I see you guys have incorporated a Canadian promo for KO week where the winners get prizes to see some boxing match. Boxing is dead... so the UFC would have made more sense... but regardless it's a good idea in general so I applaud you for that.

The execution of the promo is terrible. I mean it's bad in two ways and unfortunately the promo is only geared in two ways. Either win a freeroll into another freeroll and then into a 32 man HU match. That's hard. I mean really hard. Yeah someone will win... but this is a freeroll player who has no loyalty to the site and there's a 95+% chance he doesn't play for real money and even after winning there's less then a 50% chance he'll even keep playing.
It should have had some real money mtt's and you'd actually get players who play for money log in and play.

The next option was deposit $100 and get entered into a freeroll to a HU 32 man freeroll. In this case you overplayed your hand. To be honest just being able to comprehend that email you sent should give someone a ticket in the finals.
Who in their right mind is going to deposit $100 for a freeroll to another freeroll where your odds of winning are 1 in a 1000 at best. This is a ludicrous offering that can realistically only garner a $10 deposit at best.

In the end this will be $7500 dollars pissed away by Stars and you'll get nothing back from it. Run the promo like you did last summer for Dnegs party and stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

/endrant

Wonder if maybe Stars might get free advertising from the Boxing people, or something?


Seem to have picked up a little bit of a cold, with all weather changes - so was checking out stuff to see what was available to play this weekend ...

Almost forgot the VIP Tourneys are tomorrow, since it's the end of the month - maybe they'll be a little smaller than usual over the next couple of months, now that the weather's gotten a bit nicer? Guess every little bit helps haha

GL to everybody playing tomorrow!!


PS last5bucks - so fun to bump into a fellow 2+2er at the tables!! Wish the fun for me had lasted a little longer haha ... hopefully next time

Oh fiddlesticks - looks like I didn't get credit for coming in the 'Top 100' of a 2-7 triple draw tourney, that only had 48 entries Guess PS is only counting a 'Top 100' result, if there's actually a top 100?

This challenge may be a bit of a stretch, with my 1-tabling, and cold ... guess there's still 2 more days, so will see ....

regarding MTT schedule quest, it would be nice if you could see which of the 10 challenges have you already finished.

That's a fantastic idea to have something that shows which ones have been completed - would help a lot

Have to go take a nap now ...

Cardhunt finished, nothing to replace it. Must be an oversight surely.

+1

I also find myself having to figure out which ones I already finished and which ones I have left to do, lol.

But ps may have done this on purpose, to keep people playing all of them ,lol.

Not an oversight. They have replaced the cardhunt with the knockout promotion which lasts until halfway through May (and also the MTT promo is still running for a few more days)

This may be putting the apple ahead of the cart (how does that expression go?) ... but here's the PokerScout graph for today so far ...




Maybe they're hoping we'll all give knockouts a try if there's nothing else going on? If only the rake weren't so high ...

Maybe if they didn't take away the 2nd pool of 10nl zoom, that's a sign there might be a new promo coming up soon enough?

You can be very sure about that. A promotion which requires people to play on the biggest rake-trap.....must be as very good business

Probably they forgot to remove that table

Anyway I think they should give a break to these 10NL+ cash game challenges. Running these type of challenges 365 days makes them feel less special. I don't think Card Hunt was a successful promo and I don't think anybody won $5,000 prize. So clearly a fail promo if you advertise win upto $5,000 but nobody actually wins it. Its like stores advertise "Get upto 80% discount" but then we find out there is no product with 80% discount. I may be completely wrong but this is what I think.
Edit: Okay I shouldn't have called it a fail promo :/

Also, very cruel to have this tourney late registration period for 1 hr. At least give them 3000 starting stack and have antes from the first level.

What are you saying about the cash games traffic graph? Is there something unusual about it?

Oh - was wondering if the cash game traffic might be lower now that there's no more cash promos?

Have a different graph from later in the day that makes it look like today's peak might be smaller than yesterday's ... does it look like that a little bit, maybe?



