The Rake :( - Page 12

Do you want a site that charges lower rake? I can tell you what you have to do to make that happen.

First of all, you have to realize that you guys- the guys who play enough poker to actually make a lot of money from it- basically don't matter to the sites at all. Pokerstars doesn't care about you at all, because they don't make any money off of you. You never deposit money to them (other than your initial 50$ lol), you just take it away from fish. Fish are where all the money comes from. The only reason Pokerstars even offers supernova and supernova elite is to encourage the fish- "play hard and you might someday become like one of those guys!" It's not to thank you for paying so much rake, because that money was all going to end up in their hands anyway. Once money is deposited on the site, it's effectively theirs. They probably think that winning players who withdraw money are stealing money from them. And like someone said earlier, if a bunch of pros boycott a site, other pros will just step in to take their place at the new "soft" site.

If you want the sites to change their ways, you have to organize the people who are actually important to the sites- they fish! They have all the power here. If fish won't play at a site, no one else will either, and the site fails. There's so many small sites which have failed because no one wanted to play there. Many of them offered really nice rakeback deals, way better than pokerstars or FTP.

However, fish don't care about rakeback. Most of them probabably don't even know what it is, and don't sign up for it when they make their account. They don't really need to care, because if you just deposit $100, then the rake is just a small part of that. These are the people who will throw away 5 BB "just to see a flop" because 5 BB is a small amount of money and they're not paying it over and over like you guys are. So they pretty much don't care about rake at all.

If you want to make sites lower their rake, you have to make fish care about rake. You need to launch a massive advertising campaign aimed at teaching fish just how much they're spending on rake, and how much harder it makes the games. Show them how someone who's a marginal winner without rake becomes a massive lower with rake. Put up a counter that shows how 90% of their losses just went to rake. Make them think they can be the next Ivey if the rake didn't stand in their way. Make them flock towards whichever site has the lowest rake, and let the sites compete with each other in a price war. That's pretty much the only way it's ever going to happen. And I don't think it ever will happen, because it basically requires you to educate fish on a huge scale.

So, do I sign up somewhere for a petition or something ._.

Luddite I agree 100%

Negative campaigning against how much they are raking. Revealing the farce of the "Find the Pokerstar in you" bs when only 3-5% of people can be winning players over top of the rake they charge. Just ridiculous.

So I started a new thread and low and behold Bigbobm shows up to close it on me. He's been arguing against any sort of movement against the rake from the beginning so I hardly think he should be the one doing that.

The new thread is clearly designed to focus the discussion on beginning the movement and collecting e-mails and PM's of people who want to be involved. If you wanted to close a thread it should be the old one and let the new one focus the discussion in the direction of taking some action.

Also a big WTF to any of you who think we shouldn't do anything about the rake and about how it disproportionately affects the lower stakes. If you were playing 2/4 and you won an $800 pot and were forced to pay $40.00 in rake that's the equivalent of what most lower stakes players experience in every pot they play. Yeah it's a hell of a lot harder to win when you're giving 5% of every pot to the house. When you're being raked at 10pt/bb you have a right to complain. That's what the lower stakes are going through. When poker first started it wasn't such a big deal because people were so horrible but now there are 3-4 regulars on every low stakes table and 10pt/bb rake is pretty brutal to beat.

Negative advertising and articles about how the rake is greedy and is destroying the games from the bottom up is not bad for poker. It's just about the only thing we might be able to do to fix the situation in future. The long-term health of the games is what's at stake. If you're okay with no fish making it up from the lower stakes into your games because they're paying 10pt/bb in rake then you don't have your own best interests at heart. Just because you're making 50% rakeback as a 500k VPP Supernova doesn't mean that's the situation for everyone else.

On October 27 2010 13:53 Bejamin1 wrote: Revealing the farce of the "Find the Pokerstar in you" bs when only 3-5% of people can be winning players over top of the rake they charge..

That's just awesome, let's do that... We can also update the software so a big fish gets big red letters on his screen stating he is a big fish and will lose thousands of dollars playing on that table.

