Do boycotts work in poker?
Following the successful boycott that led GGPoker to reverse their rake increases, Barry Carter looks at why they typically haven't worked in poker before.
This month high-stakes poker professionals came together to boycott GGPoker cash games. They were protesting the doubling of rake at $25/$50 and above and agreed not to play at the tables.
I, for one, did not have much confidence that the protest would go to plan, because they never had before in online poker. How wrong I was. After just two weeks the group of high-stakes players negotiated a reversal of the rake hike by 90% and in some cases, it became lower than it was prior to the original increase.
It was the first time that I am aware that professional poker players had successfully reversed an operator's decision with protest.
A Pro Player Union?
Over the years there have been many discussions about boycotts, occasional talks of a player's union, and in some cases, actual boycotts went ahead. They always proved fruitless encounters.
This is mostly because the operator wanted to, or felt they were forced to, go ahead with whatever change they had planned. It is also because when high-stakes players boycott a game, it instantly makes that game softer, making it appeal to other professional players.
A good example of this was in 2019 when a professional player boycott of the Turbo Series at PokerStars did not go to plan. The first $5,000 buy-in event started with a paltry field but by the time late registration was over it beat the guarantee. The prospect of an overlay and a softer-than-usual event was too much for the poker community.
What Pro Players offer online poker rooms
Some people are skeptical of the idea of 'pro player unions' or boycotts because they ask what value does a pro poker player bring to an operator? The professionals are the ones who clean out the recreational players and also the ones who take money off the site, after all.
This is true, but professional poker players also provide liquidity for an operator. A lot of games would not start if professional players didn't sit in them. Perhaps more importantly for the operators, professional players are the ones who turn deposits into rake.
It is a simplification, but if two bad players played each other, one would get unlucky and lose their money, and the other would get lucky and withdraw their winnings. High-volume professional players are the ones who spend a lot of time at the table and actually generate the rake from the deposits they have won.
Why this boycott worked
The reason this boycott worked and others have not is probably due to the fact that the high-stakes cash community on GGPoker is very small. There were only 90 players in the boycott initially. This made it much easier for the players involved to mobilise and plan their strategy, keeping each other in line when the temptation was there to jump in on the juicier tables.
This is also why I suspect Jake Schindler and Ali Imsirovic were banned from the EPT High Roller events last year in Monte Carlo, after playing the first event of the series. These events sometimes only get 30 or 40 players, it would have been much easier for them all to present a united front to the operators saying "It's them or us".
It would be near impossible to organise a meaningful boycott at low or midstakes, because the player pools are so vast. Even 500 or 1,000 players boycotting $50 MTTs or $1/$2NL likely doesn't put much of a dent in things for an operator. Plus such a group is much harder to get together in the first place, it would need to be done via a poker forum at best.
Maybe the best way the poker community can affect change at lower stakes is by getting the higher-stakes guys to protest on their behalf, where they can have more impact.
Do boycotts work in poker? Let us know in the comments:
