[slavic]

This reminds me a good bit of Compaq's old channel marketting aproach. At one point their bottomline showed as much as a tenth of the companies revenues were being sucked up in kickbacks to the channel itself.

The easy solution as Compaq saw it was get away from their channel and evolve into a Direct Marketer, the problem is that you are already in bed with your current model and changing it is just as likely to kill you as to help you. I have long thought that the affiliate programs had the potential to be very bad for Online Poker, I just didn't believe it was quite this large. If 10% of players make up 70% of play then party is looking at an extremely significant cost of "rakeback", the easiest way to solve it would be to drop all affiliates.

I think fortunatly for party that would be a less painfull ploy than it turned out for Compaq.