Last rake adjustment was at $50,000 BTC price.  With BTC at $67,750 at time of this post, the rake has increased 35.5% in USD value since the last adjustment on March 2nd, 2021.

Now would be a good time to adjust the rake again to be competitive with other sites.

Goodfella, the rake cap has not hit $6 at any time during the last 8 months.  The jackpot tables are currently capped at $6.44 ($5.15 rake plus $1.30 for the jackpot). You can't include the jackpot drop in the rake. If you want to get technical you can add 12% of the $1.30 of the jackpot to the rake because they rake the jackpot when it is hit.  So that's about $5.31 as of this posting.

Please remember that the current SWC is not the SWC of old.   In August 2020, SWC introduced a new rake schedule and the rake percent and caps were all drastically increased.  SWC was some of the lowest rake in the industry prior to August 2020.  Granted there were times pre 2020 when the rake wasn't adjusted in a timely manner during a spike up in the BTC price, but the rake targeted on the date of change was substantially lower than it is now.  The last rake adjustment was on March 2, 2021 (https://swcpoker.club/old-rake) when the BTC price was $50,000.  If you check the rake changes historically we are at about the rake that I believe SWC wants.  50 cents HU caps at mid stakes limit, $1.00 HU caps at high stakes limit and mid and high stakes no limit/pot limit, $3 and $4 caps at games with 4+ players at no limit and pot limit games, and $1 drops for the Bad Beat Jackpot.  These are around or slightly above the industry standard. Not super high, but definitely not low rake.  Lower heads up caps at 6 handed plus tables would help incentivize regs to start games and battle.  Something SWC desperately needs.

I can't imagine SWC will lower the rake again until the BTC price goes over $65,000.

I was just trying to be objective. You can not say that collusion is happening on SWC.  You just don't have enough data to confirm this.  Only SWC can.  SWC can see the hole cards and can analyze all the hand histories of suspect players.  Players don't even get hard copies of the hand histories to save locally.  SWC has done very little, possibly nothing, with regards to communicating with their user base to make them feel safe.  I would be amazed if collusion wasn't happening or hadn't happened in the past.  Most poker sites will admit and post about cheating incidents on their site.  The poker community isn't dumb.  We know cheating exists.  There are basic flaws in the platforms and the game itself that make it virtually impossible to stop collusion before it happens.  I believe most poker sites have realized this and out of respect for their user base and to show that they are actually doing something, they inform the community about cheating incidents on their site. Often this information sites provide is very limited with regards to cheating incidents because they don't want to reveal information about their security tactics.

I believe the discussion was about collusion.  How on earth are you backing up this claim here with regards to game integrity/security?  Are you claiming that SWC has a security/game integrity team?  I have never once been refunded for cheating scandals on SWC and I have played a significant amount of hands on this site.  I'm not saying cheating exists on SWC. I'm just saying that sites often give refunds when players have been found to be cheating.  So either: 1) no one has ever cheated/colluded on SWC, 2) SWC has never caught anyone colluding because there is no one monitoring the games, or 3) SWC keeps completely silent with regards to all security measures. Most sites don't reveal their security measures in detail, but they do reveal enough to make players feel comfortable playing there.  SWC to my knowledge has shown the community absolutely nothing with regards to their game integrity team.

There is absolutely no way SWC's game integrity team is anywhere near as advanced as some of the industry leaders like Poker Stars or America's Cardroom. So your claim that SWC has "some of the highest standards in the industry" is probably completely false.

yes some very hateful chat. never seen bert or vegan chat like this either. swc's chat enforcement seems rather arbitrary. one could even say random.

I don't believe this is an option.  SWC probably already sent the BTC.  The fee attached to the transaction is just too low and this is resulting it the transaction not being confirmed.

If you post the BTC address of the withdrawal, I can provide you with more information.

I highly doubt more than 20% of your players have any holdings in shitcoins.

The only solutions to your cashout problem is:

1) Consolidate SWC's smaller balances to a single address while the mempool is less congested.
2) Batch player withdrawals. I'm pretty sure every other gambling site does this and isn't concerned about the privacy issues.

Leaderboard is no longer updating: https://swcpoker.club/krill-leaderboard

No 5k or 10k mixed events?  Only 1 3k mixed event?  Only 6 non nlh events?  Only 1 PLO event? Are you even listening to your user base?  One of the few things SWC still has going for it is that all the non-nlh games get spread and played there. For some reason there is the misconception by your tourney director that lower buyins brings in more player. Lower buyins bring more players who like to play tourneys with lower buyins. These are not the same players who play higher buyins.  You have a large group of cash game players who play mix who aren't really interested in playing $20 or $55 mtts that pay out under $1k usd for 1st and would rather play $215s or $530s. You are not catering to them at all.

Obviously you will get more players in a micro stakes nlh tourney.  The non nlh mtts are a niche thing. You have to keep them on the schedule and hope to build them over time. What you do not want to do is be results oriented right away.  Play to your strengths which in this case is that you actually spread games like 27td, badeucey, badacey, badugi, stud, stud8, 5 card PLO, BigO.  You can't expect them to crush it every time, but you want to keep them around.  Patience, grasshopper.  You aren't failing as a poker site if you run a non nlh tourney and it doesn't run, you are establishing a base for the long run and investing in the future.

