thanks for the Rely answer
Two cents…
I like the idea of a time bank - it can be valuable, but very infrequently a must.
The pitfall -
You have players that will take every second of the clock, on every hand no matter the cards, 9 2 unsuited or A K suited… There needs to be a limit set somehow on the # or % or some other trigger to keep a player from this practice already being abused on Replay.
So I’m hearing, don’t let anyone use their time clock all the time but let everyone have extra sometimes.
Patience is the name of the game. Don’t let them get you down playa.
How about a mini thon Saturday
Like a series of 4 different games, first we start with NL Holdem, then
NL Omaha, NL Omaha hi/lo, last NL Royal. Maybe a 10 min. break between them.
Maybe like a 5k to 15k buy-in, with a leader board for the top 20 player’s.
It will be fun. Maybe once a month to see if it takes off.
6 Likes
That would be awesome if they had some mixed-game events!
1 Like
Players are permitted to use as much of the Timer as they choose to so long as it’s not every hand for several in a row. If you share a table with a player that is running out the clock every hand then you can report them for violating Site Rules (Code of Conduct). Be sure to report player’s name, game being played, time of occurrence, Hand #, etc. The more information you provide the better. Reports are reviewed by Staff and action taken accordingly. Clicking on a Player’s name, at the table, brings up a window with stats and also a report icon (triangle with an exclamation point). Clicking on that icon will open the player’s page (new tab) with the report form up for filling out. Staff usually follows up on the reports with info that the issue has been addressed, without specific details. Most of this information is available within RPP Site Rules (a link to which is at the bottom of every page). See you @ the tables. Happy New Year
3 Likes
Great idea, I think it’s worth a vote! It’s fair to everyone, and semi solves the problem.
Also reduce the leader-board and other giveaways proportionately.
You could just divide everything by 100 (payouts, bankrolls, so on). Of course the amount of chips you can purchase would need a similar adjustment. It’s also the best time to do such, as it’s the start of a new year.
-Larry
1 Like
Sure, no reason to think it wouldn’t work as well as it did in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Bolivia and Venezuela. Aside from doing nothing to address the problem, this methodology punishes anyone competent enough to have accumulated chips here. I very much doubt this idea has even crossed the mind of the owners here because it would mean the end of this site as a viable business. Try selling another chip package after pulling a stunt like this one. I can’t imagine anyone with a sense of integrity ever playing here again if they went this route. Just like in the real economies where it was tried, anyone and everyone who could leave, did. What was left was a hot mess that never recovered.
Addressing the symptoms without addressing the underlying problems has never worked out well anywhere. Whether or not an idea would be popular with the masses is irrelevant to this basic truth. Its also why pure democracies cannot work once you allow people to vote themselves free stuff or to appropriate the property of others for whatever reason.
4 Likes
Never said it was a full solution to the issue. But it’s a fair idea, as everyone would remain the same rank. There would still be a need to address the giveaways, the vig, and so on.
But I guess you don’t like the idea, so it has no merit. I said it was worth a vote.
Get over it.
-Larry
1 Like
Lopping zeroes off the end of everyone’s bankroll was only part of my suggestion.
The other half of it was to mitigate inflation by increasing rake, and reducing the amount of bonus chips added to the economy.
I still don’t see chip inflation as being a problem. New active players are going to create more chips, and those chips are going to find their way into winning players’ bankrolls. That’s by design.
Bigger bankrolls need progressively bigger stakes to play at in order to keep the game interesting to them.
Big bankrolls belonging to inactive accounts don’t cause any problem, since those dead chips are effectively removed from the chip economy, and in that way serve to reduce inflation.
I’m not really clear what the symptoms are that would prove the assertion that chip inflation is a problem here, anyway. I’ve heard people say that after logging in a few months after not playing for a while, their rank had dropped. Well, what did you expect? Rank is dynamic, it fluctuates whenever someone wins or loses chips. Active players near your rank are going to pass you buy in those months. You snooze, you lose.
What other problems are there that would be a sign that chip inflation is harmful to the game here? I’m not saying there aren’t any; but kindly point them out, and then it may become more clear what can or should be done about it.
