fwiw, pretty sure I remember a stars insider write / say somewhere that stars execs ended up regretting the decision to implement the supernova elite program

I'm sure they do regret it, but that's being a Monday morning quarterback. At the time the VIP program was what brought all serious players to the site and away from their stiff competition. In 2006 SNE was reserved for the jorj95 and Elky's of the world. With the advancement and proliferation of HUDS and Scripts too many average players became SNE's which was never the intention when the program started.
If HUDS/Scripts weren't commonplace I doubt there'd ever be 50 SNE's a year.

I remember an off hand comment about how when they made the SNE program it was like a gimmick they thought 1-5 people would get a year.

I dont really get why that is sth they regret. I mean about 70% of zoom100+ grinders are playing several k hands per day (4-8tables) to archieve SNE. without that goal most would probably play less tables and less hours. So there is a ton of extra rake produced and even if SNE get 60-70% RB Stars' still profits a lot from them (esp because lots of players try it for first time and either fail or gain less RB until they reach SNE).

but well, i suppose we'll see how traffic develops when they cut SNE and nobody has any intention to put up a high volume. makes very little sense to play Zoom unless the pool is soft enough or play reg-only tables unless you give yourself a big edge over the other players.
Many regs will just ask themselfs 'what's the point' and get back to play only the softest tables accross multiple sites.

On the other hand we have no idea about the profits from other poker variants, maybe these spin and go-games (and hyper/turbo...) are raking much more then the cashgames combined and have the nice sideefect of not leaking much money out of the system since there are only a few winning-regs ( I heard that the best HS hyper-turbo regs had an ROI on around 5% and now with higher rake it'll be probably 3% - and these spin and go are too high variance and too high raked to be a serious grinding option). So basically a lot of recs that are gambling and slowly transform their deposits into rake while having fun and the hope of winning one time the magical zillion-k jackpot if they play enough spin and go every day.

tl;dr: probably stars doesnt care if they lose significant cashgame trafic if they drop SNE since they prefer the recs playing spin and go

All speculation aside: if there's one thing for sure it's the fact that amayastars has analysed the **** out of this. They have an insane amount of data and whatever analysis we can come up with has been talked about in corporate meetings months ago.

So I don't get all the talk how cutting SNE or increasing rake might be bad for amayastars. Amayastars KNOWS it's not bad for them, otherwise they wouldnt be doing it. The rake they lose from regs not batteling has to be more than made up by the fact that less regs = fun players lose at a slower pace = more net rake for stars from deposits.

It's an interesting question tho (which only stars knows the answer to): When a random fun player deposts $100, how is that $100 divided between direct fun-rake, profit for regs, and indirect reg vs reg rake? Somewhere in that equation is the answer to "why is amayastars doing this".

How do you want to know?

So far I've only seen incompetence. Here's what I can think of right now:
- Not letting our player rep know of the upcoming changes
- Discouraging players from starting tables since they mindlessly put the increased HU rake on 6m/9m tables also
- lol statement announcing the changes, even more lol @ the 'rationale'
They could have used http://pokerfuse.com/features/specia...s-change-year/ and they'd been better off, alltho I think this is somewhat of a pro-Stars site as well
- Not letting most of their players (neither our rep, once again) know about the conversion fees.

They've been dragging down the name of Stars a lot where it could have been easily avoided or at least softened.
It simply screams incompetence all over the place, but I'm sure they have the smartest heads to do these analysis (guess was just some runbad with Ongame, fk it).

anyone else keep getting error code -2/-67 when attempting to update stars software, either directly or via download/reinstall?

are you from the uk? you have to switch over to .uk today.

y i know but app the way to do that is to either open client and it'll auto-reroute, or to download directly through stars.co.uk. the client returns an error code, the domain auto reroutes back to .com.

So much this.
I always find it ridiculous when ppl on forums know what is good for Stars and what isn't.

Yea, because Amaya gaming never drove an online poker room into the ground before, right? Must take a crazy conspiracy theorist to be skeptical that changes they make are actually good for their sites future.

The long term success of Stars is very much aligned with that of a lot of posters on here. People here WANT Stars to grow and attract more recreational players and understand that sometimes changes to achieve this goal may not be that great to their immediate bottom line.

But take one example like raising HU rake. What in the hell does this accomplish toward the goal of improving the experience of recreational players? They will play heads up just as often and just lose at an even worse rate than they did before. Combine that with the fact that a change like that totally discourages regs from ever wanting to try their hand at playing each other (especially at 1/2 and below) or starting tables at 6m, and you see a change that will not be a huge money maker AND will be terrible for 100% of players, recreational included.

It is silly to blindly assume Stars is owned by a mastermind who is constantly making great decisions based on careful analysis of all factors and isn't capable of making bad decisions when their owners have a pretty crappy online poker record to stand on.

