Honestly, our company looked into lowering the rake as well. I mean, who wouldn't in order to try to break into a very cluttered marketplace.

However, as we soon realized, the cost to get one of these sites up has been significant, not to mention the marketing, support, etc. Boo hoo, right? We chose to open the site. The rewards outway the risks if we start to see traffic, no question about that.

Some of the posts on this thread are on the money, though. The unfortunate result of this new site's venture will be seeing tight-fisted sharks rock gardening each other on the tables. And without an influx of cash from the rake to fund big freerolls, guarenteed tournaments and freebies (not to mention customer support, marketing, operations, etc), these folks look to have a rough ride just to get out of the gate.

Thanks to Earl, I'm a believer in Karma, so I'll never wish ill of any site. But assuming they get 2000 people to sign up and pay $15 per/month, that's $30K gross revenue for what might be 4 tables worth of traffic. Unless everyone in the company is bankrolled (or working for free), they're going to be in the red for quite some time.

Like it or not, a poker site is a casino and every casino needs to give away big prizes in order to stimulate the imagination. I constantly run into people and ask them about where they play poker. More often than not, I find most play at Party not because of the fish, but because they are waiting to hit the Bad Beat Jackpot. When I ask, 'you don't mind paying an extra $.50 in rake?', they to a man reply: "Yeah, but I only pay that when I win."

Zero Rake's problem will become this site's problem. Namely, how do you get casual players into a site without cold, hard cash prizes flowing from the site like water? And above all, no casual player is going to 'subscribe' to a poker site...because they all feel that's like paying a site every month to lose at poker.

Again, the market will tell. Personally, I don't know a single casual player who's complaining about the $1 rake that was taken...because they're happy about the $19 dollars they took down AND the $5 in bonus money they earned back yesterday.

I wish them luck.