Star City rake structure

[mark76]

Hi,
I live in Sydney (Australia) and was excited to learn that the Sydney Casino Star City is finally offering live poker.
It looks like there is about 8 tables and they offer all the popular variations of poker. Holdem, 7stud etc.

Limit games range from 5-10 to 40-80 and there is also pot and half pot available.

Unfortunatley they are using an unusual rake structure.
They make the player pay a fee for every hand they play.
Its 75c on the 5-10 $1 on the 10-20 and 20-40 and $1.25 on the 40-80. I think the pot and half pot are either $1 or $1.25 per hand.

A full table of nine players runs at 30 hands per minute so In a 5-10 game each player will roughly pay 30*.75 $22.50 per hour. Professional players usually claim their win rates to be 1-2 big bets per hour ($10-$20 in this game) which means their no point in playing. Its just been reduced to a dumb casino game.

At the other extreme the $40-$80 might be worthwhile 30*1.25 = 37.50 per hour against a possible win rate of $80-$160.

The other factors are that with only a couple of players at the table the number of hands might double to 60 per hour and this would cut profits down even more.

Star Cities rate structure punishes good players. In a game where the winners pot is cut its the poorer players who are in every hand who end up paying most of the rake.

I'm not sure how to caculate the effect of the rake on the pot and half pot games. The blinds are $5 $5.

So ...
Can anybody help me to calculate the pot and half pot ?

Also..
Its my logic correct for this rake structure. Any comments or advice ?

Thanks,

Mark

[bobbyi]

[ QUOTE ]
Its 75c on the 5-10 $1 on the 10-20 and 20-40 and $1.25 on the 40-80. I think the pot and half pot are either $1 or $1.25 per hand.

A full table of nine players runs at 30 hands per minute so In a 5-10 game each player will roughly pay 30*.75 $22.50 per hour. Professional players usually claim their win rates to be 1-2 big bets per hour ($10-$20 in this game) which means their no point in playing.

[/ QUOTE ]
Keep in mind that the win rate professionals cite is taking into account the rake they are already paying. You are making the comparison as if they were playing in games with no rake since you are subtracting the full amount of rake you will be paying from their win rate. The actual amount you want to subtract is the difference between the rake you pay and the rake they pay.

That said, this 5/10 game is still raked way too hard. It isn't necessarily completely unbeatable, but isn't going to be beatable for much and isn't woth your time if your goal is to make serious money (as opposed to, say, to get practice playing). The bigger games should be reasonable beatable, although those rakes are still pretty harsh. You're paying roughly 30/hr to play 20/40, which about twice what I would consider a reasonable amount (for example, at Borgata in Atlantic City, 20/40 is 7 per half hour; of course, US$1 doesn't exactly equal AUD$1, so we may not be talking about games that aren't exactly same size).

[PokerMike]

IMO the rake hurts too much at the 5/10, but is readily beatable(for a respectable amount) at the 10/20 if only because that game plays far worse than the party 0.5/1. Its also worth checking out the 5/10 half pot game since the pot sizes are usually comparable to the 10/20 pots(sometimes far far larger).

[TStoneMBD]

yah that rake is on pluto :[

[BlueBear]

The rake is exhorbitantly high in the 5/10 and 10/20 games, to the extent I feel it is unplayable. However, there is considerable value with the rake structure in the half pot limit games and loose manila games in my opinion.