I get why spin and go's are appealing to them and to recreational players. I think most of us do whether we like them or not and that is an example of an 'innovation' that may be bad for regs but 'good' for some recreational players. Raising HU rake does not benefit any player of any game so the immediate boost in rake is the only potential plus for Stars. So that change will definitely be 'bad' for the games and the only question is whether its costs will be made up for by long term revenue increases from that specific change. I would argue it very well may not be since it will dramatically discourage two people of anywhere near similar ability from trying to play each other. When the rake is 10bb/100 in a hu match, what do you expect? In fact, in the long run, it will cause regs to become even more selective, only worsening the bumhunting problem.

A change that would have been equally anti reg friendly but more logical in improving the experience for a recreational player would be shifting resources in rewards programs away from SNE type grinding and more toward newer players so that a new player would actually have a pretty friendly rewards system. I'm not arguing to do this and obviously it would suck for a lot of us, but again, at least it would seem a logical way to redistribute rewards to the recreational players rather than the pro's. A rake change in HU is nothing more than a near term money grab with absolutely no vision of improving the site and growing the site. Changes like that can have very unforeseen consequences that cannot be calculated using statistics and performance sheets. There is no simple way to quantify the value in having a brand people love and are very loyal to. The way Stars is now acting is dragging their brand name through the mud and how that will affect the company down the road cannot be easily predicted, even by those masterminds sitting with their TPS reports.

prob stars only looked at the winrates of the biggest bumhunters. To be honest I wouldn't care either if a retej type guy gets the money or stars...

Hmmm, you realize the biggest winning bumhunters are the ones least affected by this, right? A rake increase is crushing for almost everyone but those that have really high winrates who these days get in very few hands. Hence, this stimulates bumhunting, not the opposite. A goal I thought no one wanted. If someone wins at 25bb/100 and now will win at 19bb/100 their life doesn't change much. If someone was winning at 5bb/100, they may now be dead in the water. It is the people that win at 5bb/100 that are at least somewhat good for the site because they do play some matches they are -ev in so a change like this is terrible for them while hardly affecting those that game select most extremely. There are a lot more people like me that have a small positive winrate than there are people with huge winrates. Some people are even extremely selective and still manage to have a pretty small winrate (which is why recreational players are better off playing people like that who aren't very good but let's avoid that tangent). For a long time I was losing in HUPLO and when I turn the corner, they basically announce a change that makes it impossible for me to ever grind heads up 1/2 again without turning into a huge bumhunter which is not my goal. With that said, I am aware of the rake in bb/100 and I am not going to play in games where both my opponent and I are both -EV which will now be the case in a ton of hu 1/2 and below matches if not all the way up to 5/10 where edges can be smaller.

Raising rake in heads up is a terrible way to achieve anything positive beyond if they want to try to rake more $$$ in the near term in those games. Let's be clear, this is nothing more than a money grab in the hopes that the long term damage to Stars is outweighed by the projected increase in revenue. As I said before, I think this is a bigger gamble than people realize when they piss off so many and tarnish their near spotless reputation and Amaya has very little credibility in making smart operational poker site experience as they already drove one network into the ground.

A seemingly more intelligent way to try to make more money would be for them to be coming up with more recreational player friendly options and promotions not just making the games more of a rake trap for all involved. If the site has the same player numbers five years from now with the old rake they will be making a lot more $$$ than if the site has significantly reduced traffic and higher rake.

Exactly, if we have groups of regs, recs, stars & bumhunters, the bumhunters should be the least worried about those changes.

As soon as people have a lot of money they are often perceived as super smart and their actions won't be questioned as much.

Their thought process most likely stopped at "those guys are winning too much" (looking at HU bumhunters. I am dead serious

I'm afraid you might be right lol

Well, I guess it's a good thing we have that table cap at 2/4+ now....

Another train of thought. Are there PLO spin and gos?

Assuming the same rake, those would be even more unbeatable than the nlh ones.

no.

and if it was a joke, a bad one.

+1.

the most ridiculous is trying convince pokerstars that they will make more money if they reduce the rake.

lol.

ah okay. I assumed at least they were raked reasonable.

hu plo under 1/2 is dead wp

Not a big fan of random correlation arguments but the way you are blindly accepting that higher rake = higher profit is absurd. You do realize that perhaps one part of the reason Stars is worth 6 billion and not yet another site that went bust is that it offered the best playing experience AND the lowest cost.

Once you take trust out of the equation (and Stars is burning a lot of the good faith they had) a lot of gamblers just seek out the place known for having the best offer. The loosest slots in town! Whatever it may be. But growing users is so much more important than trying to milk existing users that it is certainly a very risky proposition to increase rake and turn a good reputation sour.

They might just assume >90% of players are inelastic to rake changes (and sadly, they're right as long as they're monopolists, which we can't do anything about).

The equilibrium point in the game just changes in the long run; regs will slowly tend away from them and they will tend to run only when they are fishier on average.

I see 22 entries in 0.5/1 Zoom and 3-4 active tables at 17:26 ET. It's the same as it was a week ago and the week before that.