That said it is obv true the rake is pretty high. It's been said a ton of times here why it is really hard to get pokerstars to lower the rake. Americans are screwed, but other players can just get a big rb% on 'euro'sites. There are still a lot out there. I never understood why non-american microstakes players played on pokerstars.
I started 2 years ago and grinded through the microstakes with a 4ptbb winrate, from which at least 2ptbb was rakeback. 2 ptbb is what you are missing when playing on pokerstars! For a lot of people pokerstars is the place to be, but not for microplayers imo. Sure, try to lower the rake, or just move.
(i'm sorry if you are american, and your country on lp is wrong, in that case you are screwed)

Educating fish seems like a waste of effort. Either you successfully educate them and they're no longer fish or you're just bothering some gamblers with things they don't care about.
5% long run winning players seems normal though. In trading only 20% make money, 5% consistently enough to believe it's more than luck.
Anyway as far as the disproportionate rake goes, things tend to balance out. Regs don't last at a stake they can't beat, so if there aren't enough fish to furnish the regs income after rake then the amount of regs will decrease.
Open source poker platform might help, but who knows.

http://www.liquidpoker.net/poker-forum/929678/Fight_The_Rake.html

refer to my post about this. Also i would argue that the rake is higher at lower stakes but MUCH higher winrates can be had at the lower stakes and thus it compensates for the terrible rake. Get better, move up and problem solved. Btw start winning money from the regs too then. Poker is hard its getting harder for everyone, deal with it people jeez

so what are you guys going to do to convince pokerstars to burn all their money?

I'm not sure why people can't do all they can to get better (and even succeed at doing so) and still try to do something about rake. I don't disagree that focusing too much on this is less productive than just trying to get better, but even some of you who feel that way are putting just as much wasted time into telling others they are wasting their time.

cuz as long as pokerstars is making money no one is going to dent them enough to make it worth it for them to change anything THUS most of the things that are being proposed will just hurt everyone but wont yield any rewards. the only companies that would listen to feedback are the ones that dont have much of the market place. but the giants will NOT do anything differently as long as they continue to be the ones cleaning up

Doomer I agree with you 100%. Something has to be done. It is clear that not enough people in the poker community want to simply lobby for lower rake. We need to do something more directly to influence these sites. We need to raise a competing site of our own through the strength of the online poker community. It also becomes quite clear that those who make their livelihood from the games don't want to do anything to piss off Pokerstars or risk damaging Poker in general. Things like negative advertising to fish which would absolutely be necessary in order to get the word out about how rake is gouging the players and that the dream of "being a poker star" is pretty much bollocks if your playing micros and 5% rake with tons of regulars.
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A copy paste of the changes I just made to the OP re-posted here for people who don't bother to check it:

New OP Thread Update

I have so far noticed that there are very few people willing to get organized or involved in a fight for lower rake because they feel that no matter what we do as players there will be no impetus for the major sites to change. Most have reflected that until a new site comes into the market and changes the competitive environment none of these sites will take any action. I suggest therefore that we throw our support behind Gen and others who wish to create a rake free poker site. I believe that such a site could be run entirely through donations and eventually advertising revenue. If we build it and all make a conscious effort to spread the word once it is built, both the fish and the regulars will come.

Gen has already showed quite plainly that it's not all that difficult to build this. Starting a large open source project and bringing in people from the poker community who want to work on it is the first thing we need to do. The second thing we need to do is a little fund raising from the major poker communities. On a rake free poker site the players win. I'd rather play at a table with all regulars and no rake than a table with one or two fish and a bunch of regulars + insane rake. I would much prefer to watch a 30 second ad over top of my table every 30 hands than be charged rake. This new site would charge for deposits, withdrawals, and peer-to-peer transfers. Not to make a profit but simply to keep costs down. All of which would be a massive amount cheaper than paying for rake as any regular can tell you.

This is a very achievable project. As a poker community if you want to see less rake in the games and more than 3-5% of people being winners and thus softer games higher up then support this movement to build a rake free site. If we build it they will come. We need the help of everyone in the poker community to help build it though. Computer science students, donations, and people who simply want to help advertise the site once it gets launched. There is absolutely no reason why the community can't organize and build such a project. There are hundreds if not thousands of online Poker Sites. It's really not that hard to do. Competing with large already branded sites will be difficult - but it gets a lot easier when your tag line is that nobody has to pay rake at our site. Lets work to build this into a reality.

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This is where w should through our organization. The first thing we probably need to get in place is a trusted group of 5-6 people who have strong reputations in online poker to help organize the building of a rake free site. Simply because if we raise donations I don't want some random "developer" who comes out of nowhere to scam the community out of a lot of money. Any money donated should be well tracked and expenditures should be public. I want this to be an open source project to which anyone can help contribute.

new OP is definitely better direction for the purposes of this thread. Id donate a little money if i knew it were heading towards something good. I dont necessarily have that much enthusiasm but its not to say it isn't a better idea. It could potentially be the solution so by all means, better application of this thread and people's time.

