Maybe it’s just me, but I see no reason for Replay to implement rakes or tournament fees. Maybe some will see it as realism, but I don’t buy it (pun intended). Free poker is or should be intended as an enjoyable pastime. I guarantee you that no one who plays for money would prefer to pay either rakes or fees if given the option. Moreover, Replay makes no profit from them as the chips are worthless. Suckouts after getting your chips in with the best hand should be the only cruel aspect of a player’s experience on this site.
You don’t really want to be giving away too many more free chips than you take in via rake/fees, otherwise you have to keep adding higher and higher stakes games, and the people at the highest stakes will mostly be those who have been playing the longest.
There seemed to be a real risk of that before that last rake increase IMHO, but things seems fairly well balanced now.
I don’t get it. Doesn’t higher rake fees mean a bigger prize pool? (risk and return) There’s streak tickets anyways so you aren’t really forced into buying in and risking chips.
A higher buy-in means bigger prize pool, but the the tournament fee removes money from the prize pool. ie If the it’s a $1 tournament with a $0.10 fee, then only $0.90 of everyones entry fee makes it into the prize pool (excluding guarantees, which can effectively mean the opposite happens).
Again, these are free chips. They have zero value beyond the hand in which they are played. Replay does not need to offset free chips given as though they are the Fed printing money. In fact, I wouldn’t mind if they capped the eligibility for free chips to players with less than 100k in their bank. I have about 10 million in chips, atm. An extra 2500 per day is practically meaningless to me, as is a 7.5k or 20 (25k?) ticket. IMO, the rakes and tournament fees shouldn’t exist.
Every time a new player joins, the total chips in circulation increase, as they do when someone buys them to replenish or boost their bank. Regardless, the chips still hold no economic value outside a tournament or ring game. Controlling the number in circulation is as obsessive-compulsive as controlling the number of grains of sand on Ipanema Beach.
You’re underestimating the enormous amount of chips Replay removes through rakes and fees. In ring games, 5% of each pot goes to the site, and in tournaments, it’s 7 to 8% of the buy-in. This may seem “small” at first glance, but multiplied by thousands of hands and tournaments each day, it represents a colossal amount of chips removed.
That’s far more than the number of chips the site offers to new players or those purchased.
So what? You just take it for granted that chip circulation needs to be managed. It doesn’t.
On a real money site, the rake and fees are revenue generated by the site. Those sites want as much money in play as possible to increase their profit.
In free poker, the only motivation to limit chips in circulation would be to encourage the worst donkeys and fish to buy chips. But here’s the thing: it’s a fairly straightforward proposition to build up your bank from the initial 50k in chips a new or busted player is given free of charge. The ones who have to keep reaching into their wallet will eventually learn or leave.
Just as in a real casino, poker’s popularity is the only thing allowing it to survive. It is by far the worst moneymaker of any game. Replay is not making a huge profit on chip purchases and I don’t believe charging rakes and fees does a significant amount to enhance it. Their influence is probably, as you note, between 5 and 8% of all chip purchases.
Until recently, Canada had a carbon tax that penalized people who stuck with petroleum vehicles and awarded rebates to those who opted to purchase EVs. It was even less popular than rakes and fees, and a subsequent study found that it was generating only 6% (!) of new EV sales, so the government dropped it, deciding the poor return wasn’t worth the bad will generated.
If Replay is charging rakes and fees to increase chip purchases by such a small amount, I don’t think it’s worth the bad will generated either, considering that the players who need to buy chips to stay in the game will repeatedly go bust anyway.
Your position seems a bit contradictory to me. The chips are totally worthless, but losing some to rake/fees generates significant ill will? And if you think rake generates bad will, wait until Replay has to start bumping up how many chips are in each package and running increasingly generous sales. Anyone who bought chips at a higher rate is going to be annoyed, and that’s the paying customer base you’d be alienating.
You dismiss the realism aspect of paying rake/fees, although at least to some people that’s probably quite important. It does at least have some educational value. I don’t see what not having a rake accomplishes, it’s just making things one louder.
Just for clarification, are new players now receiving 50k chips by signing up, because it used to be 2500 chips to start?
I know they aren’t receiving that when busted but only 500 chips with a series of progression based on your daily logging in.
in my opinion, the fun of free poker lies in it being easily accessible and enjoyable without any additional pressure. I get the point of realism, but since chips don’t have real value, it might be more about enjoying the game rather than the cost. Just my thought, though.
We’re making some increases to our rake on Thursday. The last time we made changes was in May 2022, and after evaluating our chip economy, we see another need to make adjustments.
We’re making these changes for a number of reasons:
We’re keeping our economy in mind. We want your chips to feel valuable, and avoid the stark levels of inflation that other poker sites see.
This will allow us to continue to offer promotions that pay out higher rates of chips. We increased prizes significantly this year, and we want to continue to make them exciting.
We’re making some changes to the BB cap at some stake levels, and our high stakes tables will rake at 5% (our other tables have already been raking at that rate). With these changes, we’ll still be charging less rake than most free-to-play sites (many of which have no rake cap) and it keeps us in line with rake charged by some real money sites.
This chart details the changes that you can expect:
We encourage you to check out our blog post on bankroll management and keep this in mind when you choose your game tables. This will minimize the effect any rake changes have on the variance you experience.
Why would they need to bump up the number of chips in a package? And why would that upset the purchasers, who are getting more chips for their money? I think you meant lowering how many chips are in a package, and if players who can’t build a bankroll from a starting point of (I stand corrected) 20k chips at the first, second, or even third time of asking take offense at having to pay slightly more than $ 0.99 for 65,000 chips, well they should. There is absolutely no reason to balance the number of chips. They are virtual and cost Replay nothing. The inflation they claim is illusory. As top players grow their bankrolls, the solution would be to introduce games with higher stakes. IMO, Replay should challenge players rather than tax them.
As for bad will giving worth to chips, no. Bad will tells Replay they are undervaluing their customers, not their product.
Finally, I seriously doubt a significant bloc of players exist who desperately want Replay to take a cut of their winnings. Nor do they need to be educated on tournament fees or rakes. They’re simple concepts that can be learned in one trip to a casino or real money site, where only an idiot would think it wrong for the house to make a tangible profit. Intangible profits, on the other hand, only serve to lower the player’s enjoyment.
Because if you keep pumping chips into the eco system without taking any out, then pretty soon 1 million chips won’t get you into anything but the lowest stakes games running.
It won’t upset future purchasers, but it will annoy anyone whose already bought chips, which is likely to a large percentage of your future expected customers.
Free to play games have to deal with this stuff too. Nothing they’re selling has any real world value, but if they don’t treat the in game economy like a real economy and take inflation into account, the game is going to die pretty quickly.
There are absolutely very good reasons to balance the number of chips in circulation. I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason not to take a rake.
