The most annoying part for me is that I think its terrible business for both me and Stars. I'm not sure how many times I can write this but I will try again. If you remove my rakeback, you are increasing the rake, if you increase the rake, you force me to look for better games, which means I will play less poker and win at a higher win rate off the recreational player. Bear in mind, the rakeback the SNEs guys get is money that Stars have already collected. Job done, they are just giving some of it back. Without this, they have to collect the money somehow, and presuming your most economically aware customers aren't going to change their habits is obviously a mistake. A SNE hyper guy will go from paying Stars 200k and getting 110k back for his income, to playing mtts and winning at a 20% roi post rake, whilst Stars collect somewhere between 7-10%. It is so so so stupid. They would do much better by encouraging poker players to play as much poker as possible instead of forcing them to win off recreational players instead of rakeback. I have no idea how they cannot see this. I also have no idea why people think they are a smart company. They leveraged capital to buy a business and then decide they need to change the whole business model to get things to work. If I tried to buy Rolls Royce and turn it into Ford would people on this forum tell me it was a good idea simply because I managed to convince someone to invest the capital to allow me to do so? They can't even handle the PR for major changes like this, I see absolutely no reason for me to think this is the best route for Amaya to take. I understand they think it is, and honestly I think I'd get over it if that was the case. I think what they are doing is burning the ship down and I'm a passenger.
Arb, they sold because they couldn't get it into America. They also wanted to stop working. I think you would think it was a lot more ridiculous if I demanded they continued working, instead of hating on the new owners. Do I wish they had sold to someone who cared about poker or had the vaguest idea of what to do with the business? Absolutely, but I'm not going to expect them to dedicate their lives to poker.
I also don't know why you expect people to not be angry. That is one of the most absurd things to me. You seem surprised that online pros are pissed off. I play virtually every site you could have access to and a few more you don't. This doesn't mean I'm going to applaud someone for making "excellent business decisions".
I'm not sure Stars will exist in five years tbh.
Listening to Dnegs on the Joey podcast its actually pretty clear they don't understand poker (as in the new execs). Which is really very very worrying they seem to be treating Poker as any other gaming product and it really is way more complex and different to the majority of casino/sports betting.
From what he was saying a bunch of stuff they thought would do X will actually do the complete opposite Y.I think the example he gave was that they thought reducing rakeback would make SNE/SN mass grinders player differently in regards to actual style. Suddenly they thought these guys would be playing 30/10 and splashing around for some reason.
Obviously it will have next to no effect on how they play. In fact it might even make them play tighter in some spots in theory if effective rake is higher less hands are profitable to see flops with.
Similarly they seem to think removing VPPs for example at 5/10 cash will protect the fish from being hunted. when actually the opposite is very likely true. Those games will only run with a big fish in the game and he will be hunted to extinction very very quickly. Also the big fish who likes to play high now doesn't get a bit of a kickback when he does play the games.
Much better would be if they gave the fish a much higher % of RB than the regs imo but it seems they are not going down this route
By the way your analogy with ford/rolls royce reminds me of when General motors bought Saab and totally balled it up trying to make it run like GM did. Feels like Amaya is trying to shoehorn on their general business model onto Poker.
As a general aside it always baffles me how companies are allowed to raise tons of capital to buy a business and then load that same business with mountains of debt. I recall Man UTD had the same thing when they were bought out also quite a few years back now.
This quote from Amaya's CEO pretty much sums this up.
The players will not last longer and their experience will not be enhanced if you take away the middle section of the eco system. This will leave the absolute elite players who can beat any game, the elite bumhunters who will be on every site and don't take rb into consideration as they don't put enough volume in on Stars alone, and the recs. Having 5 elite players on 1 table instead of 2 elite, 2 avg regs, 1 bumhunter and 1 rec, the recs are going to get smashed. Who is going to want to redeposit if they never win a hand?
Yeah. We’d say that you're looking at essentially—from an ecosystem perspective this actually is a big positive, Chad. We don't view this as being disruptive to the ecosystem. We view it as being very positive.
You’re talking about a small percentage of players that are a very large percentage of net withdrawers, and I mean that's good and that's fine; we want them to be winners. But there has to be an equilibrium. And you know what? I think that the player experience needs to be better. You shouldn’t be able to have a lot of players who are sitting at the table to break even and still making money.
And so I think that by actually having players in the ecosystem have a better equilibrium you’ll have players last longer, you'll have increased redeposits, you’ll have a better player experience, and you know what? I think we're going to have increased poker revenue, but also increased player engagement and retention.[quote/]
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