@Larry_Laffer - there is nothing for me to get over. I don’t stumble through life making decisions based on how I feel about “stuff”. With this particular suggestion, I used real world examples to show it doesn’t work. That’s not my feelings about it but actual results. The same thing has happened to multiple free poker sites over the years who tried to address their inflationary economies this way. History and hard data are at the core of my statement. You seem to want to make it personal. I get it - when you don’t have the facts or the facts don’t support your argument, switch the focus away from them. I’m banking on the owner of the site being smart enough to know the facts and interpret them properly rather than simply asking the masses what they feel would be “fair”.
@puggywug - there’s a lot of info already on this Forum if you want to read through it. You will see that the topic has been acknowledged as an actual issue to be concerned about since at least 2013. In fact, it was mentioned by the site’s owner back then as something they had to account for and manage. Here’s a link to the threads containing “chip inflation” as a search term: Search results for 'chip inflation' - Replay Poker
There are many reasons its an actual problem if not actively protected against. Some are more important than others. To me, there are 2 main reasons I’d like to see it addressed:
- The long term viability of the site as a business: I like the model and I like the owner and staff. I am also a bit of a business junkie. I enjoy watching good businesses succeed and it pains me to see them fail. Without advertising, this site relies on selling chips as their source of revenue. Anything that devalues the chips would necessarily negatively impact the sale of those chips.
- The game of poker itself - At the heart of poker is game-theory. I won’t debate whether GTO based strategies are the most profitable or not here because that’s besides the point. Whether you consciously use GTO principles or not, poker as a game of strategy doesn’t exist without it. Game theory requires there to be risks and rewards for actions. With cash games, those risks and rewards are monetary. With play-chips, the risks and rewards are based on the perceived value of those chips. Anything that increases their perceived scarcity/value brings the game played here closer to the one played for money. Anything that decreases that perception moves the game farther away from the one played for cash. I would like to see this site remain as credible as a poker site as possible and therefore have an interest in seeing the currency used be perceived as scarce and valuable.
As to the suggestion itself, you’d be “lopping off” sat 10 Billion chips from the top players here but only removing 10 or 100 chips from the accounts of the lowest ranked players. So, aside from the historical evidence that this doesn’t work, how could you make an argument for this being fair or acceptable to those people at the top?
4 Likes
That’s the thing, I didn’t really feel like reading through a lot of stuff, and then trying to separate wheat from chaff, and hone in on the points that you actually agree with. I was asking you for your own opinion. I totally get it if you don’t feel like it’s worth your time to summarize the discussion up until now, but without specific points to address, It’s going to be difficult to have a productive conversation on the topic – we’d inevitably talk past each other, not understand unstated assumptions, and so on.
As to the 2 main reasons you gave:
- OK, but how does the perceived value of chips being devalued harm the business? I can see that if chips are devalued, and if players buy chips rather than win them, and if this is the only way the site generates revenue, then if players spend less money on chips, the site becomes less profitable. But I’m still confused about a number of things:
- Doesn’t buying new chips increase the chip supply, and thereby create the very inflation you say is harmful?
- How exactly does the creation of chips devalue them? If I spend $10 and get 1M chips, I can play with those 1M chips. If the table stakes remain the same, then I can play 40x $25k SNG games, and that’s true whether there are 10^12 chips in circulation, or 10^16 chips in circulation.
- If the number of users playing scales up with the chip supply, I don’t think there’s any problem with inflation. Do we know how many active accounts there are, or the volume of chips in play vs. the number of players in tournaments? I think talking about chip inflation would make more sense if we had a better idea of the chips:player ratio.
- I postulate that I should value chips that I’ve spent real money on more than I should value the chips that I get for free (through the daily bonus or various promotions) or that I earn through good play. In practice, I don’t buy chips, but I still value them, because it takes skill to earn them, and if I lose them, I have to wait a long time for the daily bonus to make up for it, or (if I were willing to) I’d have to drop real $$ on replacing lost chips.
- I only don’t value chips as much if they’re getting easier to come by. I don’t see this happening in my experience, whatever the chip supply might be on the site. Perhaps I don’t know how to see this, or am looking for it in the wrong way, but what would indicators be that chips are being devalued over time? Show me something objective and measurable, and I’ll believe it.
