The Rake :( - Page 4

Poll: Try to reduce rake?
(Vote): I think it's fine the way it is.
(Vote): I think rake is too high and would participate in something like a strike in efforts to reduce it.
(Vote): I think rake is too high, but I'm not going to do anything about it.

theres a factor im sure most people are missing...
the lower the rake...the closer poker becomes to a zero sum game...it becomes easier to have tables with all regulars viable with significant edges...so if theres less fish its okay...

on the practical part....strike is pointless because there is not nearly enough leverage...

there are 2 ways to change
- enough poker players unite to constitute leverage and force sites to do this -- most likely impractical
- a better business plan is released and takes over market share -- if i knew how to and had the funds there would already be a monthly rake site...i think its a good business plan

On October 14 2010 19:49 Minsk wrote:the lower the rake...the closer poker becomes to a zero sum game...it becomes easier to have tables with all regulars viable with significant edges...so if theres less fish its okay...

You underestimate the rake's impact in the games. It's mainly the rake causing the huge variance in the games, not the edge between the players. Lower/no rake = more edge for better players = lower variance. No Limi Texas Hold'em is simply too complex to become considered as a zero sum game. I doubt anyone in the world is even close to solving it at this point. If the rake is just lowered we should see a huge difference in swings.

really interesting thread, lowering the cap on rake in cash games would have a really solid impact on the games as a whole. im surprised there's no compensating in this thread (or as a whole among poker players) since stars, in the end, is going to make their judgments entirely based on whats best for stars...poker players should be the same way but it seems they're not.

Unfortunately most people who would have the connections/experience to start a bonafide business through a new poker site, would know that simply offering price as the sole positioning to differentiate themselves from the competition would be a highly vulnerable endeavor . The existing operators can counter them so quickly and so brutally that I can't imagine some hero businessman taking up the task

All I know is we domesticate ourselves, and look what happens. You know what they say, in the poker game of life, women are the rake

They are the fucking rake....

On October 14 2010 11:02 Baal wrote: if regs leave, the site will be a fish pool that will attract regs and this is why its so damn hard to organize a large ammount of regs, we fuck ourselves because poker players are greedy and short term oriented.

didnt read the whole thread but I guess thats what would make any sizeable protest against rake really hard to organize, I could see myself stop playin poker to defend our interests but I think most would just take advantage of it and jump in the fishy games that such a boycot would create

I would easily pay up to 1k a month up front without even thinking twice if it meant 100% rakeback.

lol $50 bucks. my god i'd be a rich man.

On October 14 2010 17:57 Surprise wrote: I'm pretty stunned at the poker players here that don't want to fight for a rake reduction. Who would've thought if you proposed a measure that could greatly increase everyone's hourly rate that some people wouldn't bother to support it?

I think a lot of people just accept it because it's been the standard practice from the beginning. The idea of "hey, maybe rake should be way less than it is" just doesn't come to mind because it's what everyone is used to. I think it's time to shake things up and start organizing. There is a clear impetus to do so. There are also lots of good ideas out there as well as solutions to any potential problems.

I think the next big boom in poker will come when rake is significantly reduced. When people realize the price to play poker has been highway robbery. As consumers we've got to do a better job of representing ourselves and pushing for much needed change.

I think the first thing to push for as a group would be greatly reduced rake at .25/.50 and below. Not just because I'm a member of that player base but because the more winners we have at those limits the more fish end up getting into the higher games. People at these limits and below are disproportionately affected by rake. They see 5% of every pot they play raked away. Meanwhile people playing at 5/10 lose only a fraction of a %. The overall rake is a much lower pt/bb effect at those limits. Such inequality needs to be addressed.

On October 14 2010 23:29 MiPwnYa wrote: Show nested quote + On October 14 2010 11:02 Baal wrote: if regs leave, the site will be a fish pool that will attract regs and this is why its so damn hard to organize a large ammount of regs, we fuck ourselves because poker players are greedy and short term oriented. didnt read the whole thread but I guess thats what would make any sizeable protest against rake really hard to organize, I could see myself stop playin poker to defend our interests but I think most would just take advantage of it and jump in the fishy games that such a boycot would create

It's also really tough for a guy like you because you've put so much effort this year into getting SNE. In order to maintain your 65% rakeback you really can't stop playing. It's almost not an option for you. There are however lots of ways to bring your voice to the matter.