GL fellas

On October 25 2010 00:34 Jubert69 wrote: Do you guys realize how much it costs to run Pokerstars? Are they making a large profit? Probably. But here are things that hits Pokerstars's profits. Every time there is a deposit, there is a fee assessed. Every time there is a cashout, there is a fee assessed. They cover all those fees for everyone. Do you know how quickly Pokerstars responds to your emails? Sometimes minutes, usually within an hour. That's because they have a HUGE support system running 24/7. Do you feel safe Pokerstars handling your money? Most people answer yes, because your balance is an actual balance in a European bank. Do you know how big Pokerstars's security team is? Personally I don't, neither do most people, but they do large investigations, eg. Chinese DoN players, The Void in the WCOOP last year, etc. Do you know how much bandwidth/hosting is required to run PS? Yes sometimes it's slow as hell, but most of the time it runs with no issues, even then if you lost money, you can request a refund for losses, and usually they do give it to you. There are so many things in the background that we don't see. You can make a website, with little to no rake. But you won't be able to provide the security, support, volume, etc.. to Pokerstars unless you start increasing rake. As stated before, those who played on Prima websites like RedNines, much less rake. But have you tried cashing out/contact support on those places? Took days. Also, there's no way people could orchestrate the strike by no one playing. The reason FR got it because they have a small community. People who won't care about it, fish, they don't go to any poker forums like we do, they won't know whats going on. Regs who don't care as much about the rake, since it will be the regs orchestrating it, would be more profitable to play during those times. Yes rake sucks, but I don't think anytime will come remotely close to competing with Pokerstars rake wise(Other than the current sites out now like FTP.)

this. i like stars, their support, like everyone else says, is top tier in the world.

and what about deposit bonuses? aren't fish attracted to those, in which rake-free sites won't be able to offer?

deposit bonuses are just rakeback.

I support you in this. I PM'ed Benjamin my email.
I always wondered why other internetcompanies like facebook and google can make massive profits with completely free services and why pokerrooms can rape us in the ass for thousands of dollars payment for their service every month. It's a common fact that only having a lot of unpaying visitors on a website/community can be turned into good healthy profits for an internetcompany.

The people who are trying argumantate in favor of pokerrooms that make a netprofit (so after all the advertising and employeecosts) of 1,5 billion should be ashamed of theirselves or just admit that they work for Pokerstars. If things will stay this way online poker will be dead in 2 years and your winrate would be twice or 3 times as high with a fair rake system.

(These are newer screens than the video)
Full screen for the fish:

Minimal for the grinders (you can hide the toolbar also):


Slowly piecing together the server-side game engine.

Some questions:

1. Who is going to pay for the development of the software for this venture?
2. Who is going to pay for the domain name for this site?
3. Who is going to pay for the hosting of the domain for this site?
4. Who is going to pay to process deposits/withdraws for the site?
5. What country will this site be based out of?
6. Who will be the principal owners?
7. Who is going to do the marketing to have "sponsors" and what will the charges be to "sponsor"
8. What processor will you go to that will be able to process payments?
9. Who is going to do customer service, what platform will you use for customer service and will it be a 24 hour customer service?
10. Who are you going to get that will "VOLUNTEER" their time to do #9. Keeping in mind that this is a rake fee room?

This whole idea is nothing more than a pipedream. The margins made by poker rooms isn't as big as you think they are. There are a lot of costs not even mentioned in this post. I won't get into all of it but I know for certain it isn't as easy as people are making it out to be.

Processing fees aren't cheap, not to mention the cost to affiliates, software upgrades, legal team, customer service, etc etc, I can go on and on. WSEX tried a rake fee room it didn't work, partly because they didn't run it properly either.

Nice idea in concept but the main stream poker players accept rake as it is and rooms like Stars/Tilt do well with no major pushback about rake. It's the reality of poker just as is the take in the betting pools in horse racing and the 10% vig in sportsbetting.