- But, actually, one of the reasons I don’t buy chips is because to me that’s the easy way of obtaining them. I think it’s much harder to win them, and since rankings depend on stack size, I value my ranking more if I’ve earned it through winning play.
- No, I’m not suggesting lopping billions off the top ranked players bankrolls, and only a few hundred from the bottom ranked players. I’m talking about an across the board, percentage-based shrinkage of the chip volume, if volume is really the problem. If the bottom ranked player has 10^4 chips, and the top ranked player has 10^10, then we could re-value chips at a 10:1 rate, and the bottom ranked player would wake up the next day with 10^3 chips and the top ranked player would have 10^9. Nobody loses value relative to anyone, everyone is in the same ranking order as before, just with 1/10th as many chips in their bankroll, and since everyone has been affected the same, it’s fair. The only problem with this would be that bet sizing and buy-in sizing relative to bankroll is going to squeeze the bottom ranked players more than the top ranked players. But that’s what you would want, isn’t it? They’re squeezed because they value those shrunken chips more than they did, because they have fewer SNG buy-ins in their bankroll, and fewer BB for RG play, don’t they? So if the above reasoning is sound, how would that not fix your problem of perceived value diminishing?
I agree but this is a complex issue with many viewpoints and perspectives. There are people on both sides of the debate about whether inflation exists here to such an extent that its a problem right now. My opinion is that it is an issue and has been for quite some time. Looking back to see Paul’s post in 2013 acknowledging it as something to be wary of reinforces my opinion.
The play-chip is the ultimate fiat currency. It has no actual value other than what its users perceive it to be. Many things go into those perceptions and different people may weigh each factor differently from each other. The market value of a fiat currency is established by all the participants in the economy collectively but through individual actions. We don’t have a lot of the hard data that would give us a more solid understanding of the volume of chips in play. All we have are the observations of people who are looking out for this type of thing and some anecdotal evidence. It would be better to have hard data but we don’t. What we can see are the increased numbers and levels of promotions and bonus chips without a corresponding increase in rake/fees anywhere noticeable.
It may be best to have a mod separate this bit out from this thread and stick it onto one about this subject? I think that would allow others to continue on with each thread as intended. It would also let people with opinions about chip inflation in general to know the topic has been taken up again. People like @JoeDirk and @SunPowerGuru and others were active in this discussion and might want to address some of your questions as well.
I’d like to continue the discussion because I think it is important. I’ve seen what uncontrolled inflation can do to a play-chip poker site, as have others here. Once it gets out of control, its too late to do much of anything about it. It has to be controlled before it becomes critical.
Last bit about “lopping off” chips - whether you want to define it in actual or in percentage terms, most of the costs are going to be borne by the most successful players here. IMO, these are the very players you do not want to anger or alienate. We have several players here who have gone through this type of action at other sites. Some of those sites are gone and these players don’t play at the ones that remain anymore (from what they have said). It may sound easy and fair on paper but its just not that easy when dealing with a fiat currency.
3 Likes
Well, you don’t have to think about it like those chips are going away. You can just think about it like all the chips are melted down and then re-cast. And the smallest denomination is $100, but everyone just calls it a penny, because it’s indivisible. Everyone has the same amount relative to one another, so it shouldn’t be perceived as harm to anyone.
OK, let me try in my awkward way to put this into perspective. I’ve played about a year and a half to get to 2 million chips. I play MTTs, not the best way to gain chips. If you take 3 zeros from everybody, the billionaires will have millions and the millionaires will have thousands. Now I am playing with the first timers that just joined and got their 2500 chips. Is replay going to take 3 zeros off it’s daily bonus and make it 2.5 chips per day?
Warlock is right. If I have to start over, I’ll do it somewhere else.
2 Likes
That makes sense.
So, do you think it’s a problem that there are players holding billions of chips?
If so, what is the problem, and how does it hurt the site?
I don’t have a degree or background in economics, or internet gaming etc…etc…etc… But this seems way over complicated, more so than it needs to be. Maybe I’ll get bashed for this by people but Oh well.
The solution of having too many chips in the game falls to the people winning the chips, The site can adjust the program in the area of payoff placing.
