[MrDannimal]

One thing people seem to be missing in comparing this idea to the MMORPG "sweatshop" is that with the MMORPG, there is no point at which the employee has access to actual money.

They sign on, grind out in-game currency, and at the end of their shift, they give that currency to another character (who is like the "bank" holding the currency for sale). There's no way to get actual real-world money other than as pay.

This is substantially less true in the hypothetical poker sweatshop. Even if the "company" sets up all the accounts and handles the process of getting money into the poker account, what's to keep the pleyers from chip dumping to a friend who isn't in the sweatshop? That friend then gives them a cut after cashout, and all it has to do is be bigger than their hourly pay and voila!

Also, with an MMORPG, there is no risk of losing real money. The only fear is that an employee won't reach his quota (and in fact, you can often fleece gold farmers at the end of their shifts as they cut "prices" on items in an effort to make quota), that he won't generate enough on-line currency.

In poker, there is a definite risk of losing real world money. In my last 6 hours of play, I made 8 BB. Two 3-hour sessions, one was -37 BB, the other was +45 BB. Both are outliers in comparison to what I normally see in a single session result (although the net result is a little low, it's pretty inline for a small sample). But imagine I'm working for a "poker farm", and finish my shift down 37 BB. Do I even get the chance to have the +45 BB session tomorrow?

On top of that, there's a definite cost involved in finding out if a given employee is a winning player. It's not like you can dump 100 people into the play money pool (or even micro-limits) and say "Learn!". There is far less cost involved with an MMORPG. There is a LOT of zero-revenue time spent learning how to even be a .2 bb/100 player at even 2/4.

Overhead/startup cost is also much greater. Let's assume that the equipment cost is the same (1 station per employee). If you're going to put your employee at .5/1, you would need to bankroll each player with AT LEAST $100 (and probably more). MMORPGS cost less to play in places like China and the like (partly because they can't afford $15/month). Even at the U.S. rate of $15/month, that's almost 7 months worth of play!

From a "farming" standpoint, there's little financial incentive to try poker over any MMORPG.

Now, I'm not saying that there won't be people in foreign countries who will play and win, and be happy winning at a much lower rate than your average american. In fact, I think the individual player is the only one there's any amount of concern about. However, those individuals fall under the same fish/shark rule that any other poker player would. For every third world player who comes in and is happy at .2 bb/100, there will be 5-10 more who lose money trying and the barrier to entry is much higher than that for a company.

Yes, if you suddenly added a large # of marginal winners to the playerbase, it would impact the existing winning players AT THAT LEVEL. I don't think worrying about this scenario happening is any more worthwhile than worrying about extracting the maximum from a flopped Royal Flush. It's so unlikely, and there are so many other things you could be thinking about that would have a greater EV.