Hi folks -

My apologies for not getting back to you sooner - I've been on vacation.

Rake Changes

There have been a bunch of posts claiming that since our rake structure changes in February, the effective rake has actually gone up. Well, we've gone back and analyzed the rake changes we made and how they've affected the overall customer base. We used the data for March 1-7, exactly one week to eliminate any day-of-week bias. We determined the percentage of players at each VIP level who paid less rake under the new rake structure.

Percentage of players who paid less rake under the new rake structure

VIP Level	% players with reduced rake
Bronze	88.1%
Silver	92.2%
Gold	90.2%
Platinum	85.7%
Super Nova	80.7%
Super Nova Elite	66.1%
Total	88.8%

Bottom line: the rake has gone down for a huge majority of players. This is simply another perspective on the data that Steve posted here in February.

I also want to make a general comment regarding the discussion about our rake, revenue, profit, and expenses in the forums. We have provided a lot of detailed information in previous posts. We have given the visitors to Isle of Man substantial access to our financial details - information that you would rarely get from any privately held company in any industry. But we are not going to share that information publicly in the forums. You are, of course, welcome to speculate about our revenue, marketing expenses, other costs structures, tax liabilities, and whatever else you wish. But please don't expect or ask us to reveal that information here; it's not going to happen.

And one other thing...

We've been over this multiple times already. Let me state the salient points clearly and in bullet form to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding:

• In January, we switched from dealt to WC for the purposes of VIP rewards. This resulted in a reduction of VIP rewards paid equaling between 1.5% and 2.0% of our total rake.
• We planned to make some rake changes in January that would have caused about a 1.0% decrease in total rake. But because of player opposition, we never made those changes.
• The rake changes we made in February after the player meetings, which were quite substantial for micro stakes, resulted in about a 3% reduction in total rake. We have reconfirmed that the reduction of VIP rewards we paid due to weighted contributed (WC) is between 1.5% and 2.0% of total rake.
• Since the February rake changes, 88% of our players paid less rake than they would have without those changes.

We have never stated anything contrary to the above. You may choose to not believe our data. You may also choose to not believe the players who participated in the meetings on Isle of Man. Finally, you may choose not to attend an Isle of Man meeting yourself where you can see even more data. Ultimately, there's only so much we can do; we are reaching that limit.

Changes from player requests

We've got a few things to announce that are direct results of player requests and meetings:

Limit Hold'em Rake

We're making some adjustments to the limit hold'em rake (probably effective June 1st) to smooth out some rough spots. They're not huge, but they're in your favor:

Stakes	# of players	Old cap	New cap
$1/$2	3-4	$.80	$.70
$1/$2	5+	$1.00	$.80
$2/$4	3-4	$.80	$.70
$2/$4	5+	$2.00	$1.25

More frequent bonuses

We are reducing the size of the bonuses in the VIP store so people can buy bonuses for fewer FPPs (the bonus will be correspondingly smaller). That's also planned for June 1st. The new values are as follows:

Min. VIP Level	USD	FPP	USD/FPP	% Reduction
Bronze	$10	1000	0.01	60%
Silver	$25	2250	0.011	50%
Gold	$75	6,250	0.012	75%
Platinum	$200	15,400	.013	69%
Super Nova	$600	40,000	0.015	60%
Super Nova	$1600	100,000	0.016	60%

The "% Reduction" column shows the reduction in the number of FPPs you need to get the bonus. All of the bonus amounts (in dollars) have been reduced proportionally; there is no change in the USD/FPP ratio for any of the bonuses. Couple of minor points:

• The old bonus levels will go away immediately.
• Bonus levels will not change for U.S. players.

Unregister from all tournaments

This is something that came up in the player meeting in March. We're developing it right now and expect it to be out sometime this summer. This feature will allow you to get out of all of your registered tournaments with just a few clicks.

I want to note that this is just one of the items that came out of the March meetings. Steve recently sent a three-page report to all participants covering every item that had come up in the meetings. He will send out a similar report following up on the April meetings.

Other news

• We've deployed $1/$2 PLO Zoom. Enjoy.
• We've added 6-max $60 and $200 Hyper Turbo SNGs.
• We are now waiting four orbits instead of three to pick up a sitting-out player at six-max tables. That change went in on April 26th.

Thanks for your time and interest. I'll answer whatever questions I can.

Best regards,
Lee Jones

*

Edit/MH: See http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...4&postcount=10

Hi,

i'm Supernova, is it correct with the new bonus sizes i'm not longer allowed to by bonuses with 0.016 USD / FPP?

MTT lobby fix??

Hope not, or I will get really pissed
ATM I have 240k FPPs.


Rake at FL seems pretty good.

great to see you are going to reverse the LHE rake increase at the mentioned stakes, this is very much needed. would have liked to see the FPP/dollar requirement lowered at the lower VIP levels, but still good changes.
stars

not very thrilled to see 200PLO at zoom though

Ups....what a mess! Do the people always have to find the hidden bad news immediatly

Would love an answer on this asap because I'm on 230k FPPs and will be very pissed if they take the $4k bonus away on 1 days notice.

This is a blatant lie, get your **** together, Lee.

looks like so. Disappointing is not only the change itself but that stars isn't honest with the players and tell the facts. Be honest, you know that the price of a bonus doesnt matter the FPP/$ ratio is the most important fact and changing this without one sentence is a very bad attitude in my opinion. I'm glad that I'm going for SNE and so don't lose any value and now just have to save the FPPs and turn them into money when I got SNE.

