Which Site Is The Softest?
There is constant debate about which poker site has the best games. In order to shed some light on this question, we poured through our database and analyzed the number of proven winners that are playing on each site at any given time. Here are the results.
For this analysis, we have defined a proven winner as someone who has played at least 50,000 hands and has turned a profit. Anyone who meets this definition is taking at least enough to cover the rake from the other players at the table. Even if there are other players at the table who are better than them, it is difficult to extract the kind of EV from this player that you can from a much weaker player. This group also includes those who are crushing the game, but even the worst players in this group can not be considered a soft seat. You can think of this group as "winning regulars."
To get a good sense of the density of proven winners at the different sites, we took a snapshot of all the players currently playing every 15 minutes. We then checked what percentage of these players fit our "proven winner" definition. The graph below contains the results of this analysis over about a weeks worth of time.
You can see that the percentage of proven winners currently playing is fairly similar across the sites ranging from around 6% to around 18%. Party Poker stands out by consistently having the lowest number of proven winners playing. Cereus is second best. The other sites have very similar numbers.
This doesn't necessarily answer our question though because in on-line poker it is possible to multi-table. To account for that, we looked at the percentage of all the seats at all the tables that were occupied by our same proven winner's group. The results in the chart below are much more interesting.
Poker Stars jumps way above the other sites, consistently having around 30% of it's seats occupied by proven winners. This major difference is likely due to a combination of a relatively strong player pool and the high multi-table limit(24) on Stars. With the ability to play so many tables, the regulars end up filling a large number of open seats.
Party Poker, on the other hand, comes in as our softest site. Even with a moderate multi table limit(12), Party's player pool just does not contain enough proven winners to fill it's games with regulars. It is quite surprising that Party Poker, an established and fairly large site, had less proven winners than a tiny site like Bodog.
One factor that may have influenced the results is that Party Poker allows infrequent name changes for it's players. This may have artificially decreased the number of proven winners since some players may not have qualified due to a recent nickname change. The influence of this would be minor however because any player who plays decent volume would reach the 50k hand qualification level quickly.
horse chit
I guess this proves Americans are best at poker.
Are the times given CDT? (Central Daylight Time)
The reason that party poker has by far the fewest winners is because regulars can change their name every 3 months. This makes it longer for someone to be a "proven winner".
Has little to do with the skill level of the players
Yup CDT
party time
I think the 50k hand limit is significantly skewing the partypoker results -- new names come and go all the time and it's easy to see that someone is a non-fish even if their PTR only has 2k hands -- you know they've changed names recently.
Why is CAKE poker not in this list???
uh, on Party Poker you can change your hands every 30 days for VIP players, so many winning regs never even see 50k hands per screen name...
*change your screen name
coxquinn, i was thinking the same thing. also, cake? where is it? arguably was the softest site online.
what time zone????
cake is considered part of cereus network, along with sites such as playersonly and absolute poker.
@tom_bon91. How exactly? I play on PokerStars and I'm British. It's hardly exclusively an American site.
No. Cake is its own network and in no way connected with cereus.
Cake players are allowed to change their names once a week...impossible to track over any decent sample size
You people are god damn morons. Fire your entire staff. First you post some idiotic article comparing 6m to hu and get it totally wrong... well, at least you retracted that. Then you "showed" how "high" the rake is at fish factories like bodog, completely ignoring that they have a very favorable structure. Well no shit, you play worse players you pay more rake. That does NOT make them less profitable. Now party is the softest because it has the fewest winners? Are you retarded? They have the worst rake structure of all the major sites. That is why they have the fewest winners, not because they are the softest. Pokerstars has the best structure. Are you seeing a correlation here, geniuses? I'm totally convinced none of you are winning players. Everyone enjoy reading the FACTS here until PTR probably deletes my complete ownage of their ridiculous "logic." Now I have to go detilt. FML.
Why don't you email me your address; I'll send you extra drool buckets. Why don't you at least get an editor who has a brain before you continue to make yourself look like asses?
TL;DR Cliffs: PTR sucks at interpreting data.
i would be interested to see a graph of stake VS % winners
Partypoker has losers only because the rake is so criminally high that only the house wins.
Wouldn't sites with the most proven winners be the hardest?
Very nice! But i guess that this is at all limits, can you make this sample at mid stackes?
