Friday, December 12th, 2008
A while ago a Pokeriot journalist managed to get hold of information about a large number of affiliates offering Betsson Rakeback even though Ongame obviously prohibit Rakeback. Betsson was allowed to answer the article and claimed that they were actively working to remove all rakeback offers on their affiliates sites.
It might seem like the kind of answer that any poker room would give on an article showing such obvious flaws but now a few months later most of the Rakeback offers have actually disappeared. There are still a few of the listed offers available but in most cases they are gone and in some the whole sites. We at Pokeriot can only applaud Betsson for taking care of the problem in a fast and professional way.
The question wether Ongames Policy is fair still stands though, even though Betsson are out of trouble this time. Is the Ongame Enviroment really Rakeback Free? Well, as long as poker rooms offer Revenue Share there will always be Rakeback in kind, it’s way to simple to start out as an affiliate and have your friends sign up through you, paying them a percent. If Ongame truly whishes to fight Rakeback, slapping fines on the rooms is not the answer, the answer is disabling Revenue share possibilites.
The truth is probably somewhere in between, rakeback is bad for the network in a lot of ways but not so bad that it would be worth it to remove rev-share. Like in most online games they just want to do enough to be able to say that there isn’t any cheating. They settle for saying we have a no-rakeback-policy so that they can attract bigger poker rooms that would lose money from smaller rakeback offering rooms.
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
After the last article about Ongames unfair Rakeback Policy we got a lot of feedback. We thought that it was the right thing to do to let Betsson answer the statements in the article and here is the complete answer:
Betsson supports Ongame’s policy
As a hard working and serious gaming company, Betsson wants to point out its relation to Ongame and what we offer and do not offer our customers.
Betsson is an independent company which means that our agreement with Ongame as network is the same as every other operator in the network. This means that as Ongames states, Betsson is operating in a “rakeback free environment“ and have done from October 2007. The same goes for back to back bonuses.
We know that there have been affiliates working for us and giving out rakeback. As soon as this has come to our knowledge these affiliates have been suspended. In our aim to support Ongame to obtain the rakeback free environment, this is how we have to work.
Betsson wants to offer its customers a feeling of a high end product with a high level of service. This is how we attract and keep our customers.
Rumors about being an operator offering things to players that no other operator in the network does is not in line with how a serious betting company operates, and especially not Betsson. For other poker rooms in the Ongame Network Betsson therefore wants to clarify this by this article and explain that rumors are just rumors that have no real source.
We will together with Ongame proceed working for a “rakeback free environment” and are always open for new serious gaming companies in the network.
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.
Monday, February 18th, 2008
Ongame Ntwork haven’t allowed Rakeback for their partners for quite a long period. Many of the partners have had repetitive bonuses of different kinds though and these have been available on Rakeback sites. For legal reasons Ongame and the owner Bwin disagrees with this and are now making the rules a bit tougher. From now on Ongame partner aren’t allowed to be mentioned on Rakebacks sites. The question is how the poker rooms can handle this. They can of course stop paying CPA to the sites offering rakeback but if someone wanted to make trouble for a site in the Ongame Network they can just start a rakeback site and link to the site in question. It would be especially funny if it was to one of Ongames own sites, how will they handle that? Will they kick Pokerroom out of the network?
