Revolution Gaming Announces New Player Segregation Policy
Just one day after it was discovered that the Party Poker Network was segregating large winning players from losing players, the Revolution Gaming Network announced that they would release a similar program. The news was first leaked by Intertops, one of the largest Revolution Gaming skins. It was later confirmed by Lock Poker representative Shane Bridges in the Two Plus Two Lock Poker forum.
Bridges describes the program as Fair Play Technology. The software would prevent large winners from having access to tables where there were players identified as large losing players. Unlike Party Poker, this news was made public by Revolution Gaming. Bridges described that there would be a blitz educational campaign telling players about the changes. This would be done through a pop up within Revolution Gaming’s software.
Fair Play Technology will only affect cash games.
Fair Play would rate players and place them into three categories. The categories would be large winners, large losers and then all other players would be placed into a middle tier. Large winners would not have access to tables populated by players identified as large losers. The players in the middle tier would have access to all tables.
This news comes just two weeks after Lock Poker rolled out a similar segregation policy on the network. The feature was not publicly announced that time and the backlash received from that release may have convinced the network to be more forward this time around. The previous segregation policy removed most Lock Poker players from the general network’s player pool. This caused liquidity issues in the higher limit games. This also drew the ire of other skins that were unhappy that the network was withholding tables from their skins. This setup will be replaced by Fair Play Technology.
This move is interesting because Lock Poker, the owner of the Revolution Gaming Network, has been known as an online poker room that catered to high volume players that were predominately winners, especially when they were on the Merge Gaming Network. This type of marketing included offering private rakeback deals that were higher than allowed by the network, offering promotions that did not conform to network rules and there were also accusations of poaching players from other skins.
This type of action continued when Lock Poker purchased the Cake Poker Network and moved their skin there. Lock Poker’s first move was to raise the rakeback percent from 33% to 36%. This was done because it was higher than the 35% rakeback that was offered by Merge Gaming at the time. The Revolution Gaming Network is also the last to offer rakeback using the dealt method. This means that players can fold get still get paid rakeback for that hand.
Lock Poker also bases some of their marketing off of their house pros. Big names include Michael Mizrachi, Annette Obrestad and Chris Moorman. This new setup has to leave one to question whether players in the lowest tier will even have access to games involving these players.
As I wrote about in the Party Poker article, this also leaves players to wonder if this is done solely to generate more rake. If large winning players are denied access to losing players then the rake will be the clear winner. In the long term, players of the same skill level will eventually lost all of their money to the rake if forced to play only each other.
This may also help with Lock Poker’s well documented cashout issues. Players outside the US have reported cashout speeds of 1-2 months. Players in the US can expect to wait about two months for a Western Union and 3-4 months for a check. This system should reduce the number of cashout requests made by winning players and potentially improve cashout speeds.
No definitive date has been announced for this system to be released. It appears that the network is aiming for a mid March release.
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