I'm guessing that players will turn towards more ROI games instead of volume thus cutting back on the rakepaid, thus making pokerstars less money. I am very curious to see if cutting the rakeback will make them more money than they will loose by players switching games. (havent watched the video yet)

Mostly what I was referring to is that I believe that the RB changes will have the biggest effect on weak regulars, cutting them out of the ecosystem. This will 1) simply cause less hands to be dealt 2) make recreational players lose faster because they are up against better players - making deposits last less and therefore making less rake.

I should clarify that I feel strongly about the above only as it applies to high-ish stakes games. I'm not so sure what the effects at micros/SS would be.

Remeber how fulltilt turned out when it was owned by poker pros eheh. wouldnt want that to happen...

Pokerstars was once the best online poker site. Why? cause the previous owner was a private investor with a love for the game. Now, with amaya being publicly traded, their only concern is making money. When they ask for your Customer satisfaction or when they do a survey, the truth is, they don't know really care about you per se, they only want to know the best way possible to make more money to satisfy the investors.

Reminds me of the last Survey from pokerstars basically asking me where they should invest my money (rake) in advertising. Should we pay a basketball player or another soccer player to play on the site? Ridiculous

Yeah but actually that does not matter for me. As long as they make more money it means their business is growing, which I am interestes in too. So if they knew that our interest is their interest they would not fck that thing up. In a few month they will see that basically we all share the same interest. They are just to blind to see that. That's the biggest problem about it. They do not realize that the pokerplayers realize that this is a business thing and we think it's ok that they take money out of it. But it's just full of stupidity the way they do it. They instantly take everything they can and probably won't even get the money back they invested. Let's see how far it takes them..

And that FullTilt thing was just because these people had more interest in their own roll than in the game itself. And I think there are some ridiculous crazy pokerlovers out there who would not do this. Who really care for the game. There must be a way to be sure that the money is safe and everybody knows this. Like Pokerstars where they had bank accounts for every account that had money online at their site and you could be sure you would get your money.

IDK, it seems crazy that nothing has happened and they do not watch all the videos out there explaining why what they are doing is such an insane bullshit.

Re: tournaments -

While I think MTTs will certainly be affected by the player pool getting polarized, I think it is definitely one of the games that will be least affected by the changes. Partially because of fundamental reasons (more variance in MTTs, different types of edges, etc.) and partially because of the nature of the player pool. For example, I think it's quite likely that the weaker regulars who should potentially be dropping out of certain tougher player pools won't: so you'll have winning regulars at lower buy-ins dumping back in tougher fields.

Re: starting own poker site -

I don't feel like I have enough knowledge to intelligently expand on this, however fundamentally it is wrong to assume that in order for a poker site to be successful what you need is a bunch of the best regulars coming together in one place.

Thanks for your answers
Re: starting own poker site
Yeah that is true that you do not need this, in this case however; certain players know exactly what they love in their best sites and they know what the fish loves. And at the moment nobody seems to be able to put up as good of structures and stuff as Pokerstars did, so either 888/Party/or other sites get better with Rakeback/Rake/variaty of games or a knew site opened by whoever working in the sense of the game and competition with the goal of making money by the growing playerpool a bit later than it would be with higher (rake) prices and stuff in the beginning. Actually I really hoped somebody would step up and would do this but if you are pretty pessimistic as what you mostly say seems pretty true I become a bit more pessimistic too.

Let's hope for the best and do what we are able to do. As it is in poker - there's nothing more we can do.

Peace

If their end goal is to make more money and they end up doing it good for them.

I disagree. What you said is only true if the party in question behaves ethically.