No room at the inn for profitable players
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010Somewhat bizarly it would seem, some of the poker rooms on the iPoker network have been forced to trim back on the number of profitable players.
Firsty we saw Blonde Poker being told to find a new network, and being given a months notice to vacate iPoker. Now we have also seen some sites such as Victor Chandler being told they must reduce the profitable players and hence forcing some players to leave. The have actually emailed players citing this reason.
At first glance this does seem totally ridiculous, but if we think further about possible motivations we can derive a probable reason for it:
Several skins are likely to have been part financed by some online pros in collaberation. Obviously they spend their time playing on their own skin and mopping up the fish. This basically looks like it applies to Blonde Poker. Similarly others have actively targeted a small market of good/better players (lurring them over from sites for example) and are reliant heavily on them to make money.
These type of operators dont really have the millions needed to effectively market to a broad audience so they are largely reliant upon their inner circle and niche marketing for their players.
The problem though is that the network (ipoker) generates its revenue from part flat fee and part commission of the skins rake. Commission making up the lions share. So if sites like those described exist they contribute very little to ipoker’s revenue but they are drawing lots of withdrawals from money on the network. Effectively there’s too much of a shortfall between the two. Too much money out, not enough money in.
It seems very unlikely any site which does market heavily on the ipoker network, like Titan or Sun Poker etc, are going to be told to change anything. But it seems increasing likely that the small operators will need to justify their place by having enough deposits (by players) in relation to the pseudo shortfall. Otherwise they are essentially draining funds from the hard work of the major skins, and contributing very small commissions for the priviledge.