Guess even if the cash traffic might be a bit heavier when there's promos, if the promos cost PS money, maybe in the net they don't make much more? Or maybe they do, since yeah rake's so high

Although yeah if they keep running cash game promos all the time, then it's not so special any more (funny 'upto 80%' analogy, when nothing's ever 80% off ) - and there's lots of other games that haven't had many promos, like tourneys ... maybe they'll have a SCOOP promo next? Or maybe a spin promo, or one for draw/limit games?

When they run a promo that will give me 43euros for playing 205 hands in a month at 2cent-4cent (with 1% rake) let me know. Until then I'll enjoy the same offer on Unibet.

You actually get €53 if you do it at PLO

I've added numbers to your post for easy reply reference: [1] Real money ring game players: Here's your first PokerScout graph & latest graph I grabbed from the same source combined into one. Note that the RED VERTICAL LINE is when the promo finished
[which is based on the PS ET clock - the time zone which defines promo dates & PokerScout traffic stat dates/times]



So yes - there was less cash game traffic on Sunday May 1st compared to Saturday April 30th. But, I suspect the reduction is due to May 1st being a national holiday in much of Europe & the former Eastern Bloc & Russia. It's a long weekend here in the UK & people are out doing stuff. Another example is Poland where it's also a long weekend called "Majówka" which is unofficially considered the start of barbecuing season!!

[2] I believe these promos are making PS money for the reasons you've given. I also notice they've kept the two 5c/10c NLHE cash Zoom! tables for now. I suspect that it's proven to be a net rake gain because substantial numbers of 1c/2c & 2c/5c players moved up for the CARDHUNT promo that isn't available at those two bottom levels. Perhaps they're now testing to see how many of the people from the two lower stakes will continue at 5c/10c without the promo - they perhaps will keep both 5c/10c Zoom! tables while they run the experiment. Right now there's as many seats being played at 5c/10c as at 2c/5c which is unusual

I hope PS will continue to try ideas that force/encourage the nano/micro cash game players to ladder up a bit more.

[3] You write [I edited heavily]: There's obviously heavy SCOOP promos already in the sense of advertising SCOOP - there's a lot of that going on & it's expensive. You can't run too many different promos for different sectors at the same time - it's a bad mistake. A promo must be explainable in a simple slogan & graphic. It's difficult to market simultaneous promos especially when you have players who play a mix of tourney & cash - you don't want customers to be confused by being pulled in two directions.

Regarding promoting draw/limit, PLO & other non-NLHE - I don't believe this will ever happen while there are crushers playing those games. PS policy [I believe] is to eradicate the crushers by making the environment unappealing for them in the games they crush or remove those games entirely. Why would PS spend their promo budget herding weak players in the direction of the sharks who will then withdraw the profit to their bank accounts?

You can expect further anti-crusher measures this year such as removing the ability to table select [hiding lobbies from players in ALL games] - this will also be an effective anti-datamining tactic. I think you'll eventually be forced to click a seating button in all games & you'll be seated randomly just like as happens in MTTs, all Zoom! & many S'n'G formats such as Spin'n'Go.

From my point of view I miss the deep stack cash games [250BB] where there's a lot of post-flop play - there's too much potential for skill as stacks deepen & inevitably games are going to continue tending towards shrinking in average stack size.

how ? link plz

Check the Unibet thread.

It amounts to seeing 205 flops in the month. 10 flops a day, 5 days each week. Any stake.

nice promo. i just made my first deposit. its a nice little site. pretty user friendly and simple.

Also moved recently away from Stars. Obv miss somewhat the smoothness of the Stars-software, but else it has been my best decision in a long time. So, a clear +1 from my side. A promo giving 50 bucks for some micro-hands would certainly bring me back to Stars.....obv only for the time of this promotion

Uniiiibeeeeet Tralalalalaaaaa

when players join Unibet after reading a stars promotion thread, you see that there is a clear way on how things could be handled.

I hope you enjoy it. And one of the best perks of the site is the rep will actually respond to all your questions and concerns... good and bad.

I think one of the main reasons why people are migrating from Stars to Unibet so eagerly is that Charlotte van Brabander has done so. She's so sweet.

I haven't played at Unibet for 2 years - I generally have high tolerance for software, but Andrew's decision to ban hotkey scripts was a total turnoff for me. Their absence just slows the gameplay down.