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I'm not personally aware of any UK based B & M casinos that pay props or shills to start cash games.
I would say 99% of players on this website welcome any promotion that sees them making more player points and therefore more money from the games they play.
Perhaps that's true, perhaps not, it doesn't really matter. What matters is is there a more effective way of distrubuting reward money.
I really struggle to believe that if you grinded 1,000 hours of normal points compared to 1,000 hours of double points that you would earn less in the double points period. You can still table select, granted it would be a lot harder, but there's ALWAYS going to be recs to play with.
I don't see your point. OP isn't arguing for the winning player. He's arguing for the microstakes recreational player who a) isn't getting rewarded for consistent action, in spite of the fact they're the ones driving action & b) as a result of these promotions, is facing a net increase in the amount of regulars in their games (most likely).
I just can't get my head round why any player (Pro, Semi-Pro, Amateur) would rather earn say 25% rakeback when they're having 50% offered to them, but I'm a self confessed rakeback grabber and would never claim to be anything better than that.
OP is proposing a model that should have a net outcome of a) decrease of breakeven winning regulars (seems like you'd be in trouble, perhaps that's why you're on the defensive - perhaps you're not too dissimilar to OP in that you're campaigning for your own interests - shocking) b) inc of rewards for recs. A decrease in breakeven regulars & an increase in money for recreationals should result in an increase in potential winnings for (already) winning regulars. That's the basics of why certain regulars would actually benefit from this sort of thing, and why the absolute % of RB available isn't the most important thing.
The poker ecology is not something Sky Poker are unaware of, far from it. The challenge is to try to make a balanced offering. They well know - obviously - the value of net depositors, but its a Business, & those that play a lot are entitled to be looked after too.
The new Rewards Scheme introduced in June specifically tried to address the lower staked players - making Rewards Payments weekly instead of monthly, for example. Many don't like that, but for some, it's very important to get a bit of cash or a £2.30 token back every week, & of course, access to £5,000 worth of Freerolls every week. It's populated largely by lower stakes players.
That £1,000 Rewards Freeroll, assuming it gets 1,000 runners (pure guess, I have no idea) is worth £1 per player per day (assuming 1,000 runners) in hard cash. It quite often has added seats to stuff like UKOPS, too.
The (daily) Sunday Major Freeroll is worth £330, so that probably worth about £1 per head per day too.
This month, the Winter Giveaway is awarding £60,000 in 24 days, which is £2,500 per day on average. It "costs" just 15 points earned on the day to enter.
The vast majority of players in most Freerolls (but not all) are lower stakes players.
It'd be rather nice to have no barrier to entry by way of points earned, but all that would happen is that thousands of freerollers from the poker population who never play on Sky Poker would play & skidaddle with the cash, & in doing so, deprive those who play here regularly the opportunity to get something back. You can hardly blame Sky Poker for that, sometimes the players are to blame for these problems.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding all this, you'll be pleased to know (or not....) that Happy Days returns today, & runs until 23.59 on Friday.
I'll be playing my usual amount of games tonight, against my usual opponents, & so I'll earn myself an extra tenner this week. I'm happy enough with that but I guess my glass is always half full.
Yes I would be in trouble and I'm not embarrassed to say that. The only way I manage to play poker for a living is by breaking even or having an ROI of -1% etc and making all the money off rakeback.
It seems like there is a fair point being made at the start of the thread, but potentially with the wrong person (politically) for the role of 'Champion of the Recreational Players'. Kind of hard to believe their motives are entirely altruistic?
Also not sure that SkyPoker is the site to be targeting on this front, as they arguably do far more than any other poker site to try and keep the fun players logging in - and they must be doing a good job at that, as witnessed by the numerous poker coaching sites around the internet which are promoting Sky because they doubt other sites would be anywhere near as soft.
Point is valid though, getting more pennies into the pockets of the net depositing players can surely only be a win for the whole system.
I understand that some other sites now have an inverse rakeback %, so players that lose more than £x over the rakeback period get close to 100%, while those winning players only get a very nominal share, with a sliding scale in between.
That doesn't seem too dissimilar to the sort of promos I've seen over Sky platforms offer, which presumably suggests that Sky already believe there is a benefit to the business to putting more money directly back into the pockets of that particular player group?
2 - Regulars need to get this out of their heads. This kind of thing is repeated over & over by guys on your side of the argument, and as far as I can see it loses your points credibility. You pay money to play on a site to hopefully win money. As a professional you think you can win money. The site then has to use the rake generated by regulars to maximise its returns. It does not have to make you happy. There is no contract, no deal. Sure, the site can say "Ok, we'll give regs back 40% a month because they generated it" Or they can say "regulars want the best games. We should direct the majority of this money into an area where all player types have around an equal expected value which should result in a win-win situation - recreationals have more opportunity for $$$, winning players have more money to win).
As we have now seen on other sites, what you suggest would happen does not seem to be actually happening. What does seem to happen is a decrease in the concentration of regulars, correct, but not all regulars, and as a result the games seem to be thriving under a new model. The fact is, if recreationals are around, regulars are around. Breakeven players + rb pros are the sufferers under this type of model. Good winning players shouldn't be affected too much due to the greater ratio of recs:regs.
If what you're saying is true, then iPoker would have had (and still have) nearly the entire poker market since it offered by far the most RB. Did/Does it? Not even close. So I think we can dismiss your rakebackcentric model. Now, whether the happy hour thing is actually a bad idea or not I still don't know - I'm actually only commenting because I think the type of idea OP proposed gets unfairly ridiculed too often. To get one thing clear, I believe the happy hour thing is better than nothing, but that doesn't mean that it's good. I do, howevz, think Sky's general promotions are much better, e.g. the new RB model. I'm focusing only on the happy hour promotion, or any similar rake race type of things.
I also see that there are major differences between Stars & Sky. For one, Stars has a huge playerbase that can now withstand not offering regulars excessive promotions, like they did in the past (mainly to promote regular growth + promote the game of poker as a profession). Now, with their enormous player base, they have no short-term risk of poor liquidity (unless something goes horrifically wrong) - their games will always be running. The same isn't true for Sky imo, so they likely gain more than Stars by offering regulars more rake races to increase the amount of games running.
If you took that stance there would be less to maon about as well, a sort of win win if you like.
Personally, I love getting X more points full-stop. It's an almost weekly bonus when I cash using the tournament token I get. And certainly for me as my volume is relatively small every extra point is a blessing.
They take money off the site which then needs depositing players to maintain a player pool. Without deposits there are no games.
Regs are needed by sites as they ensure games run and they convert deposits into rake. I agree with the don that promotions should really focus on attracting deposits. That is the lifeblood of a site. Any site with lots of depositing players will naturally attract the regs who can convert that deposit into rake by starting games, early regging sngs, mtts etc and they also take a % of the deposits - their fee if you like.