Drastic Party/Empire/Multi changes, does it affect you?

[Blu3B3ar]

Party has conducted a major overhaul of their software and now the different skins no longer share the same tables. As I play omaha games, this affects me severely as table selection is rotten at non-party skins. I was heads-up against tough multi-tablers before realising something was amiss. This is undoubtedly affect players undergoing multi-tablers and players with rakeback arrangements. Do these changes affect you?

[Blu3B3ar]

I completely missed the existing Pokernetwork thread relating to this matter.

[hystericalme]

I'm not that concerned, i've been getting "rakeback" from http://www.centrelink.gov.au/ for years now.

[Matt Spratt]

Centrelink is good. Provides a steady rate of 215 a fortnight or so, no matter how many hands I've played during the fortnight. It is also deposited straight into your AUD bank account. Hooray for Centrelink.govOnly a matter of time before the Centrelink skins start appearing. ;p

[hystericalme]

I get $460. I like to think of them as a skin of the work place.

[Sedda]

BlueBear,I'm a very small stakes player (small fish?) but I signed up for rakeback through Eurobet a couple of months ago. I've got to say that the rakeback has been great. The problem I am going to face is that when I play at night there may not be enough players playing at eurobet/multi, etc (especially fish). 8:30 Sunday night - currently 3500 players at Euro/Multi and 12,000 at Party. Do you think that Party may offer rakeback to try and get all the party skin players? They MAY do this to totally oblitarate the 'skins'!

[alan lester]

Bugsy, can you work out what PP are up to. I do know that Party and Empire still share the same tea room.

[Bugsy]

What party have done is offer all the skins 40% of the rake contributed by their customers in return for the skin providing "new" customers to the PartyPoker customer base. Some skins such as eurobet are major UK bookmaking firms able to just add their own existing customer base stright into PartyPoker. With the recent report saying that the rate of growth in the industry is falling combined with the fact that players are moving from PartyPoker to the skins just for the rakeback, party have decided no need for paying 40% of the rake to an outsider ever. Dumping the skins will save $100 million in rakeback and probably very few players will continue playing at the skins rakeback site rather than magrating to PartyPokerPartyPoker have also added Blackjack to their software, with 75 000 players on line and suddenly able to play casino games Party just became the most massive online casino too. quite possibly some shifty behaviour in deliberately talking down their own share price by 30% just weeks before launching some fundamental changes like this which might double their value

[alan lester]

Thanks for that interesting post Bugsy. I just cant believe that report that the industry is declining, for mine its the reverse. My prediction is that Party will lose their dominance of online poker.

[hystericalme]

If anything Alan, this is GREAT for party as a large majority of people using the skins will move back to party. 60k people currently logged in on party, 7500 on empire..It speaks for itself.With affiliates offering rakeback on party once again i they can only grow stronger.