Will rake-free poker ever be a reality?

[illab]

Maybe I play more than a couple hours on the weekend, and Im usually playing four tables at a time. I've broken $500 by a decent amount each of the last few months. Anyone who plays at decently high limits should have no problem building much more rake than me. If I'm a spammer, I'm not a very good one since I haven't mentioned my site. Ironically, I'm an affiliate (I make some money off of rake) for a few people though I barely make anything off of it.

[pudley4]

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Well I for one pay over $500 in rake a month. I know because I get rake back, and see what my stats are. I only play a couple hours a day, where as some people literally are making a living playing poker online and are paying thousands of dollars of rake a month. Why wouldn't you choose paying just a flat rate and keeping hundreds of dollars which are rightfully yours. Why do you think people estimate that about 80% of people who play poker lose money. That 5% rake really adds up, I guess some of you aren't taking the time to realize how much.

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If you play 2 hours a day you are not personally paying $500 a month in rake no way.

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Wrong. It's incredibly easy to pay way more than $500 in rake each month only playing 2 hrs/day...

[emonrad87]

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Why wouldn't you choose paying just a flat rate and keeping hundreds of dollars which are rightfully yours.

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How is the money rightfully yours? I hear that a lot, and it's a really really dumb thing to say. The sites are providing you a service, and they charge you for it. Is the money you pay to your long distance company rightfully yours just cuz they charge you more base on how much you use it?

[Kevin K.]

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If you play 2 hours a day you are not personally paying $500 a month in rake no way. And to show how further ill-informed you are the rake on other sites is not 5% at higher limits. You sure seem like a spammer trying to drum up market reaction to the monthly charge idea.

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4-tabling 3/6 a couple hours a day will cost you over $500 a month. And rake doesn't drop below 5% at Party and skins unless you are playing 15/30+.

It sounds like you have no clue as to how much you are paying to play poker. If you aren't getting rakeback, get it. You'll see the difference.

[PokrLikeItsProse]

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On the one hand I see what you mean. The casual player does not really notice the rake enough to care.

On the other hand, Poker Rooms make literally millions of dollars a day for running and maintaining software. The cost of operations is a fraction of what they take in. A competitor could charge a quarter of what the standard online-rake currently is and still make an unbelievabe profit. Also, if the sites low rake drew more players, they could make up for the the diffrence in volume. Theoretically.

It would be the same theory that made McDonals such a force, lower prices to undercut competition to draw larger numbers of customers.

I don't know why the millions of generic minor poker sites don't try a system like this to set themselves apart. I think I heard Gus Hansons site had some sort of automatic rake rebate system along those lines. I never checked it out.

It is probably a pretty efficient business model. I wouldn't get your hopes up to see one any time soon though.

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Well, let's do some math here. Let's say that a monthly charge will get you 25% of the revenue that a conventional rake will get you, per player. You have 1000 players with a conventional rake. How many players do you need at your site to make the same amount of money?

If paying less rake would be economically feasible and bring in more players, wouldn't sites just lower their rakes? Please keep in mind that an online poker room may have pretty intensive start-up costs. Bandwidth ain't cheap. Neither are computer programmers if you aren't outsourcing to third world nations.

[maryfield48]

A workable model might be the insurance industry - where the price of the service to the consumer barely covers the costs. In fact, it often doesn't. But the company makes a profit by investing the funds during the period between collection and claim settlement.