And in the end they get it all.... (online poker)

Dutch Boyd was interviewed and had this to say about online poker.


Poker would be a much better game if it wasn’t so costly to play. The way the rake is structured makes the games practically unbeatable. There are very few players who can make any substantial money playing poker for a living. As a full-time player online, I started adding up the numbers and it was sick how much money I was paying to the online cardroom. I averaged about 5000 hands a week. I’d win about 8% of them. So I was paying about $1200/week to play online. Each time I had a less then stellar week, I’d just think about that $1,200 that the casino took.

There isn’t any reason for online cardrooms to charge a rake. All of the processes are automated. Having been on the other side, I understand very well the costs that go into operating an online cardroom… and they are nowhere near the costs of operating a brick and mortar cardroom. The only reason players accept the rake is because it is a hidden cost. You only pay a rake when you win a pot, so it doesn’t seem like you’re losing anything. But you are.


I think poker is changing a lot… but it can never get to the same level of “legitimate” sports like golf, tennis, bowling, pool, etc. The reason is because the players aren’t winning. And the reason for that is because the house is raping the players. This doesn’t just apply to ring players… it applies to tournaments to. There isn’t any reason why a site like Party poker should be making $60 million a year off of a userbase of 50,000 players, or a site like Pokerstars should be making $45,000 off of a single tournament.


Trust is the most important thing with online poker sites. Right now, the only reason that I trust my money in a place like Pokerstars or Party Poker is because they have a lot of traffic and they haven’t had any problems paying customers out. But I don’t really know that these sites are trustworthy, and won’t disappear in the next six months. I don’t know that Pokerstars is financially sound, or that Party Poker isn’t using a bunch of bots which can all see my cards to inflate their numbers. The only way you can be sure that a site is trustworthy is if the site is transparent. That means being able to see who is involved, where the money is going, where everything is located, where the accounts are, what the software looks like, etc. It means being able to drop into the site’s offices, meet the developers and the people who run the site. I don’t know of any site right now which operates anything like, say, Amazon.com or Ebay.com.

Rake is high online, but the lower rakes tend to draw in the tougher opponents. I have seen this since playing poker over 10 years ago and all over both online and B&M cardrooms. If you look at a sub-market, all the rooms within a 2 hour drive of each other check out their rake structures. The ones with the lowest rakes will have the toughest games almost without fail. In LA the Crystal Park tried to separate itself from the pack with low rakes and the place was still dead with a lot less action both in tables and live players even though the rake was lower. In the Bay Area the Oaks has always had the lowest rake and the least amount of action, after all no one else would keep playing so much damn lowball! In Vegas every now and then Sams Town gets the $1 or $2 max drop going and it goes well for a week or so, but then it becomes a rock garden.

Bottom line is that the lower the rake, the more you attract the rocks. To make much money as a rock you need very low rake. You can play super tight, but unless the rake is low enough weak/tight play won't win enough money. When the rake comes down those players find their way there and in the process kill off the action. Now I am not saying I couldn't see some value in lower rake across the board for all rooms, but I have a suspicion that the biggest rooms wouldn't join in and guess what, they would still have the livest games. If anything the games would get even better because the tight players would leave for awhile and try out the lower rake games. Most experienced cardroom mangers will tell you this is true. A low rake game only works as a promotional offer, whether it is at least create games in off hours when there wouldn't be any or as a short-term move to draw in some customers for a time to show them what you offer. You can't let it go on indefinitely or else your player base will change for the worse. Bad players gladly give action as long as they see others at least giving some action. If the game tightens up even they will start playing better.

Sounds like a whiny rant from a punk who isn't that good a poker player, who robbed other people, and who is trying to set something up to rip other people off.
Do NOT trust Dutch Boyd folks, he IS a shyster, con man, and grifter of the 21st century. At least Phil Hellmuth is an asshole who is a good poker player. Dutch Boyd is nothing more than a boiler-room wannabe.

GD,

Great post...I was thinking the exact same thing. He rips off people and then whines when someone legit is making money.

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by GreenDoberman:
Sounds like a whiny rant from a punk who isn't that good a poker player, who robbed other people, and who is trying to set something up to rip other people off.
Do NOT trust Dutch Boyd folks, he IS a shyster, con man, and grifter of the 21st century. At least Phil Hellmuth is an asshole who is a good poker player. Dutch Boyd is nothing more than a boiler-room wannabe.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

post of the MONTH

For anyone wondering about the reference to Dutch Boyd, do a search on PokerSpot. Probably best to steer clear of anything he's involved with.

