How is this bad for Michigan's budget? I am thinking the state likely wouldn't have agreed to this arrangement with PokerStars if they didn't benefit from it somehow.
Online poker in it's current state is a terrible loss for any budget, it hurts both budget of players society as a whole, and budget of any country or organisation.
Subscription based online poker can be a solution, while current system which is based on rake is nothing but robbery.
Why?
There is no difference for computer when it hosts a freeroll or $1.1 buy-in MTT or $109 buy-in MTT. In all 3 cases computer will consume some few kilowatts of electric energy and some Gbytes of internet traffic, in general it costs something like couple of dollars. Maybe tens of dollars. At the same time if this computer hosts 100K grtd tournament then it will generate thousands of dollars in rake during several hours. It's a huge hit for all participants if we'll think about players as a structure. In other words in like 11 days of daily 100K grtd tourney PokerStars will earn $100K profit, for providing a service based on PC that is turned on.
So if we'll think about the transaction between two structures, one of them is PokerStars and other structure is ALL players, then transaction looks like this:
All deposited money are going directly to PokerStars during some period of time.
online casinos must switch to subscription system, like Netflix for example and stop robbing players society.
So, assuming said above I can't see how this can be profitable for state of Michigan or some other state or country? They're giving license in exchange for some amount of money, it's like PokerStars bought a permission to rob citizens of Michigan.