But for people who get only 500k VPP or so over the year, they get nearly 2k less through their boni.

There was a typo in Lee's OP. The $1,600 bonus will have a minimum VIP level requirement of Supernova.

Thank god!

/me satisfied

I'm sure they overlooked this issue ,I don't think Stars will take another 6.7% from us.

nvm

nice slowroll bros

Can you give us an expected percentage point of what the effects of the LHE rake reduction at those stakes is likely going to look like?

I dont think those rake numbers touch on the most important point and that is who gets the rake reduction ie recreational or professional, and those who play more or those who play less etc..

Damn. I have 230,000 fpps now. was planning to cash out an extra 4000 in June. Now I have to cash out 3,200 and wait. No biggies I guess. Rather like the change overall.

Hmm Lee, I still have in mind what you said a couple of months ago. You said you had never heard of TableNinja. Seriously, how did you make it so far within Pokerstars without knowing that? I suppose you have been working for Pokerstars for a long time because your 2+2 account was created in 2003.

Also, you shoudn't have mentioned that you were on vacation. We know that you can afford to go on vacation; PS makes hundreds of thousands of bucks every single day in pure profit.

Anyway, a rake decrease in the dying limit game is always welcome with open arms. PLO would have been better and 100 more expensive for you, but I keep faith that you are working on It.

Last but not least, perhaps 88% of the players paid 1/4 of a big blind less; however, my rakeback got decreased by over 30% in order to help finance your vacation.

Sorry for picking out on you, but I coudn't resist.

Can I ask for some clarification on the maths used to get these figures please?

I dont think anybody doubts that the rake paid (as in, total money taken from the tables) has decreased compared to last year with the new changes. But when we talk about 'effective rake,' which you specifically mention, we are taking about rake paid minus rakeback ie. the total amount I pay to PokerStars to play poker there. So, for example, the rate at which you considered FPP to be worth would be important in the second scenario, but would mean nothing in the first. The quote you reference from PS Steve seems to constrain itself to rake paid and NOT 'effective rake,' which leads me to believe that the numbers you posted are also not 'effective rake' either.

All players care about is 'effective rake.' If a site charges twice the rake of Stars but offers everyone 100% RB, you can trump out your 'we take less rake' argument all you want, but everyone would be playing over on that site.


Well, actually when the original announcement was made on 28th Dec, Stars only stated the second point - that 'Rake percentages and caps are being set such that we expect a small overall decrease in site rake assuming that play remains the same..' ie. There will be a 1% decrease in rake. References to the VIP club were using words such as 'balanced' or 'fair' and not 'decreased.' Feel free to go back and reread the post. It was only after most 2p2ers got up in arms about the fact that this was clearly word play and misrepresentation that a later post here on 1st Jan from Steve admitted that there would be a reduction of 1.5-2% reduction in VIP rewards.' Thus, the DiR post you quote and attempt to refute is perfectly accurate as to what happened in the sense that original posts from Stars misrepresented the truth.

Further, if I am correct (given the post you refer to and that no method information was provided, I believe I am) in assuming that your table is actually a 'reduction in rake' rather than a 'reduction in effective rake' table - then this statement that you made

is misleading and false.


Generally, I think this whole debacle raises two main issues. The first is that the rake is too high - thats obviously a big issue in its own right. But the second is that people dont like 'having the wool pulled over their eyes.' If your version of events was true - that in the first announcement Stars came fully clean with the 1% and 2% figures - there would not have been nearly as much uproar. The fact that big companies use language to paint their actions in a better light is not groundbreaking - an obvious simple example would be companies using the word 'average' and using whichever metric (mean, median or mode) suited their argument better. 'We' (meaning 2p2ers) believed Stars were above that. But the events of Dec/Jan proved otherwise and were something we would have expected of less reputable companies.

And THAT is why I have written this long post. Because I feel to quote the post you did by DiR and prevent the version of events you did cheapens the point he was making. We can argue about rake all we want, but you cant also ignore that many players who were long time Stars fan boys are now actively rooting against you and hoping another site comes along that they can give their business to.

^^ What he said. And seriously, how many scummy posts are you guys going to make in your PR campaign to mislead players about what happened?

+1 great post by Perfection.

I expect this sort of ninja'ing around with the numbers from most companies, but I always thought stars was better than this.

When you offer up charts like the one in OP it makes you look bad to anyone with a brain.

Using a chart that has no bearing on whether rake was increased or decreased to lead people to believe it was decreased is ridiculous.

We don't need charts or graphs. Just a sentence following this formula:

Effective rake was (increased/decreased) by (Percentage here).

I have a solution, im not sure how great lol but cant we increase our rakeback% via promotion of pokerstars. This would be on top of normal VIP stuff and i guess would need someone at stars to track this but if 5000 no name professional online players had the opportunity to help promote like team online but not to the same degree couldn't we get extra rakeback percentages?

Lee

First of all it is good to see Stars listening and I am pleased you have redressed the rake increase placed on 1/2 and 2/4 fixed limit holdem from January, that is fair and I'm glad you recognised it, that is appreciated.

However as a whole the rake remains way too high and especially for the micro and lower limits. A rake reduction would be offset somewhat by less vpp's/fpp's being rewarded per hand to the players.

The 6max pickup after 4 rounds is a good change that was suggested and implemented.