Are iPoker Heading Towards An Adjusted Rake Model?

Could iPoker be moving towards a new rake model that is weighted towards losing players? Barry Carter discusses some recent rumours and explains the benefits of an adjusted rake model.

iPoker Climb to 2nd

This week iPoker moved above PartyPoker to occupy the 2nd place in the PokerScout rankings, behind PokerStars.

Their average number of cash game players just before Black Friday was 3777, and today is around 4121.

This move into second place in the rankings is very good timing for the network. Not only have they just started a small online $1mil guaranteed festival, iPOPS, but there is a big rumoured change in the pipeline.

New Rake Calculations?

It has not been confirmed by the network yet, but there are rumours circulating that iPoker will be changing the way rake is calculated. The suggestion is they will use 'adjusted' method, similar to the Essence system used by OnGame.

If true, this new method is designed with the recreational player in mind. Essentially a higher percentage of rake (And therefore, rakeback/loyalty bonus) will be allocated to losing players, using a specially designed algorithm that factors into account criteria such as playing style and the previous month's wins or losses.

This may seem like bad news for a lot of winning, mass multi-tabling, players who have called iPoker their home, but the adjusted rake method is designed to benefit everyone in the poker economy.

New rake calculations in the pipeline?

At the core, it is there to keep losing players playing for longer. It also combats against a somewhat cannibalistic culture employed between the skins on a network.

To understand why, we need to see why skins that offer generous rakeback deals actually hurt the games long term.

If you take a standalone poker room (ie. PokerStars, PKR) then the ideal situation for them is to have everyone losing money slowly, so they can accumulate rake consistently.

So it is much better for everyone to be playing lots of low stakes games, than for them to have all their roll on one high stakes table, where it can be lost and withdrawn in a single hand.

This is also a favourable situation for the players, as the losing players stay in game for much longer.

Skin vs Skin

While this is also the ideal scenario for a network, it is not the case for the skins themselves. It is actually in a skin's interest to have winning players, not losing players, because every time their player wins, they take money and essentially market share from other players on the network.

Such an ecosystem essentially pits the skins against each other. As a direct result, some poker rooms started offering winning players generous rakeback deals and poached them from other skins.

This not only starts saturating the traffic of a network with more winning players playing more tables, it also penalises those skins that make the effort to market to recreational players.

Many networks retaliated to these practices by fining skins whose net player withdrawals were greater than their deposits, which understandably proved very unpopular.

The introduction of an adjusted rake calculation is another, arguably more favourable way of protecting against these cannibalizing practices, and will hopefully actively encourage more skins to market towards recreational players.

This should help keep the losing players in the game for longer, which benefits everyone in the poker economy - networks, skins, winning and losing players alike.

Whether iPoker do implement an adjusted rake model remains to be seen, as so far this new system is unconfirmed by the site and just rumoured.

by Barry Carter