Poker Stars Rakeback

[redbeard]

I am a long time player at Party almost exclusively for my entire career. The recent shut down of this site to American citizens had force me to explore other sites. Much to my chagrin, I have found that what appears to be the front runner for the biggest site (Poker Stars) does not offer rakeback. For those of us playing at mid to low stakes rakeback is a pretty decent portion of our income. Now i certainly understand Star's position on this in that they get to keep all the income for themselves. If that keeps pros off their site to some extent it can be good for them in the sense that their player pool should be able to maximize their playing time on that site. To clarify here let's look at an extreme example -- if you had six players of totally equal talent all sitting at a table the money would move around in a clockwise manner with the house eventually winding up with all the money as soon as enough hands are played. If you have some pros mixed in there, the lesser players have more of their money go to the pros and less go to the house -- so there is an arguement that not having as many pros on a site is a good thing. Now I am aware that there are good arguements for pros keeping games going when there might not be any etc. But it seems to me the WPEX way of doing things returning all the rake may be a superior way of doing business. WPEX returns all the rake to the player at the end of the month. They make their money in the interest they earn while holding the rake for that month's period. It may not seem like a lot but remember Party used to make $4 million a day in rake. That winds up being a lot of money earned in interest when it is all added up. The players are therefore alloted a much longer playing life with their money and will probably be more apt to make additional deposits as it would appear to them that their money lasts longer on a site like WPEX vs Stars. I realize this is more of a theoritical arguement than a practical one as Stars will never ever give all the rakeback, but maybe Mr. Jones will consider allowing affiliates to give rakeback to its players in the future as his main competitors over at Full Tilt seem to do.