What you do not want to do are the following things you have been doing:
1) DO NOT CHANGE THE START TIME EVER.  The high roller 11 game was originally at something like 7 pm EST 2 or 3 months ago. Then it got shifted to 4 or 5 pm EST. And then a few weeks ago it got switched to 9:30 pm EST.  You want to be consistent.  Some timeslots are better for some players, some aren't.  For example, the high roller is set to start at 9pm EST every weekend and Joe is a reg who plays almost every week. Joe can play at 9pm EST but can't play at 3pm EST.  If you switch it from 9pm to 3pm you lose Joe, you don't necessarily gain another person who is available at that time slot right away.  That takes time.  It's not like you are aggressively advertising.  And say you do find someone who would be a potential regular at the new time slot.  They have to actually remember that it is at 3pm EST.  Joe knew it was at 9pm and would make time for it.  When you shift the time slot you lose players, when you lose players there is a chance the tourney doesn't run, when it doesn't run it discourages players from showing up in the future and they begin looking for other things at that time and then your tourney dies. CHANGE IS BAD.

2) DO NOT CHANGE THE BUYIN.  This is a huge issue at a bitcoin poker site and sometimes you are forced to.  I think you often overlook one of the key psychological aspects of poker.  Human beings hate losing more than they love winning.  This is often why you see people move up in stakes aggressively when losing: chasing loses. Now when you apply this to bitcoin and poker, you will see that people almost always want to win back the amount of bitcoin they have lost.  This is completely independent of the price of bitcoin in USD.  For example, James had 50,000 chips on SWC when BTC was $10,000, he has lost 20,000 chips over the last few months and now he has 30,000 chips with BTC is at $50,000. Chances are James is thinking that he is down 20,000 chips, losing, and wants to win those chips back, not that he is up $1000 in USD.  People don't like to move down in stakes and that applies to stakes in BTC too.  People will be much more apt to move up in stakes than down.  You had a healthy 11 game tourney at 10k chips and it very rarely didn't run.  By changing it to 5k you upset a lot of players and a lot of players lost interest in it because it was not what they were accustomed to playing for.  Now combine this with the changing of time slots repeatedly and another drop in price to 3k chips and you have practically killed this once very healthy MTT.  Now of course I would imagine that at some point you would have had to reduce this MTT from it's original 10k but you don't need to jump the gun on this because CHANGE IS BAD.  All you can do is lose when you change anything regarding a scheduled MTTs timeslot or buyin.

3) YOU DO NOT NEED TO STAGGER YOUR MTT SCHEDULE WITH REGARDS TO BIG BUYIN MIXED GAMES.  9:30 pm EST on a Sunday has to be the nut worst time to run a regular scheduled mixed tourney.  Everything in the MTT world on Sundays starts at around 11am EST, gets really going around 1pm or 2pm EST, and then drops off around 4 pm or 5 pm EST.  This would coincide with when most of the NFL games are running.  Also this would be as soon as possible after Sunday morning church service.  9pm is no man's land. People have already played their tourneys for the day. The sporting events are over and people are no longer sweating their bets.  Some have even had too many beers at this point.  If somehow you are thinking that staggering your big buyin MTTs is a good idea, you are doing it backwards.  You should run the 11 game high roller before or right around the same time as the Big BTC, not after.  A player who busts from the 11 game is much more likely to join the Big BTC in an effort to get unstuck than a player who busts the Big BTC is to join the 11 game tourney.  A player who plays mixed knows how to play nlh.  And on the off chance that the 11 game doesn't run, a player can jump into the Big BTC (This is also a great reason to have the 11 game be 5k chips like the Big BTC).

I suggest changing the weekly 11 game to 5k chips and moving it to 5pm EST or earlier.

Don't micromanage the timeslots and buyins.  Pick something and run with it.

There is no option to store/save OFC hand histories.  Can you please fix this.  There should be the ability to have all hand histories downloadable or stored locally on a player's computer.  

Can you please announce changes that negatively affect users prior to their implementation in the future.  Your failure to communicate changes prior to their implementation has caused outrage in the past with regards to issues like rake.

I would also suggest discussing proposed changes with the community first to see how they will go over.

I would like to point out that NitrogenSports offers 1 free withdrawal per week for users who gamble over a certain amount of their initial deposit.  Possibly something like this could be a better solution to keep costs down.

You could have users specify the fee that they would like to pay.  I realize that something like this may require software development.   Maybe you could do something like the withdrawal's last digit would signify the speed of transaction your user would like to implement.  Say a withdrawal of 10,000.01 would signify that the user wants the transaction sent with a high fee whereas a withdraw of 10,000.09 would suggest that a user wants the transaction sent with the lowest fee possible.

Also the way you are sending bitcoin seems very suboptimal. When the site is paying for fees this isn't a problem, but if you are charging your users the actual transaction fee you should do your best to keep these fees as low as possible.  Below is a withdrawal processed by SWC within the last 24 hrs.  The user is a regular and was charged the actual network fee. The user posted this in the SWC trollbox and made it public. I have converted the transaction to USD values and hidden the addresses to keep this transaction as private as possible.



