Originally posted by silent21
Originally posted by supeyrio
lastly, what is your plan on achieving blackmember? how long do you aim to achieve it?
forcing urself to play more and more just to achieve bm status is beyond terrible.
not to de-value the acihievement of TT, but the black member status worth almost nothing and it is a pure marketing move from pokerstrategy to motivate other ppl to play more and more so they generate more revenue for them. of crouse once you achieve the status you are eligible to attend the bm party as a vip (u've raking more than 150k after wall), have a 5 star hotel accommodation, a nice dinner and etc, but if you stop raking at least approximately 5-10k a month you are no longer eligible for this stuff on the next parties.
clearly the highest black members (the one who earn most PS points) are -EV for PS. They surely have very good rakeback/cashback deals and considering that this money is deducted from the payment of the poker room to PS and when we put in consideration the 10k first prize do the math yourself.
the bm party is greatly -ev moneywize for PS as well, but as long term marketing strategy it is brilliant.
cheers for your insights on blackmember status!
i view achieving this status as a measure of success, why?
because the probabilistic nature of poker is such that we can never be sure how much we can make. but what we can only do is to continue to make +EV decisions and hope to profit in the long run. (however "In the long run we are all dead" hence reinforcing the uncertainties in futuristic gains).
hence, i never believe that how much one win is a measure of performance.
how much rake one gross("blackmember measure"), effectively determines how much one plays. and my concept is that the more i play, the more successful or the more positive my net worth becomes.
lets take a sales person as an example. the sales person gets paid an fix wage of $10/hr, and gets $50 per deal close(numerical figures are arbitrary). the sales person know that he cannot decide on the outcome of whether a deal is closed or not, but what is actually within is control is how much work he does. the idea here is not to work more to earn hrs x $10/hr, but by working more and making more +EV actions at work, his expected payoff increases, and this increase in expected payoff may not be reflected from his actual returns in $ and cents. hence if he choose to judge himself by how much he earns, he may not get motivated. however if his mindset is such that he aims to work more to get into more +ve situations and thus increase his expected payoff, the returns will not matter.
however, how can we determine our expected payoff? we know that expected payoff = +EV x input
we can only measure input which for the sales person case, it's the hours he work, while for poker players case, it's the amount of hands he plays or rake. (ok lets not forget that like sales person who has to attend courses and lessons, poker players also need to learn through various means like watching videos and reviewing hands)
hence having blackmember as a goal with such a mindset(and not mainly for the rakeback or blackmember incentives) is a not a wrong one to have
cheers 
:f_confused: 
