iPoker and winning players

[Warbirds]

There was talk of winning players being banned from iPoker skins, and now this: http://www.bluffeurope.com/poker-news/en/-Blonde-Poker-set-for-iPoker-axe-due-to-winning-players_6212.aspx (I don't want to advertise for another forum although the full thread is linked at the end of the Bluff article and it makes for amazing reading...) What can be the reasoning behind this? After all unlike in sports bettings the rooms do not actually loose their own money to winning players? Is it because they are trying to be viewed as "fish tanks" in order to attract more new players??? Sounds crazy... :eek Fred

[GaF]

Re: iPoker and winning players Actually, I have to confess, I feel I can understand it to an extent (though I've only skimmed the article and not looked at the blonde thread) and I imagine it encapsulates something I've long thought. Every network needs to recruit fish to feed the sharks. Get the fish and the sharks will surely follow. Recruiting fish costs lots of money. Recruiting sharks should be pretty cheap - they'll want to be there, and when they are there, they'll play more volume for longer, whereas after the fish have gone busto x times, then they'll eventually give up and stop playing. Where a network is one skin - such as Full Tilt and Pokerstars then they need to recruit the fish to feed the sharks that play on their network. They pay the costs of recruiting the fish and reap the rewards of the fees paid by the fish and sharks. However, where a network is made up of multiple skins, then it is a completely different dynamic. Skins should have no incentive to recruit the fish, to feed others sharks - instead their optimal strategy should be to recruit the sharks and leech off of the fish provided by the network/other skins (I'm not saying that this is what Blonde did - deliberately or otherwise) - because the sharks are the ones who provide the volume at low recruitment cost. Because of this, I've always thought that the responsability for recruiting the fish, should lay more with the network than the skins - indeed I've often found it difficult to understand why skins put as much energy into recruiting fish as they often do. In a similar vane - for the very same reasoning I often thought that it was in a skins interests to work hard at educating their players, and improving their profitability - but equally that this is not in the networks interest. When you look at the Full Tilt free training at stoxpoker/cardrunner therefore, I've been a bit baffled by it, because Full Tilt are the network - and by educating their players, they're making the waters shark infested and harder to adequately feed - I think they're far better off keeping the players ignorant/uneducated