My FT post continued from the other day...

FT basically took money away from a lot of cash game regulars and gave the money to mostly tourney donks (ovbiously there are tourney regulars who aren't donks, but they are severely outnumbered by the donks).  The regs who they took money FROM are annoyed, and the people who they gave money TO aren't necessarily responding positively.

Why do I think this?  Well, *I* started playing a little on Stars and I know a bunch of other regs are too.  When looking at my rake race, what is particularly striking is that while the top 175 dropped 19% in rakeback, the top ten dropped 39%.  So there has been a huge disincentive for the top rake generators to keep playing.  I suppose this makes sense since many of the top rake generators could probably make a run at SuperNovaElite at Stars.  Also, the top five percent dropped 42% and most of the top 5 the guys are usually SNGs/MTTs grinders.  I'm surprised with the additional benefits for tourney players, they didn't step up.  On the contrary, it looks like they may have played way less.  I really have no idea why this would be, so maybe it's a strange seasonal aberration.  But maybe for the HU guys, bumhunters gonna bumhunt (so they're not going to play more).  And tourney donks gonna be donks.  For all we know, a lot of them may not even be aware they are getting extra points.  That's not what you want in a rewards change - taking money from people who are knowledgeable and giving it to people who may be unaware of the change.

But as a business, now that they've spent/reallocated the money, they're kind of screwed.  I mean, they're not going to say "here's an extra 5% in rakeback to make it up to all you nice folks."  Because that's probably like 15% of their net profits.  So people who are expecting FT to "step up" big-time in the next few months are going to be sorely disappointed.  I'm not trying to be a kill-joy - just a realist.  But I do think FT needs to do *something* to make up a few extra percent to the high volume cash game players, and in particular to the full ring players.

The midstakes full ring games haven't been doing well outside of rush, and if FT wants to have a viable presence in those games, they at least need to make sure that there is no further exodus of mid stakes regulars.  You can't attract 12-16 tabling midstakes full ring regs when there are only 8 tables going.  2011 is just around the corner, and that's when everyone makes their SuperNova or SuperNovaElite run.