First of all in every major blog, poker related website, or forum there should be a thread stickied to the top of the boards about fighting for a reduction in rake. Similar to the fact that there are always people demanding lower tuition on University campuses. Negative campaigning all over the internet about how greedy Pokerstars is with the amount they rake is a good start.

Then its a matter of building a big enough group of people that say we will give all our business as consumers to the Poker site that makes this change. Even if all the regulars on Pokerstars left to play on FTP the FTP games would still be more profitable of the rake was greatly reduced. The rake is the single largest factor that causes the situation where very few players can be winners.

This is not something that's going to happen overnight. It's not something that's going to happen in one fell swoop where the players get everything they want. It's about picking target goals and flooding Pokerstars support with 100+ e-mails a day. Constantly bombarding them with the demand completely over flooding the support e-mail system. Talking about it everywhere. There are plenty of things we can do to make life difficult on Pokerstars.

Imagine an army of micro/non-micro players who whilst not playing but have a computer on nearby can sit out on 24 tables. That's not something that's difficult to do whilst your doing something else you would normally be up to like watching a favorite TV show or whatever. Having 2-3 seats blocked on a table makes it difficult for others to participate in the games and all of a sudden those people start complaining and hear about the strike and maybe join in.

All it takes is enough people that care about starting this movement. I care about starting it. I'm going to keep campaigning for it every day. I don't care if people get sick of hearing about it or are pessimistic about the potential for results. I'm going to keep on fighting for this issue for as long as I'm a poker player. I hope a lot of others take up the cause and do the same.

On October 15 2010 00:04 YoMeR wrote: I would easily pay up to 1k a month up front without even thinking twice if it meant 100% rakeback. lol $50 bucks. my god i'd be a rich man.

So would a lot of other people. The games up higher would be softer. The games health overall would be much better long-term, and that's the point.

Also $50.00 is just an arbitrary number that I think it could be done for. It could be a graduated fee based on the level of games that you play in. Not only that but instead of a monthly fee you could just have a "Rake Meter" in your cashier page. If you opt in to use the rakemeter it could work like this. The would keep track of your monthly accrued individually contributed rake. Once you raked over the required value - in your suggestion 1k - all further rake would be returned to you as 100% Rakeback at the end of the month.

The player in this case has to do nothing but opt in. Your contributed rake is tabulated and once you fill the monthly rake meter all further rake is returned to you as rakeback. That's simply a rake cap system and would be very effective in providing far better rakeback overall to those who put in large volume. So at NL2 the meter is $50 and at NL50 maybe it's $250 and so on. Still allows Pokerstars to make a good deal of money but also greatly reduces the fee we're all paying as individuals who play poker. The price is too high and its not justifiable. Any poker player on the wrong side of this issue needs to wake up and join the fight to lower the rake.

Sites incentivize players to play more for increased rakeback through their VIP programs and people make goals out of trying to hit Ironman or SNE. So far everything you've suggested, Benjamin, would cut into a site's profits by huge percentages. The amount of bad publicity and organized strikes that would have to occur for them to do anything but laugh at your suggestions would be enormous. If they look at their data and find out that at any given stake the top 5% rake contributors make up 25% of rake income at that level it would mean that setting up a rakecap that is only +EV for those top 5% players is still going to heavily influence their profit margins and still wouldn't satisfy the other 95% of players. Maybe small changes could be pushed for, but I'm really not sure what.
Thinking a little bit more about the whole issue and the problems one would face if they were to attempt creating a rival poker room I had a somewhat crazy idea: open-source player-developed non-profit poker room.
It would need a large group effort to be successful I'm sure, and there would be all sorts of complications concerned with creating something that has control of the money or disallows any individual from having control. The gist of the idea is developers help create the poker software, since it's open source anyone can help out add new features they want or whatever although there would probably need to be quite a bit of moderation, testing, and triple checking of code for security purposes. In the end large open source projects usually end up more secure, efficient, and stable than their proprietary adversaries. If the site once created and launched showed enough success and traffic the money made off interest from players' funds could cover the costs of servers and any maintenance so basically it would have a long term 0 rake goal in mind.
Currently unsolved problems with this idea:
Voluntary-only support, probably on forums
Control issues as far as who has the right to dictate or enforce the rules
Marketing would probably have to be cost free

I'm not against getting lower rake, but calling Stars 'greedy' because they take rake is just a bad rationalization. They are supposed to make money, not run a non profit. Also stars offers one of the highest effective rb% on probably one of the safest sites on the net. With 65% rb I think they have effectively lowered rake quite a bit.