Lol
A few years back a group of scientists did a study showing that children that grew up in a two parent household were more likely to be successful in life. Well no #!$@. I compare that type of "duh" study to this one. What a waste of time.. we already knew Pokerstars is the toughest site and Party the easiest. We don't need a study to confirm that.
Does anyone else find the idea of this site "tracking" and making money off of our data a little disgusting? Furthermore, it really makes me wonder why ANY poker site lets this go on.
Personally, I think that Cake is doing something right by allowing screen name changes frequently - at least it keeps these leeches from being able to track us. Hell, they don't even allow a HUD there. Go Cake! Not that I particularly like Cake, mainly because of the volume, but they certainly are doing something very, very right, at least, IMO.
I think it's time the rest of the sites follow suit!
And FWIW, I think their data analysis, along with these stupid little articles are ridiculous. I certainly wouldn't buy stock in what was being expressed as a "hot pick" on television.
Likewise, I certainly wouldn't put much weight into what these turds carry out as a "study" in their spare time, or the material that they compile for a short and sweet article that seems quite hastily written.
Brewcity said it.
Why are you doing it in such a roundabout way? Why don't you just count % of players (with more than say 1k hands) with certain VPIP ranges (eg <30, 30-40, 40-50 etc) and then filter out multitablers. More high % vpips = more fish as a percentage of player pool.
Worthless. One can only interpret variance in skills among players playing at one poker site, but there is no way to compare the skill levels from players from two ore more poker sites based.
this is useless.
on stars and ftp it is not possible to change your nickname.
on party regs change it every couple of months and on ipoker people change skins aswell.
only comparabale results are FTP vs STARS.
brewcitydrew says:
Pretty accurate if you ask me
[ ] didn't know that all the regs grinded from 2am- 6pm....
[x] lol donks
error party lets 18 tables but most mid stakes dont have nearly enough tables for that
Merge Gaming Network is the softest..
Errr, maybe compare average vpip on each site to see which is softest?
it´s not possible to compare party to other sites. i can change my nick everey month and i barrly ever reach 50k hands in that period. this is not just a minor influende on the results.
ad antoher point, why does that graph show that party ist the weakest site? it could also mean that the competition is to tough, that most regs play just BE oder -0,5bb.
i hope this site just keeps on policing the bots in pokerstars. other than that this site is pretty shit for the games in general.
I think more investigations need to be done cz i think there are alot more bots/cheating/bs going on then they are saying
Here is an idea, Party Poker is the most rigged out of all the online sites. Here is something to think about: If all of the sites were using a real RNG then wouldn't the game on all of the sites run the same way? Yet on certain sites you hit certain combinations much more often than on others.
^^ rofl @ this guy. must have been graduated top of his class.
lol
Isn't the % of winners on party so low because of the high rake? In MTTs at party under $11 buy-in the rake is 25%
I definitely agree with Stars being the toughest site to play at. I'm continually trying to find a good PLO mid stake game without all the multi-tabling regs. It seems the softest games to play are the 20-50bb buyins because the regs don't care for the short buyins as much.
Merge Gaming Network is the softest. [2] I wish PTR tracked it, cuz I've been on fire since I got a hefty No-Deposit Bonus there a year ago. Obviously, a study like this can't take all of the nuances of each particular network into account, so take the info for what it's trying to say explicitly, and not what PTR is saying it implies. From my experience, Stars is definitely the toughest, Full Tilt would follow, but those money for FTP's promotions they run really add up if you can grind and just beat rake (net break even). Cake is the nittiest, so it seems all the regs just trade stacks . . . Cereus is pretty level: never too easy, never too tough. Being an American, I can't play on PP or iPoker. :-\ I'll probably try Bodog once I can find a free bankroll affiliate offering a No-Deposit Bonus there. lol
there are so many "proven winners" on stars because they have the lowest rake, allowing a lot of 24 tabling regs to make a small profit.
Why does any site allow you to change your name? I was honestly going to sign up at Party Poker, and then I found out that you can change your name periodically, so I changed my mind.
mbburch has a small wiener
That pretty much every reg at Party can reset their nickname every month explains the figures. They should have much higher portion of their playerbase just over 50k hands compared to the other sites.
Also, Party has a lot of BBJ cash tables. That basically as far as PTR is concerned is extra rake which significantly reduces the number of winners. But you don't include those that win money when the jackpot hits. That will turn a lot of those players into winners. This will significantly change the numbers for Party and Cereus (who with this in mind unsurprisingly is at the bottom of your tables).
