iLikeTrainz wrote: ↑18 March 2025, 03:31
While rake can be incredibly high on some apps (also depends on club/circle) I personally have seen more issues with bum hunters.
On Pokio, the now closed app I used to play, that was the case at least. I only play OFC live now during poker festivals so im not sure what the situation is now online, but I imagine it has not changed much
Both issues were factors.
Bum-hunting is a direct result of the absurd rake.
I played extensively on the apps, crushing the small stakes games. Once I moved up to the higher stakes games (10x and 20x), the rake was horrendous, and the edges were so narrow, basically nobody won. Grinding out the tiniest of margins at extremely stressful stakes where you can lose 1000 units a hand was brutal. 15,000 units on a bad day. While paying absurd amount of rake. So, players would drop down in stakes and play 5x, "bum-hunting", so to speak, and that wasn't long-term viable either. Because then the weaker players stopped playing the lower stakes. In a game like Texas Hold'em, people always think they can and should be winning and are just getting lucky. In OFCP, it doesn't take long for the modestly intelligent to figure out they are just not winning players.
Also, the game was basically a game of open information. The losing players either:
1) reviewed hands to see what the winners were doing, and got better, or
2) got bored and gave up, or
3) went broke.
If the game existed on a major platform where 100,000 players are active at peak hours (such as Full tilt or poker stars before the horrific decision by the U.S. to ban online poker in 2010), with a capped rake of 4 units per hand regardless of stakes, the game would be alive and thriving. Maybe it still is in other countries where it is not relegated to shady underground "play-money" apps.
