Hey Dikshit

[Dave D]

The MTT is usually my home, but I ventured out today for fun. I'm going to try to respond to OOO's main point.

I understand OOO's point about the "source" of rake being the fish, and that makes perfect sense. Everyone is paying rake, but the fish are basically providing it for the pros, the pros are using the fish's money to pay the rake. That's all well and good. You're also saying that if the pro/fish ratio becomes too tilted towards pros, Party makes less money because everyone plays tight and the people fueling the system (fish who deposit) all die off and stop depositing. This is all well and good, however...

1. You're talking about Party. You're telling me *the* (arguably) fishiest site on the internet has any forseeable problem with luring enough fish. If party is in *any* danger of a problem, then imagine what the situation is for the next tier of competition like stars. Now imagine what it must be like for full tilt and Bodog etc But those sites are only growing, I don't think this is a problem. I don't think party is anywhere *near* that kind of situation. They might be having issues with *growth*, but if you grow 5% one year, and 4% the next.... You're still growing...

2. A more subtle point. You're basically assuming that methods of attracting fish and pros must inherently be mutually exclusive. That is, you either cater to the fish, or the pros and party is choosing the fish. This is wrong for two reasons:

A. I consider myself a "pro", at least that I make money off the site. I have signed up around 5 friends. 1 was break even, 1 is a winning player (but only after about a year), and at least 1 is a HUGE loser. I know for a fact that he has stopped playing, and he lost around 400 in the system. I'm probably the "worst case scenario" for Party. I'm sure tons of pros attract losing players by telling their friends "it's so easy, I've made so much", and the friends lose a ton of money. So my point is, every player, winner or loser, has value as a means of attracting others. I have a friend who set himself up as an affiliate (doesn't pay any rakeback to people who sign up under him) where he basically signup bonus whores them, and gives that money to them to start. He tells me 90% of those people usually bust in a month and don't come back, and maybe 10% become producers for him. My friend is definatly a pro (he lives off online/BM), and has a HUGE network where he's probably signed up several hundred players who are friends of friends of friends. If you alienate my pro friend, you cut yourself off from literally hundreds of potential players.

B. I think the key is basically marketing. Basically, party needs to either implicitly or explicitly treat its two types of customers differently. I don't think going after the two types of players is neccessarily mutually exclusive. All party needs to do is secretly reward the better players, ie let the affiliates move skin accounts to party and keep the same deal they had before. Just don't tell the fish about it. Same as it was before. Just like BM casinos do it, they never advertise their poker rates, or that you might get a Comp for whatever, they just do it for their returning players. I'm sure there's plenty of people who go to a B&M and don't even know there's a poker rate, and pay the full rate. Oh well, sucks for them, like many things, if you do some research you get paid.

Or they could even do it explicitly, like I think they are, by offering these wierd points bonuses which are basically based on play. The second way is a little annoying because people like knowing x amount of work is going to get y reward, but whatever.

3. I think this whole argument is WAY WAY assuming that the world market for poker is even NEAR saturated. I *seriously* doubt that's true, and I think it's all about marketing right now, just like it was a year ago. Time magazine recently had an article where they cited a reputable source that said something like 25% of the population of the US had been to a casino LAST year. That number is probably lower than this year. That's the US ALONE, roughly 75 million people. Witness the explosion in real estate value in Las Vegas (though I don't wanna go too far and say it's all gambling related, whatever). Party has ONLY 9 million accounts. Nevermind the world market, especially in places where gambling isn't as restricted as it is in the US generally. I think there's still COLLOSSAL room for growth for party. So the issue becomes marketing to the general population. Cutting out rakeback I think is *nothing* compared to the gains the could still make in the world market. Yet possibly alienating members and making them leave, only hampers their ability to expand, see 2A

4. No one has talked about the competition with other sites. The bottom line is, not everyone (even "pros") knows/believes Party is the best site in terms of fishyness. Though I've never personally played on stars, everyone pretty much knows that Stars has party beat in just about everything, except the fish ratio. By alienating its base, all party does is give people reason to say "hey, i'm going to stars", or some other site. In the MTT forum, I'd guess around 1/3 of our posts are from other sites, namely stars. That's a lot. Anything that makes your base leave, only fuels other sites. I think when we're talking about online poker, and the pros, we are talking about a zero sum game. Yes I know what I said earlier about the market, but that really doesn't matter. The world computer market is huge too (not nearly as many people have computers as could), but Dell still activly tries to bring in new customers and still probably sees every customer lost to HP as a bad thing. Further, once you buy a Dell, and nothing bad happens, you're more likely to stay a Dell customer in the future. HUGE RADICAL CHANGES (like taking away rakeback) just makes your customers want to substitute what you're providing with someone else's almost as good product (quality of Dell computers aside). Party really shouldn't have given its users any reason to try to substitute its product.


So the bottom line is. If Party were smart, they would have allowed their affiliates to transfer existing accounts to Party, and maybe set up some sort of deal with the affilaites as far as their %. That way, they wouldn't have alienated their existing pros, and yet done the right thing for themselves busineswise (obviously) by getting more rake. The whole skin idea never really made sense to me, but whatever.