HEY U GUYS FORGOT ABOUT LIVE POKAHS!!!! % of seats ocupied by proven winners... 0%
lol PTR is hilarious. They just crunch a few key statistics that they prefer, and base an entire study based on these key stats. They don't look at the whole picture, but they make conclusions on the whole picture based on select stats. What a biased review. Not to mention they have the worst customer support; good luck getting any sort of response from them.
Some of you have nailed it but I will just summarize it for you guys. The reason why Party Poker has the fewest "proven winners" is:
1) They have Bad Beat Jackpot tables that take higher percentage rake, which in turn reduces the number of winners on the site. Their regular rake on normal tables are also slightly higher compared to competition, but they try to make up for it with regular promotions (almost every month), and a 40% rakeback (works the same way as FPP on stars) for Palladium Elite members.
2) Party Poker Palladium VIP members are allowed to switch user names every 30 days, which results in many winning regulars not meeting the requirement of a "proven winner" according to PTR's definition. They say that the influence is "minor" but that is not true. LOL not to mention "infrequent name change" - 30 days is infrequent!? LOL WTF, should I be able to change my name every week then? Honestly misleading information and choice of words, PTR is so full of sh*t its not even funny. Many regulars do not play 50K hands in 30 days, especially because Party Poker's game selection for cash games are limited compared to Stars or Tilt. If you're looking at 400NL Full Ring and up, you will never find more than 2 or 3 tables running simultaneously, if you can find any at all. Even at the 100NL or 50NL, at times there are only 2-3 tables running. So it is hard to get in a lot of volume, unless you play in the "peak hours" where there are a wider selection of tables. If you don't believe me check the site for yourself. You will see I am the real deal and PTR is full of sh*t.
PTR doesn't like Party Poker. You guys should know this. This is a very biased review. The comment like "It is quite surprising that Party Poker, an established and fairly large site, had less proven winners than a tiny site like Bodog" is borderline condescending really. Don't listen to PTR in the future, try to study the sites on your own and see for yourself. Party does have a lot of fish if you catch them at the right time, but if you play at the wrong time every table will be composed out of 4-6 regulars.
damn, well this actually makes sense because its hard as hell to make a profit on stars.
@Suicide_Donk, if ptr was biased then why do they "allow" party poker to show up as the fishiest site in these graphs? You make no sense dude.so... give up :) k, thx bye.
But how to even interpret the study anyways? Do you say "Stars has too many winning regs so I should look for a softer site" or do you say "Stars has the highest pct. of winning players so it is the easiest to be a winning player."
Obviously, this is a terrible article for a lot of reasons but mainly just it is too broad. They lump all the stakes into one graph and they lump players with .01 ptbb/100 in with players with 5 ptbb/100
All that being said, I do think that this statistical analysis of the websites has to be done. Who knows what we might find...
wish ptr would do studies on allin equity and see how much bs stars' rng is. They have plenty of hands for more than a big enough sample size. stars has tweaked their rng to make things closer to coinflips than they actually are. I'd wager 50k that they could easily prove this, unless ptr is in stars' pocket.
I think Bossmedia and OnGame is also very soft but their software...
I'd take that 50k wager. There is no way stars will "rig" their random number generator. They make millions of dollars each day, would you be stupid enough to "rig" anything?
which timezone is the given time in the tables?
please offer this statistic for 6max / FR differenciated... :)
Banks, Investment instistutions etc made millions of dollars a day and still rigged things. Thats not to say stars is rigged though. Just to say that point doesn't necessarily mean it is not rigged.
All arguments except that PTR doesnt like Party thet Suicide Fish brought are coorect imo.
Party is way overrated @ fishy tables.
Was there any attempt to adjust/account for differences in rake between sites?
Player difficulty could remain the same between sites but would not be captured by this quiry due to differences in rake.
Effectively, it may also mean that a larger sample of hands would be necessary to identify winning players at sites with proportionally higher rake.
This consideration gains more weight when we recall that across most stakes (maybe all?) Party Poker had a higher rake than Pokerstars.
The softest site may be just the opposite of what they represent. If a site has a bunch of big winners... they probably have a bunch of big losers too. That money had to come from somewhere. Now if a site shows only a few players winning.. why would you want to go there? It appears no on is losing money.