^ true, but a very microscopic % of the player pool are getting that high of a %. the rest are just chumps giving Lee a good laugh while he scoots on towards the bank. (yes i still believe Lee exists somewhere within pokerstars. so sue me)

I would definately participate in this kind of strike. But would be hard for me to do so for a long time. I got bills to pay.

Yeah Yomer I think the lucky thing is only something like 5% of players are winners. Even fewer are grinding for a living. So hopefully a lot of people should be able to participate. I think also the grinders will certainly be able to participate in other ways other than overtly striking. Blogs, articles, stickied forum threads, and joining up to large petitions etc. Getting some negative advertising about how much rake is being taken to go viral through the internet would be the first big step. Raise the awareness and then start to build the movement.

On October 14 2010 14:53 Baal wrote: Show nested quote + On October 14 2010 14:24 Bigbobm wrote: You all have to realize we hold absolutely no leverage, and no bargaining power with these poker sites. These sites are businesses, and I don't see them sacrificing their profits to make regulars who pay thousands in rake happy. Also, suggesting that they have players pay an upfront fee is an absolutely retarded idea. Regardless of the price you suggest, only the players who are going to be +ev paying up front will consider the option while the rest follow the current pay as you go method. This is obviously a stupid proposition from the sites point of view as they will only lose profit.   On October 14 2010 13:20 NMcNasty wrote: One thing we can do however is recognize that the websites operate in a competitive environment. If new players were better educated as to which sites charged the least in rake and were more informed as to how that effects the profitability of the games, the major sites would be forced to lower rakes in order to compete. This is really our only viable option. Unfortunately there is a pretty consistent industry standard on rake charged which leaves us to rely on sites that provide higher rb as ways to reduce rake. Again this is a tough spot to go because a lot of sites like Red Nines or WSEX have had incredibly good looking rb %s, but accounts are either stolen, or software/support/etc is straight garbage compared to the norm. we do have power we are just not united enough to use it properly, poker players won a battle against pokerstars in .fr didnt they?

What happened in France? Did stars change their policy or something? I saw the start of the situation, but didn't follow what happened after...

EDIT: ah, looked around on google, and found this article. Cudos to both players and poker stars:

http://www.gamblejack.net/blog/pokerstars-fr-rake-reduces-the-cash-tables/

On October 15 2010 14:33 phexac wrote: Show nested quote + On October 14 2010 14:53 Baal wrote:   On October 14 2010 14:24 Bigbobm wrote: You all have to realize we hold absolutely no leverage, and no bargaining power with these poker sites. These sites are businesses, and I don't see them sacrificing their profits to make regulars who pay thousands in rake happy. Also, suggesting that they have players pay an upfront fee is an absolutely retarded idea. Regardless of the price you suggest, only the players who are going to be +ev paying up front will consider the option while the rest follow the current pay as you go method. This is obviously a stupid proposition from the sites point of view as they will only lose profit.   On October 14 2010 13:20 NMcNasty wrote: One thing we can do however is recognize that the websites operate in a competitive environment. If new players were better educated as to which sites charged the least in rake and were more informed as to how that effects the profitability of the games, the major sites would be forced to lower rakes in order to compete. This is really our only viable option. Unfortunately there is a pretty consistent industry standard on rake charged which leaves us to rely on sites that provide higher rb as ways to reduce rake. Again this is a tough spot to go because a lot of sites like Red Nines or WSEX have had incredibly good looking rb %s, but accounts are either stolen, or software/support/etc is straight garbage compared to the norm. we do have power we are just not united enough to use it properly, poker players won a battle against pokerstars in .fr didnt they? What happened in France? Did stars change their policy or something? I saw the start of the situation, but didn't follow what happened after... EDIT: ah, looked around on google, and found this article. Cudos to both players and poker stars: http://www.gamblejack.net/blog/pokerstars-fr-rake-reduces-the-cash-tables/

i think they did

On October 14 2010 22:14 Carthac wrote: All I know is we domesticate ourselves, and look what happens. You know what they say, in the poker game of life, women are the rake They are the fucking rake....

