Check from Full Tilt

As indicated in a previous post, I withdrew majority of my bankroll from Full Tilt due to the Black Friday brouhaha. I requested for a check and the first one arrived yesterday.

To my surprise, the check was from a Philippine bank and it was already in pesos. I have already done previous withdrawals from FTP and it was always a foreign check that arrived. But this time for some reason that could be related to Black Friday, it was already a local check.

Conversion was not too bad. Our current exchange rate is hovering at around 43 and I got around 40 : 1 for the dollars that I withdrew. This is certainly better than the rates being offered in Pokermanila forums if you're selling FTP $.

So for anyone reading this post. Withdrawal by check from FTP is actually now a valid alternative. It took about 2 week for the check to arrive in the mail from the time I made the transaction. So the wait was not too bad.

In another bit of poker news, Pokerstars recently changed their rake and blinds structure. This has caused an uproar especially among SNG and MTT grinders. It seems that the rake for the lower buy ins have increased and this has led to a lot of complaints. Marginally profitable players are thinking that the increased rake will totally wipe out their profits.

In my personal opinion, the rake is actually not too bad unless you play the micros which had a really big increase. But if you analyze it, it takes the same amount of server resources to process a micro tournament and a mid level tournament and obviously Pokerstars gets a lot more rake from the higher buyin tourneys. So raking micros higher makes sense from a strictly financial point of view.

For the 5 to 20 dollar tourneys that I sometimes join, the effect is not that big. There was one big change though The 15+1 9man turbos are gone. This is actually one of the most cost efficient SNGs that you can play in the online poker scene. The rake for this tourney is only 6.6% considering that the Industry average is about 10%. So obviously, Pokerstars had to get rid of this one to fuck over all of its loyal SNG grinders.

Anyway, for casual players, the increase in rake is not that noticeable. For grinders, it depends on what games you play. But at the end of the day, its all about making profit and due to Black Friday and the withdrawal of US players. Pokerstars' profits were significantly reduced and all the talk about being customer centric flies out the window if you're not making money.