High stakes PLO community boycotts GGPoker VIP Tables

Tl;dr The rake on GGPoker is unsustainably high given the large variance intrinsic to PLO. It encourages a toxic bumhunting culture on the site which doesn’t allow for any reg battles. With our boycott, starting today, we wish to communicate our concerns with GGPoker and significantly reduce HU, 3-handed and full table rake.

GGPoker has always been infamous for having significantly higher rake at highstakes than the industry standard. Their rakeback system is also confusing and not transparent. For a long time now many highstakes PLO regulars have been suspicious of games being unbeatable or very low edge on GG. Through a recent joint effort of the entire highstakes community we were able to confirm our suspicions. While the games might be barely beatable, given the high variance intrinsic to PLO (and especially 5-card PLO) and the relatively low volume at highstakes, playing PLO on GG is simply not sustainable for the regs on the platform.

We have reached out to GGPoker representatives to voice our concerns; however, it fell on deaf ears.

As such, starting today the high stakes PLO community will be ceasing all play at the VIP tables (25/50 and above, 4-card and 5-card PLO) on GGPoker.

We are currently in the process of reaching out to the last few remaining regulars to inform them.

The Rake

Regs pay around 7 to 8 bb/100 rake. We found that rakeback averages between 20-30% for most regulars. This means that effectively the rake is between 4.9 and 6.4 bb/100 depending on playstyle, ante structure, and your player value index (PVI) at that moment. Heads up rake is significantly higher: around 13-14 bb/100 (effective rake of 9.1 to 11.2). It is also worth noting that this rake is consistent across every stake above 25/50. On practically every other site (including GG on the NL VIP tables!) and live poker game in any casino, rake scales down as stakes increase.

Winrates

We found that regs on GGPoker are on average winning 0.5 bb/100 pre-rakeback. With rakeback being 1.5 – 2.5 bb/100 on average we can expect the average regular to win at 2 – 3 bb/100. To understand why this is a problem in PLO we have to dig into the variance and consider the available volume at highstakes.

The dynamic at highstakes is much different from lower stakes where you can just sit down and grind thousands of hands a day. A very good year at highstakes will find a regular playing maybe 150k hands. Plugging these values into primedope we find that this regular needs to have a bankroll of 700k – 1 million to have a less than 5% risk of ruin depending on exact winrate and rake. If this player would also play 5-card PLO where the variance is even higher, their bankroll would need to be even bigger. And with all that, this player has about a 1/5 chance to not make money for an entire year.

It is precisely for this reason that it is considered normal that PLO winrates tend to be higher than NL winrates, to make up for the increase in variance. As it stands PLO and NL regulars on GG are raked to a point where both are making roughly the same amount on average. We believe that to be unreasonable.

The Effect

The high rake environment leads to an incredibly toxic poker environment for everyone involved. The high rake structure causes HU and 3-handed battles to be non-existent as every reg is aware that you’re just bleeding money sitting any other semi-competent player. Extremely aggressively bumhunting and regs fighting for whoever can click on the seat the quickest when a VIP joins is the only way to approach playing on GG. This is not an environment that VIPs enjoy but it is the environment that is forced upon everyone through an unreasonably high amount of rake for starting tables.

As regs started becoming more aware of the rake and low winrates through our joint effort of educating each other as we all played more hands, and our samples would start to converge, we’ve even seen tables break around VIPs who were playing a bit too tight. A VIP needs to be losing at least 30bb/100 to make a game breakeven and regs will now quickly realize when this isn’t the case. As such we believe GG is cutting into their own profits by pricing the rake so high.

By reducing the rake more games would run and there would be more rake generated for the site overall.

Our Goal

First and foremost, we wish to effectively communicate our concerns with GGPoker. All of us respect and value the effort GG put into building their ecosystem and we want to be a part into making the high stakes PLO scene thrive there.

To achieve this, we want to see the shorthanded and HU rake decrease to combat the out of control bumhunting culture on GG.

The full table rake needs to be reduced significantly to stop games breaking around VIPs that are not losing at the rapid rate necessary to make it profitable enough when we take the variance of 4-card and 5-card PLO in mind.

In addition, we need to see a rake system which scales down as stakes increase, to account for the fact that competition at the highest stakes is incredibly tough and VIPs tend to on average be better players at the highest stakes.