Just to repeat myself for the thousand time: The Sites Do NOT Want Winning Players!
They want players that DEPOSIT NEW money into the eco-system. To just look at the rake in a snap shot perspective is very short sighted.
PokerStars and Party Poker knows that now when the market is shrinking (a little late).
I definitely think this is true to a large extent I would argue a few points about it. I don't think it's not so much that sites don't want players to make money as much as it is the players who lose money might not return after they have taken enough beatings.
I think it's incredibly important for the sites to maintain a certain amount of sponsored and un-sponsored players around the environment as it inspires younger players and future generations to get into the game. Without stories like those of Doug Polk or Jungleman, many new players wouldn't even bother to enter the game and poker will be viewed as a unbeatable game with only the house winning again.
If companies like pokerstars still clearly present an opportunity for people to profit, and if you look as the softness of some of the other sites out there right now they have already lost their share of the fish population already.
It's better marketing to have a friend who has made $5,000 playing poker in his spare time over the year then to have some guy shown winning $5,000,000 on TV as most people are going to look at their friend and say teach me while they will look at the other one and think "the
odds of that are one in a million" and go on with their day.
Moneymaker was a grassroots occurrence that you couldn't have written a better story line for poker for in a New York board room.
If you set up a situation where no one wins playing
online poker, no one will play
poker online lol. I know getting AJ is a hell of a lot more fun in Black Jack and usually much more profitable then it is at a poker table,
In long, I don't think these sites don't want people to win as much as when someone loses they are worried they might not come back.
If I wasn't able to dream about being as rich as Jungleman, I'd be dreaming about being The Wolf of Wall Street, and they wouldn't be able to charge me any rake