NOW ANSWERING NOOB QUESTIONS!  I thought I would start answering those noob questions that no one seems to answer.  So if you have a question you would like to get a STRAIGHT answer for, post it at the bottom of the thread.  Or send an email to doubleflypoker@gmail.com

#1 NOOB QUESTION:  What is the softest site?

ANSWER: Any site other than PokerStars.  Seriously.

I did the following: I looked at PokerTableRatings for the top 50 winners at the NLHE 1/2 tables this year.  It seems to me that 50 is an adequate sample (altho 100+ would be better) to determine how competitive the games are.  Poker is a zero sum game, so for the winners to win *more*, they have to have a large pool of people to win *more* FROM.  I chose 1/2 because not all sites have an adequate sample of 2/4+ games.  I ranked sites in the table below in terms of WEIGHTED BB/100:

Of course, with any statistics, there are going to be some caveats.  THIS IS IN NO WAY INTENDED TO BE A COMPREHENSIVE STATICAL ANALYSIS.  But the data was out there, and I wanted to see what conclusions could be "inferred" (even remotely).  Sites where there aren't a large number of hands played (or sampled by PTR) will probably get skewed.  PTR only started tracking certain sites a few months ago.  And some sites allow frequent name changes.  So those sites are generally going to have an upward bias on win rates.  There may also be a game availability issue on the smaller sites - that games only get going during off-peak hours when there are fish wanting to play.  These are *some* of the reasons Cake and Bodog are such outliers.

I wouldn't start flocking to Cake and Bodog just yet.  You can only 4-table on Bodog.  If all regs 4-tabled on any other site, the "top winners'" win rates would be much higher.  Cake has limited HUD availability and they (along with Party) allow regular name changes (which makes it tougher to develop reads).  Both of these factors will stunt your online poker development.

For US players feeling like they are missing out because they only have access to a few sites, stop using that as an excuse for your lack of success.  If you can't make it here, you won't make it anywhere.

The data above pretty much is in-line with what my impressions of site "softness" was from my own experience and from what I had been reading on 2+2.

A few other takeaways:

* It seems interesting that with all the talk of bots on ipoker, the win rates seem in-line with the other sites.  Probably anything within 0.5ptbb is probably just noise (I pulled that number out of my ass).

* The real outlier in the tables is Stars.  Those games are obviously the toughest out there.  I was a little surprised that the win rates for the top 50 "winners" were so low.  The thing I find interesting though is that the average "winner" on those sites make 3x more MONEY than the other grinding sites.  Of course, the play 5x as many hands.

The moral of the story: playing with software bots >>> playing with human bots.