Beware the 25% rake

[RockyMoose]

I know this has come up before, but given a recent discussion with a buddy, it stands repeating:

Don't play the $1+.25 STTs on FTP! The rake is too high!

It's a 25% fee! If you play low stakes, play the $2 tourneys, which have the same .25 fee, but now it's only 12.5% of your buy-in.

25% is too hard to make a profit. Low stakes are fine to start, and it's just an extra $1 per game to go to $2 tourneys. Your prize money doubles, and your fees are cut in half. That's +EV.

[rong]

there's a 10 man .50 + .20 on pacific, its ridiculous. The $1 10 man is .15 which is bad enough, but strangely enough, if you go up to the 2.50 10 man the rake jumps up to .40 which is a higher percentage.

[taipan168]

I agree 100%. Try to move as quickly as you can to at least the $5.50 level where the rake is 10% (or even better, the $6.50 level where it's under 10% or better still the $16s at Stars where it's 6.25%, the lowest on the net).

[rong]

for $5 - $16 sng, how does stars and full tilt compare to pacific purely on quality of average opposition?

[RockyMoose]

I played FTP $5.50s for quite a while and have been on the $10+1s for about 80 games now. There are plenty of bad players. On average, a 9 person STT has three nits, two loose idiots, one guy who sits out until the blinds are at 40/80 and then starts shoving or folding, and the other two I actually have to play against.

Ok, maybe I'm being a bit facetious, but you get the picture. (I think the shove/fold guy may be onto something. He gets ITM way too often.)

[ArcadianRock]

This is always a big problem. I know playing with rake so high is not good EV, especially if my ROI is only about 10-20%, but if I play the $2 games, I can't have a losing streak otherwise I'm busto. But I probably should just either go busto and rebuy my BR rather than play for months at the $1 games. I started playing in Dec and my BR has gone down $1. No profit whatsoever that whole time.

[duczak]

thats horrid