So 1st thru 3rd or 30th or whatever the last money winners position is, Gets a % adjustment (basic programing that is already in place) instead of the winner(s) getting 12,160,000 for 1st they will now get 12,159,990 or 12,159,000 or whatever the rake % needed for it’s objective and target of removing flat value currency. I personally never know how much I am going to win or how many players will enter, So it is never a set figure, I still get my chips from placing so why would I care if I received 1 chip or 100 or 1000 chips less when I make it to the money! ! !
♫♪ Hope This Isn’t Too Simple or that I missed an important part of the problem. I’m only addressing “THE RAKE” for the propose of keeping the play money value from being like it was/is on poker stars, all you guru’s can hash out the percent’s needed.
@puggywug , ( joke plz ) I’ll remember that when I see 20 of your newest threads, but seriously we have had good discussion on the point of “chip inflation” in a few different threads, and it does come up semi regularly as a topic of conversation. It is hard to rehash every 9 months what we went thru before for 2 months each time…
You have the value of Money itself, cause chips can be bought …
You have the value of the chips themselves…
You have all the bonus chips given out say year to year…
You have # of active players month to month …
Certainly as more players join/play , then thier chips are “fluid” and “in play” thus the overall amount of chips “in the system” will increase… Thats “natural inflation”
Bonuses to players, whether thats the daily bonus, the top off bonus, any leaderboard or promotional bonuses add chips into “the system”… thats an “artificial inflation”
Obiously, “the rake” or the “+ in tournies” is a “artificial de-flation”…
Any “Chip purchase Specials” just draw in more chips into “The system”, faster than normally occurs thru sales of chips for $$$$$… more “artificial inflation” (faster).
@1Warlock , is correct, uncheck’d inflation over time will hurt the site, because in the end everything really does seem like “funny money”… do you really want to see " 1st chip purchase special… 1 trillion chips for $10 " ??? cause I certainly don’t
There are so many things I haven’t mentioned that still either contribute to, or directly effect chip inflation, hard not to have its own thread… In the end, one of the best hedges against chip inflation is an expanding playerbase… One of the biggest inflations happens when the site offers “on sale” chips to attract new customers or just on-sale, @ rediculiously high amounts for a low actuall cost…
Sassy
4 Likes
I agree with you and @1Warlock, that it would be no fun to have to get 1 trillion chips to play at high stakes. The top 10 players now have over 75 billion chips. Each new user starts with 2500. That means that even with all of those easy-to-win chips entering the economy, it still requires a ton of time and doubling up to play on a level footing with the top players. Some players have shown through astronomical winrates that it is possible to go up fast, but the low-stakes are a bingofest, and the more chips that go into the economy, the harder it will be to make it past that level to find people who want to play better poker.
It took me almost two years to originally amass enough chips (400m) to play 100k/200k, which is the lowest level that some of the top players would even sit at, and even then I did not have the bankroll depth to adjust to playing against them (losing 60m in a hand was nothing to them), and I had to drop back down the stakes after going down to ~120m.
The other factor in chip inflation is the psychological factor. When I started playing on the site, I bought in to an MTT for 1,000 chips, won it and was so happy to have the 40,000 chip prize to try higher stakes games. Then at some point, winning 200,000 chips meant nothing to my bankroll. Now winning or losing 5m doesn’t mean anything; it’s a matter of one small raised pot. Even losing the 40,000,000 chip maximum buy-in at 100k/200k is ~7% of my bankroll (or 0.3% for the top 2 players). So, while Replay could just raise the stakes for everybody, the imaginary chips have less and less perceived value as you amass more of them, up to the point where there is no reason to try to play well anymore.
2 Likes
I don’t have a problem with the system as it is. That of course doesn’t address the concerns of some of the others that have posted here.
Taking zeros away will effect the lower stacks more than the higher stacks. You won’t see anybody with 10,000 chips or 100,000 chips advocating for removing three 0s from everyone’s chip count. In the long run, that won’t change anything. The people with the most chips will still have more than the rest. The better players as well as the players that figure out the system will gain chips faster. People who play RGs will still gain/lose chips at a faster rate than those who play SNGs or MTTs.
Decide what you are really trying address. Is it number of chips or is it quality of play. Changing one will likely not affect the other.