life. It is not as easy to start from 0 and go to the top or be a good regular in this game, for most people it takes years. Meanwhile as you say new people will start seeing poker as a good source of income, more people interested, even if it's mostly regs (most of these regs will be mediocre anyway), means better games overall because it also makes poker more popular, attracting more casuals even if just by word of mouth.

I don't understand exactly what your point is Romm3l because you claim your conclusion is that decreasing rake won't help and then you say it will help in the short term

That line of reasoning makes me think of Homer Simpson. Or maybe it's because of the blogpost above this one...

Stupid either way

On November 13 2014 11:07 Santafairy wrote: I don't understand exactly what your point is Romm3l because you claim your conclusion is that decreasing rake won't help and then you say it will help in the short term

very simply saying in the long run equilibrium state of the game, easy money no longer exists even if there is zero rake.

convergence towards that long run is inevitable and pointing fingers at the latest evil is a waste of time. once the bogeyman was training sites, then it was shortstackers, then bumhunters, and now it's rake. ideas like "if only we could eliminate the latest bogeyman then we could all live happily ever after" are false.


i also made the separate argument that campaigning for lower rake is futile, and arguments like "it would benefit the site" are false. i suspect people who come up with those arguments start with a conclusion they wish was true (lower rake will benefit amaya too, so they should look into it) and then try to argue the case.

On November 13 2014 11:23 pinbaLL wrote: That line of reasoning makes me think of Homer Simpson. Or maybe it's because of the blogpost above this one... Stupid either way

the line of reasoning is basically 'the theory of perfect competition' from economics 101 applied to poker: a field where the model's underlying assumptions all hold.

useful post though. i wonder what kind of a forum this is when the people who are making worthless and ban-worthy posts are mods...

your assumptions of long run are based on nothing, so why should anyone argue with you ;o

what i mean exactly is: there is no data to show us how many regs would come back to poker bacause of any of those two scenarios

also if multiaccounting is so simple, why noone does this? it gives huge advatage to change nickname every week even now without a cap on nr of tables allowed, i dont see people complaing about new regs comin to tables over and over

my long run "assumptions" are actually logical conclusions that follow from the following base assumptions which i have presented using analogy:

- if a guy sees a hundred dollar bill on the other side of the street, he is likely to go over and pick it up
- if instead it's a dollar bill, he is less likely to bother

do you really need data to show you this? if i tell you not to sprint nose-first into a brick wall will you ask me for empirical evidence that it results in a bad outcome too?

you can imagine poker as this scenario where the dollar value of the bill across the street will tend to end up in inverse proportion to the number and skill of people crossing the street to try and pick it up. do you want data to show people win less when games are tougher?

No. So you just mean to say that games will get tougher in the long run so nothing will really help? Of course games will always get tougher no matter if rake decreases or not. I don't think anyone will argue that. A significant decrease in rake will still help the poker economy a shitload though.

I agree with everything Romm3l has said. His analysis is spot on and makes perfect sense. People arguing against fail to acknowledge drawing to a 1outer (rake free platform) or fail to grasp really basic economic concepts. Rake reduction incentivises regs to get better or at least stick around longer, fish don't care about rake so there isn't an increase in easy money into the pool.

+1 for Romm3l being basically correct. If the rough equilibrium right now is too unprofitable or unpleasant for you to find the fish, that means there are too many regs who are willing to stoop lower than you. This is the stable long-run state, or if it's unstable that's because it's getting worse (fish continue to get rarer). Anything that makes the games juicy enough for you to play again, whether it's a sudden rake decrease or a new one-shot influx of fish, can only have a temporary effect. The same forces that drove the games to the current equilibrium (there being a lot of regs with higher tolerance for pain/low income than you) will begin eating that surplus and driving it back to equilibrium again.

On the other hand ggplz's idea of limiting multi-tabling would reduce the leverage of the pool of pain-tolerating regs that fill the site now. But I agree with Romm3l that unless you are living in a very low cost of living place this probably won't help enough to matter to you.

It will pretty much never happen as PS would have to be near death for them to implement changes like I suggested. I know that and don't realistically expect that to happen ever. It would help the games a lot right now though as they are serious nit/rake fests and 0 fun to play Isn't it meant to be about fun, after all? I can see why the PS casino is a great idea now

I'd just tell regs to quit but every PS reg is fueled by greed and self interest. They would say, well, all the regs quit so it's super soft now with fish... gg. PS has you for eternity my friend, enjoy grinding with all the other greedy nits