Opposing agendas in online poker

When you take a really close look at the online poker world you have to remember that the industry is still in its infancy; although around since 1998 the industry only became popular after 2003. So there are still a lot of wrinkles to iron out.

We have seen the online poker sites take huge steps in eliminating cheating and some other adverse behavior, but as a recent New York Times article regarding poker bots details, some unethical practices are extremely beneficial to the online poker sites, and with basically zero regulations and consumer protections the sites are able to pick and choose what is acceptable behavior while we the players suffer from some of these decisions.

Basically, for every backdoor and loophole discovered such as multi-accounting, there are several practices the poker rooms turn a blind eye to, such as poker bots -regardless of what the sites state publicly it’s obvious that poker bots are rampant in online poker, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility to think sites would use poker bots themselves to keep tables going, start new games, etc. When is the last time you heard of a site offering Prop player deals? These use to be common place in the early days of online poker but have been phased out since the emergence of poker bots -coincidence?

I’ve written in the past that a poker site’s goal is to have as many break-even players as possible, because the longer a player gambles the more rake the site will generate. If you have 10 players with $1,000 at a table, who all break-even and pay $3 per hand in rake, it will take all of 3,333 hands for them all to be busted; not by another player but by the site itself via the rake!

Conversely, if one or two of these players are demonstrably better than the rest, the weaker players will be busted in say 1,000 hands and the site will only take-in $3,000 in rake from the same 10 players. So it is in the sites best interest to have break-even players at their tables -or to close the gap between the best and worst players as far as possible.

It’s not just poker bots either, things like rakeback, free poker training, and other measures have all caused players to tighten up their play -so right away it takes more hands for them to go broke-and drastically reduced the gap between the best and worst players. The smaller the gap -even if it is a miniscule change-means the more hands that need to be played for the better player to end up with all the money, and more hands means one thing: MORE RAKE for the poker room!

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