[jjshabado]

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BUT, I was thinking the other day that good players in NL may be 'paying' more of the rake than we think (or at least than I thought). In 1/2NL (the only NL game I'm familiar with) there are many many bad players that sit at the table until they bust.

If we tracked the rake each player 'paid' then whenever a player was stacked, the winning player assumes an amount of the rake paid for that person up until the difference in stack sizes is reached. Since if we were playing rake free the losing player would have had that money in his stack when he busted.

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The problem with this logic is that you can say the same thing about the bad players stacking each other - each one is paying for the other guy's rake. So, in the end, you are still back to everyone paying the rake, and it's going to work out that the players that are in more pots (the bad plaeyers) end up paying more of it.

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Sure it applies to bad players stacking each other. But realistically, good players stack bad players more often and if player A stacks player B and then gets stacked by player C then player C assumes the rake paid by A and B.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing that bad players are in more pots and thus paying more rake, but I don't think the argument is that easy to make. Its especially naive to assume that good players are only paying the rake on the hands they win, which seems to be a common sentiment I hear from people.



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Your argument basically boils down to the assertion that if there's a limited pool of memory feeding into the game (the losing players stop rebuying after a certain point), then the total amount of money taken off the table affects a good player's earn - which is obviously true.

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Right, and I think in the NL case this an approximate model of what happens on a semi-regular basis. A bad player has a small bankroll for the day and leaves when he goes broke. Obviously there are bad players that leave with money, but whenever someone gets stacked by a player with significantly more money then them, the losing player basically played rake free since they bought in.