I'm a professional online poker player, and I'd like to give you my perspective. First, let me say that I used to consider you nonrakeback affiliates to be "scum sucking parasites" also. I now admit that was wrong of me, and I've learned a great deal about what some of you have had to go through with the "poaching" between you and your competitors. There is certainly no justification for people willingly defrauding a system, which was what was happening with the .com rakeback sites.
You guys are vital to the growth of online poker, because you are constantly bringing in a stream of recreational players. Without new players, the online poker industry cannot survive in the long term.
Now, I'd like for a moment to see if you could see something from my point of view. As a professional online player (4 to 6 tables simultaneously), I generate approximately $10,000 of MGR per month. I currently get about $2,800 of that returned to me on a monthly basis by my affiliate. He keeps about $700 of that for himself. This is not on Party, by the way. I would love to come back and play on Party, but I signed up almost 3 years ago when the site was in its infancy. Guess who my affiliate is? Card Player Cruises. Well, at this point, I'm not willing to come back to Party and work my tail off to give Card Player Cruises the whole $42,000 per year. The sites that I currently have rakeback on have good enough games to compensate for not coming back to Party and losing the rakeback.
It's interesting that in the most recent report, Party said that 70% of their rake from the entire network (before the breakup) was paid by 10% of the players. Guess who those 10% were? The guys like me playing multiple tables and high limits. If Party wants to attract our business back, they're going to have to come up with a solution that's amicable to all of the parties involved. I know a lot of you are saying, "well, that's between you and Party." I don't necessarily disagree, but Party isn't very receptive to player input at this time.
I hope that you can understand where I'm coming from. I've certainly gained a lot more respect for you guys over the past few days.
I hope there's a solution that we can all be happy with.
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