There's been an unbelievable amount of dissatisfaction in the Doug thread because of the recent rakeback changes.  I had written about them last month, but I just wanted to add a slightly different perspective on the changes - that from the business side.

In my estimation, the changes the last few months WASN'T a cash grab by FT.  They basically took money from most ring game regs and decided to redistribute that to tourney donks and HU players.  The latter groups of players had been getting screwed over in rewards for years.  Maybe they wanted to build a stronger tourney base - as the many players are not cash game players.  And it seems to me that they make more money per hour off of tourney players than cash game players (later post).  You probably want to give rewards to those people who are more likely to give it back.

When I look at my rake race leaderboard for October, the top 175 rake generators took a 19% hit in rakeback compared to the prior two months. That's approximately a 5% decline as a percentage of total (dealt) rake to players.

This move also "frees up" money that would have otherwise gone to affiliates.  If they decrease "rakeback" by 20%, they are in effect, decreasing payments to affiliates by a similar percentage.  In fact, if they came up with some way of calculating MGR to be zero, they could theoretically get rid of all affiliates and replace that with a system of points, like Stars.  For now, this move probably saves FT another 1+% as a percentage of total rake.

As previously mentioned, I am losing around 6% in rakeback, I get 4% of it back on additional rewards (mostly Black Card) - so net I'm minus 1-2% or so.  If I were a 6 max player, I would probably be flat or net +1% or so, and if I played HU or tourneys, I make out like a bandit - up at least a few percent.  Looks like FT loses a little overall.  Then add the extra 1% that the affiliates are kicking in, to get closer to flat.  So if you take a step back and add up all of the above, it does not necessarily equal a "cash grab."  To me, it looks like the flow of funds basically evens out.

And they used some of our money to improve service and send us our pretty stainless steel Black Cards in Fed Ex pouches.  I always thought asking FT to spend money on better service was kind of silly, since there's no such thing as a "free lunch."  But whatever.

Now that you know what happened to the money, what does this mean?  Even tho on paper FT *probably* isn't making any money off of these moves, they are in a much worse position than before.  Continued in a later post.

Also, turns out Disco got a 1 month suspension for buying HHs.  Caveat Emptor - buyer beware.