Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
The poker network Ongame Network use the selling point “Rakeback free enviroment“as an important argument towards new poker operators to choose Ongame Network as a supplier of their poker software. Ongame Network has over the last year enforced harsh punishments for poker rooms in their network that do not obey by their rakeback-rules and continue to offer rakeback deals directly to players or through affiliates.We believe that rakeback can be both good and bad for a poker room or network. One of the primary reasons used for implementing a “no rakeback policy” is because rakeback has a tendency to move players within a network from the poker rooms that do a lot of advertising to the ones offering the best rakeback-deals. Rakeback-rooms steal high-value players from the poker rooms that actually get new players to the network. Getting new players to a poker network is very important to keep a good liquidity of players and ultimately the survival of the poker network. In most networks it is the bigger poker rooms that do all the advertising and some smaller ones that offer rakeback. The situation in Ongame Network is funnily the opposite.Despite Ongame Network’s “no rakeback policy”, Betsson (one of the biggest poker rooms in the Ongame Network) are continuing to offer rakeback through several of their affiliates. Even though Ongame are strict with the other poker rooms, Betsson is for some reason allowed to roam free as the single poker room offering Rakeback in the network. (more…)
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
In every network there is at least one Cannibal Poker Room. It sounds scary, and that’s what it is. It’s the poker room in the network that does not market their room to players in general but to players in the other sites in the network. By targeting high rollers on the other sites in the network they manage to get players that will spend a lot of money without spending lots in marketing themselves.
As players tend to fell better about moving within the network than moving to a completely new one this is a stratey that works, and it works cheaply. The most common way of doing this is offering rakeback or really big bonuses for high rollers. If you compare this to advertising in TV and Magazines it becomes obvious. A magazine ad will bring a lot of new players to your room. Most of them are not very good players but a few of them will become good players in the future. A good player is much more profitable than a bad player so you can see the ad as a long term investment. You attract the players by paying a lot of money in advertising and hope that they will stay at your poker room long enough to become profitable.
If a site in te network starts offering rakeback and the word spreads what will happen is that players, when they reach a certain skill level, will find out. For the good amateurs Rakeback is the supreme bonus and moving to a poker room that offers rakeback will increase their profit a lot. This means that when players reach a certain level of skill they will move to the smaller room that offers rakeback. The big rooms doing a lot of advertising will attract the players to the network and then lose them as they start being profitable. The players have been cannibalized.
Rakeback is even nastier than this because it removes profit in general from the poker network. If you calculate the total revenue of the whole network (all rooms in the network) it is; The Rake – The percentage you pay to the network – The bonuses. Ok it’s rough but we don’t need anything more accurate. By offering Rakeback the Bonus part increases greatly without actually increasing the rake, it’s still the same players that play in the network as rakeback only rarely attract players from other networks. The Cannibal site destroyes a lot of the possible profit in the market to make a much smaller profit themselves.
What does this do for the players then? At the first look it seems as the winners in all this are the players. Well, to start with of course, it decreases the cost to play but in long term the bigger poker rooms that do the advertising actually need to make more money to stay profitable. The result of this can only be high rake. Rakeback increases the rake, maybe not for the players that have it but for players in general.
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
One of our readers asked us about Redirector3.Valueactive.com. You can find it in your browser history and similar. It’s easy to think it’s some sort of spyware or virus but the answer is simpler than that. If you have redirector3.valueactive.com in your history you are a poker player in the microgaming network. This redirector is the cashier in the microgaming network, if you have been winning or depositing money you will see it.