Suicide donk, this site is roamed by regs, so if ptr publish sth. That essentially says party is the fishiest site, it is the best ad party could ever get to attact more players and rake, especially if it is grounded on data and therefore "proven":-)
I'd be playing at Party if it wasn't for their traffic and dumbass bad beat jackpot. Stars is full of regulars with millions of hands played online, making them difficult to beat but also ez 2 read.
Making the table selection awful. 3 tagg-nits to 1 table is too much. 30% of em play 18+ tables finding them everywhere. They don't play poker, they play one gear, "BetnPray".
The less nits at one table the better don't you think????? Nits are ruining poker. No REAL poker player enjoy playing nits, they're fishier then the beginners. But you nee to nickel and dime em to death. Fun POKER huh. That goes for Lagg-nits as well as Tagg-nits. Level "1" thinkers IMO!!
Stars are for multi-tablers and SSSers(short stack strategy). Tilt are for beginners and gamblers alike. NL10 starts to get nitty tho. Cereus is a joke, lifers in there and their odds never matched up to poker, neither did stars for that matter.
P.s. Do not play at sites with poor security, stars and UB use your email to sign in, WTF?
Anybody consider the real reason why Party is softer than stars now? Duh american players are not allowed to play there! Granted american players lose a ton as a whole and no doubt some can be among the worst players online. However, most pro players or at least established winning players are from the states. The best players on earth live here as do the worst lol.
Reading some of these comments is more painful than reading the comments on youtube.
"I’d take that 50k wager. There is no way stars will “rig” their random number generator. They make millions of dollars each day, would you be stupid enough to “rig” anything?"
ummm, to keep money in circulation much more, thus make more money
"ummm, to keep money in circulation much more, thus make more money"
Hahahahahha
You're paranoid and you've lost on Stars, blaming it all on a few bad beats.
You've convinced yourself it's rigged, and that's why you lost.
Now you're trying to convince the rest of us.
There's a reason the biggest and best gaming institutions don't rig their games. If they ever got found out, business would plummet. So much so that it's extremely -EV for them. The Vegas casinos discovered that playing straight games with a small house edge were much, much more profitable. You honestly think an online poker site, whose games are actively data-mined and and thoroughly analyzed, would be so stupid as to change the RNG?
I would take your 50k bet in a heartbeat. Hell, I'd even lay you 3 to 1 odds. Easy money from another gambling fish.
lol, its because people can change their sn after 30days, all winners do that and all of them do not play 50k hands a month
Question for the people who think it is rigged: When did they rigged it? Cause you can´t think it was rigged since the online poker started. So when did the change happened and they started to track results of players and deal cards according to that? Why anybody didnt notice this change?
To be fair to Suicide Donk, the stats they choose to show are from a very short period of time. It's still interesting and useful, but perhaps the article is based on too small of a sample to make any solid conclusions past speculation.
why are the most winning players play on 06.00h? ist that CDT time?
thats not logic imo.
I don't get you guys. the stats CLEARLY shows that pokerstars is the hardest. If you are a reg and didn't know this then you aren't using logic. The main reason why there are people at stars is mainly because they allow 24 tables and have a decent vip system. if fulltilt allowed me to play 24 tables i'd switch asap.
You know, it would be funny to see TOTAL all-in ev and corresponding profit graph for all hands played on a site. Would be funny to see if players as whole have run below or above all-in ev. (Obs: I'm not saying it's useful in any way.)
Every time someone withdrawals money, the poker site loses. iPoker has passed rules against winning regs. Clearly, the websites make more money if there were very few winning players. The more winners, the more money withdrawn. Losers don't withdraw money. So let's stop using the 'Poker sites have no motive' argument. They've got motive and plenty of it. Honestly, this isn't a logic argument at all. Either the sites have included code in their software to intentionally influence the outcome of the hands or the sites have not done this. It is that simple. Anyone who refuses to accept that either is a possibility is a fool. The only way to know for sure is statistical analysis of large sample sizes. PTR has access to the data, they need to do a proper study. I can help them if they need it as I have an extensive educational background in math but it needs to be done and published. They have the data to prove it one way or another and if they could prove that there was some website malfeasance going on, it would be the biggest story in online poker history. It would dwarf the SuperUser scandal. If they proved that the websites weren't rigged, that would be a huge story as well.
lol. love the comments. The best is this:
"Anybody consider the real reason why Party is softer than stars now? Duh american players are not allowed to play there!"
okay...
