Posted this in Ray's blog as he was uncertain where to play/how to choose the right room and had been stuck on stars for the last 100k hands playing 100nl 6max.
Lets look at it more closely.
Deciding where to play!Ok, some people get this huuuuugely wrong, they just hear a percentage and go running after the highest one to find. There are several things to tak into consideration when looking to find a new room.
Rakeback:The money you will receive at the end of the month as a % of your rake coming back into your account
Stars: 3/10
iPoker: 7/10
Microgaming: 5/10
Ongame: 7/10
Entraction: 7/10
The standard of opposition:If I can have a 10bb/100 winrate and get 30% rakeback give me this all day over 50% rakeback and 2bb/100 winrate.
Stars: 3/10
iPoker: 4/10
Microgaming: 9/10
Ongame: 9/10
Entraction: 9/10
Software:The ability to be able to run numerous tables at once, software that has good time banks, software that enables you to easily see whats going on.
Stars: 8/10
iPoker: 3/10
Microgaming: 7/10
Ongame: 6/10
Entraction: 7/10
Liquidity pool + SoftwareIt's fantastic if you can get 10000 tables on your screen, but if you're sitting by yourself it's abit pointless.
Stas: 8/10
iPoker: 5/10
Microgaming: 7/10
Ongame: 6/10
Entraction: 5/10
Overall Scores:Stas: 24/40
iPoker: 19/40
Microgaming: 28/40
Ongame: 28/40
Entraction: 28/40
As you can see Stars/iPoker come out the "worst" although granted this is my opinion and its only 4 things that I have considered.
I'm now going to do this again, but becuase for ME the most important thing is soft players, I am going to increase the scores by 50%. I don't care so much about software as I only 6 table so it should be fine everywhere, so I'm going to - 50% the the software and liquidity sections.
Rakeback:The money you will receive at the end of the month as a % of your rake coming back into your account
Stars: 3/10
iPoker: 7/10
Microgaming: 5/10
Ongame: 7/10
Entraction: 7/10
The standard of opposition: (+50%)
If I can have a 10bb/100 winrate and get 30% rakeback give me this all day over 50% rakeback and 2bb/100 winrate.
Stars: 4.5/10
iPoker: 6/10
Microgaming: 13.5/10
Ongame: 13.5/10
Entraction: 13.5/10
Software: (-50%)
The ability to be able to run numerous tables at once, software that has good time banks, software that enables you to easily see whats going on.
Stars: 4/10
iPoker: 1.5/10
Microgaming: 3.5/10
Ongame: 3/10
Entraction: 3.5/10
Liquidity pool + SoftwareIt's fantastic if you can get 10000 tables on your screen, but if you're sitting by yourself it's abit pointless.
Stas: 4/10
iPoker: 2.5/10
Microgaming: 3.5/10
Ongame: 3/10
Entraction: 2.5/10
Overall Scores:Stas: 15.5
iPoker: 17
Microgaming: 25.5
Ongame: 26.5
Entraction: 26.5
Other considerations:Who is my affiliate? This is incredibly important. Sure go get a 75% deal, but if you're not going to get paid at the end of the month why bother?
Case #1: PotRaiser.comThis case clearly shows that
illegal deals are not safe, even if they are offered from
the poker room directly.
Please point out how important it is to go for
reputable and trustworthy operators which can be found on PokerStrategy.com.
Players have lost a significant amount of money and it is doubtful if they ever see it back – just because a shady company promised them high rakeback deals.
Cliffnotes:• Potraiser.com used to be an Entraction skin, that offered 60%+ flat rakeback through under the table deals to every player even though flat rakeback on Entraction is capped at 30%
• After Entraction found out about this offer and terminated the contract with Potraiser.com, players were unable to withdraw money from the site. (September 2010)
• Potraiser.com announced on their website that players will be able to withdraw money as soon as they have finished their move to another network.
• This never happened and players are still waiting to be paid (September 2011)
More information can be found on 2+2 forum:
LinkCase #2: Affiliate disappears and owes players rakeback[/size]
Players should go with trustworthy affiliates, because everyone can promise high rakeback deals, but many of them fail to pay once they get caught (=their commission frozen).
Networks have started to monitor the affiliates´ activities and won´t hesitate to close those affiliates that don´t stick to the rules.
Even though players most likely won´t lose their bankroll, it is still bad to receive 0% rakeback if they could have gotten something from a legal deal.
This example is just one out of many similar cases that we know about.
• Pokercapital.org was founded in January 2011 and claimed to be the “Facebook of poker”
• They offered illegal deals on their forum/website and claimed to have around 750 players registered
• They got caught giving illegal rakeback and went offline, of course they didn´t pay their players
• Beginning of May 2011 they even try to sell their business for €200
When do the games run? If you can only play at 9am-4pm maybe stars is your only option if you are a 8 table grinder. Lots of the European games run in the evening and are soft because they are funded by Scananavian gamblers that come over from the sports book.
To summarise, its really important to choose the right room. If you think rakeback is super super important then make it 75% more in the charts I did, if you want to be a winning player and play against bad players who don't 3bet you and put you into tough decisions then change that accordignly too.
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