Rake-Free & Ran By the Poker Community? - Page 8

whamm the reason people are criticizing this idea so hard is because it's a non-sensical way to get rid of rake (i.e a company's profit). How does partypoker get users? Simple. Rake players, then spend a shit load: to the tune of 100 million euros per year to attract new players (leaving 145 million in profits). By making a site rake free you are robbing yourself of the only source of income and hence capital to reinvest in your business. And fat chance advertising is going to compare to rake. This is how every poker site out there makes money. Case counter-example: WSEX tried rake-free, failed to make money, and then went back to rake.

You guys have a non-existent business model for future sites to make money except by saying "software is free". Implied in this statement is that software costs make up a chunk of operating expenses. If you think this is true then go check out partygaming's financial statements.

Finally, the open source project. I think working on projects is good. I just think that your design of features for your project stinks. You guys are designing it based on what a grinder would want: integrated HEM, autofold of hands, etc. Some of these features will totally confuse and overwhelm a random fish with unnecessary information. Do you think the typical poker player thinks like: "His vpip is t% so pokerstoving his range I get x, y, z. His fold to 3bet% is r, therefore the correct mathematical play is to 3bet with my entire range" or is it more like "omg I just got aces, what should I do?". Now I don't know who is on the team but I would suggest looking into getting a UI designer (or a HCI prof to review your prototypes) who will give much better insight into what is important for the interface. For example here is one thing we were shown in design class: on windows machines the menu items are harder to click because each menu button is not flush with the top of the screen. So the target region's area is finite. On Mac's every menu is flush with the top of the screen. You can therefore scroll infinitely upwards and still be on the target menu region. You can easily see the impact of this in the major sites and why we think some interfaces are tilting to multitable. I just think it's naive to think that you can come up with a better interface purely through better features.

Ok you raise some good points about the software, why not tell the team this? Im not part of the team fyi , I simply dont have time for any more poker related stuff atm(but obv im just fond of this site) , but I'm here to help inform people about what I know about open source projects and what in my mind, this can become - trying very hard to be impartial since genjix is a friend of mine whom i never really talked to in like a year now since hes been busy with wikepedia and open source stuff last i heard and kinda quit poker. I am not naive on how the world works or how business is done, what's fascinating about open source is that no one really "owns" it,and unlike its real life counterparts, it CAN succeed and in some cases, even be better than proprietary versions run by big corporations. Just go to forums or attend meetings of the project if you wanna add something , suggest, or give solutions to make the whole thing better. its going to materialize no matter what so debating is kinda useless imo, just help make it better if you care about the possibility of rake free open source poker. cheers