Jeremy

Originally Posted by Randy

Randy said:






Tony, seriously read my posts and quite taking my comments out of context.. That again is not what I said..

My apologies Randy. There have been a few threads referring to us giving our partners 5% and I lumped that in with the comment above. Reading over it again, your description was def more accurate than I previously thought.

I think this debate is healthy and good for rakeback like you said. As Jeremy suggested, we should do a roundtable on PAL Radio.

I figure I might as well chime in here. I started with a PAS site a few months ago before it was the "in" thing to do. I had some concerns before I switched over but figured I'd try it out.

I've been with PAS for a year now and everything has been sweet. Everyone talks about the %s you can get paid, etc. I started off by working up my MGR like I would do at any poker room and then I negotiated my %s again. Then I worked my MGR up even more and then PAS was happy to renegotiate. It's going to be the same was at every room you go to. Once you have numbers, they'll negotiate more.

A few months ago, I started planning a big revamp of my site Free Poker Training | Online Poker Strategy. By this time, I realized everyone was having the PAS set up so I started seeking some direct deals with poker rooms. I got a few that would start me well and others I've just stuck with PAS for. I wanted to personally change a lot of the PAS system though so my programmer has been working vigorously to implement everything. It will be a much better system when they get some better APIs in place, but at the same time - they have worked with me to get my site running. It hasn't been an extremely easy transition, but programming all of the stuff from scratch would of been just as hard.

I have seen many positives and negatives of working with PAS. I'm not a super affiliate, but I did more than 80k MGR with PAS last month. I will continue to keep doing this because it has worked for me so far. At the same time though, I will keep talking to poker rooms directly and seeing what benefits that has.

Now that just barely covers the PAS part of rakeback. I've still got plenty of opinions on the rakeback vs non-rakeback stuff. If we get a thread going, I'll chime in there later.

I can confirm Randy's thoughts. Rake races and freerolls do nothing. Barely even bring in the low quality player. Valued players feel like they are missing out on something (and they are) if they don't get rakeback. Its a psychological thing and promotions don't counter it.

I'll chime in and say that many people would be absolutely surprised at how many of the highest raking players are playing low or micro stakes.