Curious as to why the table rake on a ring game of 50/100 is over .05 but the rake on a 20k/40k is only .0025?
Our current ring game rakes are the same percentage, but they each have caps:
Low Stake - 5% with a maximum of 100 chips
Medium Stake Rake - 5% with a maximum of 250 chips
High Stake Rake - 5% with a maximum of 500 chips
Elite Stake Rake - 5% with a maximum of 1,000 chips
IMO, it might be advantageous to remove, or at least vastly increase the size of, the caps. Particularly for the highest stakes games. Players where the big blind bet is greater than 10,000 chips are effectively getting a HUGE discount because the caps are so low. Put everyone on the same playing field by removing them. If we’re all paying the same percentage, no one can claim they’ve been taken advantage of.
This would also go a long way toward reducing the so-called chip inflation we currently see. When I joined, a few days short of 3 years ago, I was ranked under 10,000 when I had a bit less than 1,000,000 chips. Today, a player would need about 1,250,000 to reach 4-digit rank due solely to inflation. 25% inflation in 3 years is a LOT of inflation.
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[quote=“eddie72, post:1, topic:11581, full:true”]
Curious as to why the table rake on a ring game of 50/100 is over .05 but the rake on a 20k/40k is only .0025?
why is there a rake yo begin with in play money?
The rake definitely needs adjustment. Most MMO economies have a heavy currency sink to combat the effects of inflation (which can simply be due to more active players). With poker, the currency sinks are entry fees and table rake.
If a totally uncapped rake doesn’t sit well with the community, perhaps making it relative to the table’s BB would be a good idea? Say a 5% with a cap of 25 to 50BB for starters. Watch what happens then adjust up or down as needed.
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Just to make the math easy
50/100 table all 9 in pot is 9,000 100 rake / 9000 pot is .01 rake percentage
500,000/1,000,000 all 9 in pot is 9,000,000 1000rake/9,000,000 is .001
Well, inflation is just a part of life without a Federal Chip Reserve
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The rake is the interest rate which Economists think can be raised to reduce inflation.
There’s a lot of factors to consider though. How many accounts have been added in that time? How many chips have been purchased in that time? It’s simply not reasonable to expect the gross chip total for all users to remain the same when users keep signing up, and users continue to buy more chips.
So those factors should be excluded from calcuated real inflation, somehow. The “real” (not that the chips are worth anything) chip inflation comes (I surmise) primarily through free chips given away, eg the daily bonus, and through extra chips thrown in as a bonus from the sales promotions. But I expect then that the rake takes care of this.
As well, dead/inactive accounts, those chips are effectly out of contest and not being circulated, and thus may be removed from inflation calculations.
Are there other factors I haven’t thought of? What are they?
I’m not convinced that inflation is a real problem yet. It may well be that over time your ranking can drop, but that’s probably entirely due to more players coming into the game and the better players winning more of their chips than you do (particularly if you’re not actively playing regularly to keep pace).
How else would you drain chips from the system? If the site kept adding more and more as daily bonuses or gifts or added prizes and never removed any, then the perceived value of the chip reduces to zero. You’d eventually have the lowest stake SnG as 1,000,000 chip buy-in or something like that. In addition, the game requires there to be something of value at risk. While the play-chip will never be valued as a real currency, it has to retain some perceived value in order for a poker game to be played at all. The game goes away if the thing you are competing for is perceived to be entirely worthless.
Glad to see more and more people bringing this up. I hate being the only one standing on the corner with a sandwich board saying “the end is near”.
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I would like to comment on this topic a little bit. First I want to be clear that I am speaking my opinion and in no way that of Replay Poker. My opinions are based on working in card rooms, owning and operating a number of card rooms for quite a few years before retiring. I am going to assume that operating an online poker website is somewhat similar economically to running a live play card room. In my card rooms I always knew my hourly costs of operation and could base the hourly income to cover those costs and still make a reasonable profit. It should be highlighted that the costs of spreading a high limit game or tournament is about the same as the cost of the lowest limit games or tourneys. The high limit games take in way more income for the house than the lower limit games even thought the rake or fee is a small percentage. If the rakes or fees for the high limits were the same as for the low limits you lose high limit players and spread fewer high limit games which would severely decrease that income. So I maintain that bumping the rakes or the fees on the high limit games and tourneys would be a big mistake. The same is true that you could eliminate all free rolls and low limit tourneys and games, but this too would be a big mistake as those games help the site in many other ways. Steady income of a lesser amount. So, I contend that the rakes and fees here at Replay are fine and do not need to be adjusted in any way. I do agree with Warlock on the topic of chip inflation and the ultimate problems if continued for a lengthy period of time… However, there are some other solutions I am hoping to one day discuss with somebody on the Replay staff. I want to see Replay Poker to continue to be the best online poker site and to continue operation for a long, long time.
Seville
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Great post Seville - Just to clarify, I was suggesting that the caps be lifted but net necessarily the rake percentages themselves (though from the chart fizzy provided, they could use an adjustment as well). High and Elite stakes are effectively rake-less games with caps of 500 and 1000 chips respectively. In some cases, rake is capped at 0.1% or less if 2 players or more see a flop in an unraised pot. I’m not suggesting anything that would drive players away from these tables because that would harm the business, as you stated above. An adjustment to 10x the current level wouldn’t even be noticeable for most players and shouldn’t impact the game at all, IMO.
If the site does something to address the issue, I think that would be great. The most obvious place I saw to do something about it easily was in the rake structure. I don’t do programing and I know the site is undergoing major changes but I think the suggested adjustments are a matter of replacing a few values in the code. Nothing else would need to be touched. I just hope they do something about it soon before all buy-ins will need to be adjusted or new games created to accommodate the higher average bankroll.
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I second this again. While I agree @SSeville that we don’t want the rake to impact the games, especially at higher stakes, a rake of 1000 chips at elite is effectively no rake at all. The minimum pot-size going to the flop is 250,000 at elite stakes, so that is already a tiny fraction. To have rake capped at 1000 when average pot sizes are 1.8m, 3.5m or higher just seems ridiculous. Capping the rake at 10,000 or 50,000 would barely put a dent in these huge pots while potentially reducing inflation.
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I would be willing to serve as Chair of the Replay Federal chip Reserve…
You’re just looking for kickbacks under the table.
Actually I was thinking of increasing the amount of free chips…
Certainty, the promise of more free chips will help in your election to Federal Chip Reserve Chairman.
Perhaps to avoid further inflation we could employ Robin Hood Economics rob from the rich and give to me and some of my friends.
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I believe that every replay member is entitled to a minimum standard amount of chips and to this end I would TAKE chips from the top 100 players (probably 20 percent of their bankroll) and distribute them to the bottom 1000 players … probably do this annually