Russ “Dutch” Boyd to Open a New Online Card Room
Article by Eric Rosenberg

The former owner of the now defunct PokerSpot.com has announced plans to open another online card room, a move that is getting strange looks from much of the poker playing community.

This story begins on August 17, 2000, when a post from "WJR" appeared on the poker newsgroup, rec.gambling.poker (RGP), stating that he was having trouble receiving his cashout from PokerSpot.com, a new online poker room. Shortly after, the post was replied to by Russ Boyd, CEO of PokerSpot. Boyd wrote, "...we did not receive your cashout request. I am not sure why, and we are still investigating, but we have no intention of keeping your money. This is a very isolated incident, and I think you'll find very few complaints regarding our customer service."


Ahh, but as time would tell, this was not an "isolated incident" and there were not "very few complaints", there were many.

The posts on RGP started to build up. One after another complaining (and warning others) that their cashouts were not getting processed. And just as quickly as the complaints rolled out, so did the excuses from PokerSpot support, excuses like, "We are reworking our entire cash out system, and this has delayed all cash outs by a week or two."

One PokerSpot member, John Buchanan, who played under the username "MS Sunshine", claimed that Russ Boyd and PokerSpot owed him and his wife "over $56,000".

What was going on at PokerSpot? Did Russ Boyd and company run off with the money? The players wanted to know.

In February of 2001, Russ Boyd finally came forward with another address to RGP:

"As many of you are aware, we've been faced with some recent problems at Pokerspot. ... Due to a situation with Net Pro Ltd., the company that until recently processed our credit card deposits, a large amount of our funds, which includes player funds, has been stalled." Boyd went on to say, "As far as money owed to players, Pokerspot will make good on all pending cashouts."

But PokerSpot never did "make good" on all pending cashouts as Boyd promised. Some that did receive checks were out of luck when they reported that their checks failed to clear the bank.

In a recent email interview, Boyd said, “Net Pro told us that they hadn’t gotten the funds that they processed for us from their bank.” He says that after six weeks, Net Pro eventually avoided his calls and PokerSpot never saw any of the money that players had deposited. Boyd went on to tell us that many of the 1000 or so players were able to charge back their credit cards, but there was no way for them to claim any winnings that may have occurred.

This was not a new story. In fact, it was similar to the post that he had made in February 2001 on RGP. Boyd says that he is aware that much of the poker community doubts his story, “A lot of people naturally assume that I took all of that money and partied, buying a big house in the Caribbean and breast implants for a blonde girlfriend. But that isn’t true. When Pokerspot failed, it ruined me. I didn’t have a way to pay my rent, I didn’t have a job anymore, and I had no idea how I was going to turn it all around.”

Boyd says that he had filed a law suit against Net Pro to try and recover the funds, but claims that the company was judgment proof, “They didn’t have any money to collect.”

In our interview, Boyd never did discuss why he wasn’t up front with the players in the first place. He did not mention the excuses about not receiving cashout requests or his customer support team saying that the system was being reworked. Now, nearly three and a half years after we heard the first complaint about PokerSpot, Boyd is trying to get back into the online poker spotlight with the launch of a new card room called RakeFree.com.

While working as a consultant to a sportsbook who wanted to implement poker tables, Boyd says that he came up the new idea of a rake free card room, “I tried to get the sportsbook behind it, but they didn’t see the business sense in giving up a potential $50 million a year in rakes. But I thought it had a lot of potential, so I came back to the states to work on it in May.”

While the idea may have potential, Boyd realizes that he has an uphill battle to retake his place in the online poker world. Boyd said, “I can’t promise that Rakefree.com is going to be successful. I have a lot of critics who have made it clear that they would never play [at] a site I was involved in.”

Having graduated from law school when he was barely old enough to legally play poker, some believe that Russ Boyd is boy genius. He never did tell us whether he thought he was a that was true or not, but he did say, “I sometimes get real moments of clarity that even surprise myself.”

Perhaps it was one of those moments of clarity when Boyd tried to put himself in the shoes of his critics and said, “If I was on the outside looking in, I’d be skeptical too. And I wouldn’t be rushing to deposit money at Rakefree.com.