Poker players united against rake

Dear poker players,

For so long have we paid a great amount of money in "rake" to online poker rooms. The rake is taken out of a winning player's pot and ranges between 5\% up to 10\% with a limit on the amount taken. More information about what is rake, read here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rake_\%28poker\%29

Regular players, winning players and professionals suffer from this as the fee is taken again and again, until at the end of the month, you may have paid enough rake for a house's mortgage. Do you really want to pay 400 USD to your online poker room for playing? Isn't this a bit too much? And what if you play high stakes and rake more then 1000 USD? Is this really a good service for what we get?

The money taken from the poker industry right now are too much. It is unreasonable to pay so much for poker, when you can pay 20 USD per month for a video game like World of Warcraft - which has better graphics and needs much more maintenance/support/staff overall.

This is how a regular poker player describes the issue:

"I'm just a casual poker grinder. I used the game to get through University with zero debt and I've never really put a serious consistent effort into being particularly good at it. However time and time again I find myself wondering why online poker players are so unconcerned with the rake that they pay. Since mid 2007 I've only played about 155k hands. That's roughly 310 hours of poker at 500 hands per hour. Almost entirely at .25/.50 PLO. I've made a pithy $1377.00 which isn't really anything. I play almost exclusively on Pokerstars. Most of the time I've been a Gold Star. I've never been higher than Platinum Star. I've paid $13,687.00 in rake.

That is $44.15 in rake per hour/500 hands. That is roughly 9pt/bb in rake. If Pokerstars allowed me a choice of 100\% rakeback but $50.00 per month up front for access to the service I would be playing 1/2 PLO with a sizable roll. What this means is that the games would be considerably softer. I'm not even very good and I play about two hours of poker a week. Instead what's really going on is that Pokerstars, FTP, and others are scooping most of the money. The games are thinning out mostly because people are being raked to death. They come up with flashy things like Supernova Elite to convince you they reward their players. It's all just a clever rouse to get people to grind more. People become obsessed with earning their next bonus rather than playing well or learning the game.

I don't play World of Warcraft. I do however know that millions of people do. These people do so for $20.00 per month or less. Imagine if 310 hours of access to something like WoW cost you $13,687.00. That's $44.00 per hour for your video game. Does that sound like something that makes any sense to you? Fast secure service for a reliable video game doesn't cost that much. Poker is an exceptionally simple game."

If we can come together on this issue we will change the landscape of the online poker world as we know it. This is a change that benefits everyone. I urge people on this site and others to come up with a plan to strike on the major sites similar to the Pokerstars.fr sitting out strike until this change is implemented. There is no definable reason why players should pay over $50.00 USD per month for access to an internet video game. These websites are charging insane prices because nobody is protecting the consumer and the consumers are too lazy to stand up for themselves. Lets start standing up for ourselves!


What do we need to do:

1. sign this petition

2. wait for a business/entrepreneur to start charging per month, instead per pot.

3. start playing on that web site

4. wait for the rest of the poker industry to catch-up so that we can enjoy good experience everywhere

I hope that you will sign this petition. It will greatly help you increase your winnings on poker or this will simply let you enjoy playing poker for more time. The less you pay to the poker room, the more money you will have to entertain yourself on a poker room.

If you find this petition meaningful, please act. Urge your friends to sign it and let everybody know about it.

If you play a poker tournament/cash table - let them know about the petition. Every man will count in this battle.

What we the poker players want, is something like the "club wpt" subscription based online poker model. It is explained here:

http://www.clubwpt.com/what_is_clubwpt.html

This petition was started via this web site:

http://www.pokerstrategy.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=98565&page=1

All praise "silent21" who came up with the idea.

Please re-post this petition in other poker forums.

Thank you in advance.