How to keep fees low and BTC lingo is not an area of my expertise so I will leave discussing how this is a very suboptimal transaction and the possible solutions to someone with more knowledge in this area.

Nice job.  Hopefully this will encourage people to start games.  It would be so much easier if you could just have the software automatically adjust rake weekly or monthly based on the BTC/USD price at a fixed/scheduled time. (i.e. Rake is auto adjusted every Monday morning or on the 1st of every month).  This would provide your user base with a more consistent rake schedule.  When the BTC price spikes and as a result your rake becomes some of the highest in the industry, players often find other sites to play and never come back.

Glady. You can't predict whether BTC will rise or fall with any certainty, so in order to compare the rake you need to compare vs the dates it was adjusted. I will compare the rake caps in USD price on Jan 5th (the date of the prior rake adjustment) vs the rake caps in USD price on Feb 26th (the date of the most recent rake adjustments).







As you can see above, every fixed limit stake has had it's base USD rake increased when you compare vs the Jan 5th rake schedule.  If you look at all the games that run the most you can see that the 10/20 jackpot has also increased, so have all of the ofc games except 25/pt and 200+/pt.  $200/pt + never runs anymore. That's $10/pt at 50k btc price.

The cap has been reduced in nlh 6max and 9 handed tables at 25/50 and above.  This rarely runs anymore since 25/50 is $1.25/$2.50 at 50k btc price.  Nonetheless, this a a positive step in the right direction albeit a baby step.

The cap has also been reduced below 5/10 nl/pl.  This is a stake that the cap means very little since the cap gets hit substantially less.  At 5/10 you would need a pot of 1,125 chips to hit the cap of 45 chips. That's a 112.5 big blind pot.

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Well when you compare the fixed limit rake to stars and ACR, it's not reasonable.  The problem areas are marked in red and green.  The major areas that need fixing are still heads up mid stake, but there are problems everywhere.

Rake is still some of the highest in the industry in certain spots. Once again, heads up limit rake is too high and double the rake vs ACR and Stars in the stakes that people actually play $2/$4 USD - $10/$20 USD.



Prices of BTC on date of last 2 rake adjustments:

Median price on Jan 5th = $33,000.00
Median price on Feb 26th = $46,700.00

There was a 43% rise in BTC price from Jan 5th to Feb 26th.  I am assuming the reduction in rake is due to the rise of BTC, therefore the rake should be reduced approximately 29.3%.  In every spot except 3 in the chart above it remains the same.  Not one of the rake reductions listed in the limit rake chart comparison between Jan 5th and Feb 26th is even close to a 29% reduction.  This rake cut looks more like a rake increase to me when you look at rake in USD value.   Since you are so transparent about your rake schedule and you talk about rake unlike other poker sites can you please explain this?

This is just silly at this point. $8+ rake at the jackpot tables and $1.50+ for heads up limit rake at mid stakes.

Rake is mooning!

Fix the rake. Specifically, fix the hu rake at limit midstakes.

ANOTHER DELETED POST FROM THE MAIN SWC THREAD


Support plays favorites with regards to answering emails, monitoring chat, and providing refunds for site outages.  

Rules and policies should be enforced equally.  Bootlickers shouldn't get special treatment.

SWC needs to remain impartial in all instances to allow the user base to be confident that the games are fair. If support plays favorites with regards to their policies, is playing favorites with regards to game integrity next. This is a slippery slope you are heading down SWC.  Users need to feel confident and trust a site because there is so much that goes on behind the curtain that we can't see for obvious reasons.  Deleting posts here really isn't helping us trust you either.

ANOTHER DELETED POST FROM THE MAIN SWC THREAD



If you could let us know what your screenname/names are on SWC are, that would be very helpful to figure if this is incompetence on SWC's behalf or if you are one of the many regulars that SWC has chosen to ignore and/or mistreat in support's recent policy shift of playing favorites with regards to answering emails, monitoring chat, and providing refunds for site outages.

If you don't feel comfortable outing your SNs, that's completely understandable. If this is the case, please let us know if you have clashed with SWC's chat moderator or support in the past.

If you could let us know what your screenname/names are on SWC are, that would be very helpful to figure if this is incompetence on SWC's behalf or if you are one of the many regulars that SWC has chosen to ignore and/or mistreat in support's recent policy shift of playing favorites with regards to answering emails, monitoring chat, and providing refunds for site outages.

If you don't feel comfortable outing your SNs, that's completely understandable. If this is the case, please let us know if you have clashed with SWC's chat moderator or support in the past.



SWC has 200+ deleted posts in their thread.  I don't think it's necessary to prove that there is a very likely chance SWC has deleted one of btcgrin-vic's posts.

I also think btcgrin-vic's native language is not English. I think btcgrin-vic doesn't fully understand what you are asking of him, nemo.

I also don't fully understand the details of the problem. Was it a cash game? Was it a tournament? Was this on Dec 31st?

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]