This study is totally messed up. Imagine a poker site having all durrrrs and Iveys, noone is winning (they are all trading money back and forth). So that site is the softest site ever according to PTR, right? 0% long term winners. No long term winners in any seat! So soft. Now imagine a site that charges a brutal rake. No one can beat this rake, therefore no winners on board. Softest site on earth according to PTR too. Wrong - you simply can't make money on that site, ever.
Regarding RNG tests. You can give strong evidence of a rng being rigged if you discover statistically significant anomalies. However you can't easily use stats to prove that something is not rigged. If you find nothing, it's still inconclusive. Just like if you find proof of a crime, you can claim it happened, but if you don't, you can't claim no crime happened.
So if PTR run a bunch of tests and find no anomalies that would be scientifically speaking quite meaningless (since it would only prove that, if they are rigging it, they are not rigging it in the ways tested in the study). On the plus side, however, it might give the mathematically illiterate the impression that poker sites have been proved not to be rigged, which would be a great outcome, of course.
JS “Regarding RNG tests. You can give strong evidence of a rng being rigged if you discover statistically significant anomalies. However you can’t easily use stats to prove that something is not rigged. If you find nothing, it’s still inconclusive. Just like if you find proof of a crime, you can claim it happened, but if you don’t, you can’t claim no crime happened.”
This is incorrect. The data set will have a predictable shape. If they take some of their large data sets and graph them, they can absolutely show either way. There are other ways to prove this as well.
If you google checking whether a coin is fair, you will see some more of these techniques.
Couldn't PTR elaborate this study more? It would be interesting to see a graph for the various limits, or at least Micro/Mid/High stakes.
It would also be interesting to see 2 graphs, one for HU tables other for 6max and Ring.
Another aspect to add to the study... try comparing also Ongame, microgaming, entraction, boss network.
I play at Party unfortunately (and unfortunately not very well), but only 12k hands or so into my career.
This 'study' or article has a number of problems as mentioned above, gathering and interpretation of the stats. One thing I can tell you playing at party, the jackpot tables are much more popular than regular tables, something like 2-4 times as many players at the jackpot tables than the regular at the stakes I've looked at micro to low. So maybe most players are paying like 15% rake per pot, assuming the stakes where jackpot tables are available are
I have started learning 2NL, and most of the players at that level are tight, and most of them aggressive. There are usually 0-2 bad players per full ring, but they don't stick around as long as TAGs, they will play 20-30 hands and leave, rest of us there for longer. I've read some places people complaining the opposite that party is not as soft as it used to be as well.
That should have read 2nd para: assuming the stakes where jackpot tables are available account for most of the players overall.
PartyPoker's VIP grinders are allowed to change their screen name every 30 days, so it's possible that many winners that just changed their screen name may not yet have 50,000 hands at the time of the snapshot. PartyPoker's statistics seem to be an anomaly, so PTR should take another snapshot at a different time of the month to see how many previous proven winners disappeared and how many new winners appear.
Can PTR do the same analysis for SNGs and any tournaments they track? A tournament tracking site came to the opposite conclusion that the site with the highest percentage of winning tournament players would be the softest site (e.g., Merge) while the sites with the lowest percentage of winners would be the hardest (e.g., FTP).
any poker site makes money from RAKE. no need to rig anything. I play at party & know of MUCH softer sites. Its softer than Fulltilt imo, but not as soft as it once was apparently.....
I think that most online poker sites that rate different rooms have a deal on with some of them to attract more players to their deposit bonus traffic. In other words, any site that promotes Party Poker or even Pokerstars as a "softest" or "easiest" or "fishiest" site is untrue!
Apparently PP inherited a number of former FT US players because of its 3rd size rating before Black Friday, and so how can PP be rated as super soft? My experience there over the course of 4 months in 2011 proved that it is little softer than Stars, which by many is one of, if not THE, toughest site on the planet.
So let's use our heads, everyone, and suggest that anyone who rates PP or Stars as soft sites is soft in the head, or getting a nice piece of your action on the rake. Stars, for instance, has many fish for sure, but the number of really really good players with multi-hook fishing lines even at the micros is increasing every day, esp. from Russia and the eastern bloc.
Yes, in case you didn't know, every time we use the bonus code from any of these rating sites, the site gets a huge percentage of the rake YOU pay on every hand. And at the micro/small stake tables, where beginners tend to start, that's a huge pile of cash over time. So of course they will promote flaky sites like PP among the softest sites.
Hope this is fairly informative...!