On November 02 2010 18:46 Hotpizza wrote: Some questions: 1. Who is going to pay for the development of the software for this venture? 2. Who is going to pay for the domain name for this site? 3. Who is going to pay for the hosting of the domain for this site? 4. Who is going to pay to process deposits/withdraws for the site? 5. What country will this site be based out of? 6. Who will be the principal owners? 7. Who is going to do the marketing to have "sponsors" and what will the charges be to "sponsor" 8. What processor will you go to that will be able to process payments? 9. Who is going to do customer service, what platform will you use for customer service and will it be a 24 hour customer service? 10. Who are you going to get that will "VOLUNTEER" their time to do #9. Keeping in mind that this is a rake fee room? This whole idea is nothing more than a pipedream. The margins made by poker rooms isn't as big as you think they are. There are a lot of costs not even mentioned in this post. I won't get into all of it but I know for certain it isn't as easy as people are making it out to be. Processing fees aren't cheap, not to mention the cost to affiliates, software upgrades, legal team, customer service, etc etc, I can go on and on. WSEX tried a rake fee room it didn't work, partly because they didn't run it properly either. Nice idea in concept but the main stream poker players accept rake as it is and rooms like Stars/Tilt do well with no major pushback about rake. It's the reality of poker just as is the take in the betting pools in horse racing and the 10% vig in sportsbetting.

ZOMG THE DOMAIN NAME??? A whole $6

way to make an ado about nothing Linux, Bitcoin, Ubuntu, Freenode. You can find all your answers by researching those topics on Wikipedia.

You avoid any legal problems by using Bitcoin and allowing people to run their own Poker game servers. Therefore barrier of entry is really low to setup your own Poker site, and governments cannot track Bitcoin payments. Law is 100% ineffective. Also you purchase Bitcoins from independent traders, not from the Poker site.

I write the software. You run the servers. (You=LP, MyCompanyX, PlayerFundedServer, whoever). Sites build trust over time. It's like when governments tried to crush p2p. I will not provide a Poker server and won't be liable or responsible (unlike Napster). The law cannot tell you which software you can't or can use

You should be asking questions like:
1. How do you plan to provide security?
2. What trust metric are you using?
3. How can we stop botting?
4. How do you plan to load balance new people joining?
5. How can we attract new users?

Those are cooler questions I have elegant solutions for them.

1. The protocol will sit on top of IRC. IRC is a well proven hardened protocol that uses SSL (the most secure encryption- cake poker was using the weakest encryption for a long time before being discovered recently)
2. None. All security is based on networks of trust. I expect people to setup their own structures for evaluating trustworthiness.
3. If you look at the Wikipedia community, they have this huge bureaucracy devoted to managing the site. Something could exist like this where someone voices concern that person X is a bot. The elected leaders of the server all act as arbitrers and examine sensitive information (like HH's) and statistics that the community asks them to check. Trusted people earn their way over time by participating in the community until they get these sensitive privileges (like sysops on Wikipedia, and administrators on forums).
They would have rights to examine HH's only after they're a day old or something.
Different networks would have difference policies and structures. Some would be more open and community based, others more hierarchial and less open.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_and_the_bazaar
4. Plan to extend the network only by offering invites. This means I can control the number of users and avoid sudden peaks when new bugs are introduced.
5. Linux has NO good opensource poker client. They're all shitty and don't have real money games. Theres no Esperanto games and Esperanto speakers would appreciate a translated game to play Bitcoin community has a Poker provider, but his software isn't very good + he charges high rake (others were complaining about it). Also many countries have trouble depositing/withdrawing. Bitcoin avoids this issue entirely and charges no costs for that, so immediately a whole bunch of people can play. And no 'English Only' chat enforcement so people can make their own 'Spanish' themed tables. People can make their own custom games.

About the whole funding issue:
Already one person here volunteered their companies servers for testing. By offering hosting to another person, I have gained an administrator.
Another company in Spain I used to work with funds Free Software projects to increase their tech standing- having technical people associated with a company is good for competency + image. They funded the last project I worked on for $60k.
http://www.pokerth.net/ is funded by advertising Poker sites on their webpage. We could also sell branded versions to people for running their own sites (like liquidpoker.net?) and use that cash to fund our own private server.
Lastly, Poker players have a lot of money and could easily fund one via charity. This is the best option IMO. The cost per person would not be high, but in case this isn't possible (Poker players are very greedy) then there's all the options above.

On October 25 2010 22:52 Ket wrote: It's time to stop thinking like a bitch and think smart like a poker player. Paying too much in rake compared to your earnings? What's the solution, is it to make threads on forums trying to get ppl interested in sitout strikes that have about a 0% chance of accomplishing anything? no, it's to play fewer tables at higher stakes and to try and work on your game more instead of mindlessly masstable grind.

Nothing more to add here