What the fuck are you talking about? What- what saying?

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On October 15 2010 03:18 jchysk wrote: Thinking a little bit more about the whole issue and the problems one would face if they were to attempt creating a rival poker room I had a somewhat crazy idea: open-source player-developed non-profit poker room. It would need a large group effort to be successful I'm sure, and there would be all sorts of complications concerned with creating something that has control of the money or disallows any individual from having control. The gist of the idea is developers help create the poker software, since it's open source anyone can help out add new features they want or whatever although there would probably need to be quite a bit of moderation, testing, and triple checking of code for security purposes. In the end large open source projects usually end up more secure, efficient, and stable than their proprietary adversaries. If the site once created and launched showed enough success and traffic the money made off interest from players' funds could cover the costs of servers and any maintenance so basically it would have a long term 0 rake goal in mind. Currently unsolved problems with this idea: Voluntary-only support, probably on forums Control issues as far as who has the right to dictate or enforce the rules Marketing would probably have to be cost free

Hey everybody,

I just signed up to post this. That is your solution. As a semi-notable former game developer who spent several years working on Open Source software, I can tell you that the technical cost of writing software like PokerStars is very tiny- one guy with enough willpower could likely write a similar quality client in under 6 months. I don't know the other costs like administration and legal, but I doubt it's many orders of magnitude greater than the technical costs.

Just off the top of my head, here's what I can imagine: you download the opensource software which contains a list of servers offering games- you can always add more servers to your server list. You go to the servers and find a game someone has setup. Now the game is not hosted on the server (that's only for finding games), but on all participating players machines. A player sends an encrypted long string to all the other players. After the hand is finished, they send out another key to decrypt the long string to confirm their hand. This kind of encryption is impossible to crack. Since everyone taking part in the game is collectively hosting the game (peer to peer network), no rake needs to be taken.

For handling the money, bitcoin has been making a lot of noise recently although I don't really know how it works. I imagine when you sit down for your $100, that it gets added to a special account for the current game which everyone has a small piece of the total password for. Maybe you have to deposit another $200 into there so that when you leave, you do actually relinquish your password to the rest of the group. These schemes are just from the top of my head, but with a bit of ingenuity and thinking, the security issues and problems can be worked out into a water tight scheme.

Of course the poker community is not much of a community. Reading this thread you can just see how fragmented people are. Open Source communities are very selfless and strong, which is what really makes the projects work (cooperation). This solution would give you rake free poker software, with the power in your hands (not hostage to companies since you have access to all the tech) and security (since the source-code is open, any dodgy business gets quickly discovered). It's truly a capitalist model since you can design your own games and if you don't like some aspect then you can easily fragment (design your own game, move to another server, or change the software and redistribute it) or even make your own skin (complete with integrated HUD, scripted play or auto-fold hands). The poker companies are scamming you and laughing to the bank while you chase the bonuses.

This model is a federated peer2peer design. You can read more details,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_(information_technology)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_identity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer2peer
Diaspora is a distributed social network that was funded by donations,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(software)
Excellent example of distribution,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

Distribution is an established methodology and with enough mathematical schemes to prevent exploitation, they are rock solid in terms of security.}

On October 15 2010 13:37 YoMeR wrote: ^ true, but a very microscopic % of the player pool are getting that high of a %. the rest are just chumps giving Lee a good laugh while he scoots on towards the bank. (yes i still believe Lee exists somewhere within pokerstars. so sue me) I would definately participate in this kind of strike. But would be hard for me to do so for a long time. I got bills to pay.

Yea but those people are the ones paying the most rake, and obviously the most deserving. Even still, almost any serious regular who gives stars a majority of their action will get supernova which is mid 40% rb. While Lee might still be lining his pockets, they are still giving back a shit ton of money to their biggest rake payers.

I'd rather have a reward system that encourages casual players to want to reach higher vip levels so they get more bonuses than to effectively give it to them by cutting the rake.