Pokerstars fires Edgar Stuchly (head of EPT/PS Live) and Vadim Soloveychik (director of global poker), no reasons stated.
Source (German): http://www.pokerolymp.com/edgar-stuc...tars-entlassen

The past few years feel like PS screaming at their competitors "Here, please take our business!!!"

Changing the successful brand name itself was a bad error. They could easily have retained
the brand names EPT and PCA and simply called the other international events EPT Global.

What they did would be like KFC changing their brand name to The World Fried Chicken Organisation. Totally unnecessary.

competitors? who?

Tough job to do without promotional budget.
But lots of errors have occurred both in online sats and at the Live Events.
The name change was an error imo but Live events will continue to suffer as long as Stars syphons disposable online money towards other verticals which used to be spent on sats to live mtts.

Hey, maybe they do care about their live product after all, even if it's only a little bit.


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I think they got too full of themselves as dominant market leaders so thought they could make any changes they wanted to while viewing players as mere statistics on a balance sheet and taking them for granted.

This IMO was overlooking the culture of the game which is that for most on line players and all live players there is a desire to at some stage experience some glory in the live arena and to win a trophy of a respected and instantly recognisable brand.

So by committing virtual hari-kare with their live brand by tossing away a super strong brand name, holding events in outpost locations, messing with payout structures and therefore creating situations where fields in some side events were tiny or non existent, they've damaged much of the allure of playing in live MTTs that are run by Pokerstars.

This is not to mention them presumably also overlooking the practicalities of players attending events. Field sizes simply have to be big to make a trophy worthwhile fighting for, and more importantly to justify a player paying the massive extra "juice" of travel costs and expenses.

You have to play very well and run pretty decent and finish quite high up in the money in ~1 in 3 tournaments just to make a tiny profit or break even on an overseas trip after all expenses. Plus some people are not full time pros so are taking time off work or business to play which is effectively an extra cost.

So if field sizes start to contract, pay structures flatten meaning it's even harder to have a profitable trip, and tour locations become more obscure places that you wouldn't really want to go to or may even want to avoid, then it is and should have been obvious that it is killing the success of their live poker tour.

They should probably switch back to their previous live poker model and then add to it and improve it, rather than stick with the badly misjudged new model which clearly is not very attractive and not working very well.

Edgar Stuchly never looked like he had any hair-care problems.

FWIW, I think the original news came from Pokerfirma:
http://www.pokerfirma.com/news/poker...efeuert/504099

So has this been confirmed? One of the articles suggest it is the MASSIVE overlay from PSC Sochi which led to this. Overlay amount was Something around 500K Euros? That's an insane amount.

It is confirmed that Edgar Stuchly and Vadim Soloveychik are leaving PokerStars, yes. And yes I believe there was a large overlay in Sochi.

Hi MacauChris,

The Sochi Main Event had a ₽150 million guarantee and got 387 entries to pay the ₽318,000 buy-in. So roughly ₽123 million contributed by players and ₽27 million short of guarantee. Approximately $450k USD or $400k EUR overlay going by today's Google conversions.

Also worth noting is at the top where it shows 83% of the entire field came from Russia. Hardly any of the touring live pros made the trip.

https://www.pokerstars.com/en/blog/t...p-166628.shtml

(CTRL+F for the RUB symbol and "prize pool" to find the info since it's a longform blog page)

who?

Everybody knew that having a tournament in Russia at the same time as the WSOP would mean that basically no foreigners would attend. No clue if they really thought that enough Russians would come?

Nobody from Europe and the US wants to travel to Russia right now. There are almost no German or Portuguese fans at the Confederations Cup. Going to be interesting to see how many tourists will show up for the World Cup next summer. I know a couple people who went to Brazil in 2014 and probably close to 50 people that went to France last summer for the Euros, but not a single one those plans to go to Russia.
Edgar Stuchly and Vadim Soloveychik, as the title says.

Hello dhub, thanks for this. I am surprised this is not big news in the poker industry. Certainly, PS is taking this seriously as top execs are losing jobs over this. Should've made the trip out to Russia for this. Thanks again.

I guess it is because most of the poker news sites are owned by Pokerstars.

HOW does the communications and PR team continue to keep jobs. In the words of Shaq they are "horriawful".

Never heard of these guys. I remember when Stars, Tilt and everyone else had so many sponsored pros. Honestly, except for a few well known names (Hellmuth, DNegs, Ivey, etc) I doubt they brought much value to the sites.

Edit: Oh these guys were executives. I have no idea who they are or what they did.

It was actually just before the WSOP started, but right when SCOOP was just finishing as well. Pretty terrible scheduling. The visa issue was another factor, this won't be required for the world cup next year so whilst numbers will probably be down, I still think a lot of people will turn up (for the world cup, not the poker torny).

Not all of them Hopefully it will balance the 'nothing to see hear' approach from other 'poker media outlets'.

Since they don´t care about pros anymore, I guess the rec field goal was successfully reached! Congrats Stars!

Party are definitely coming up strong.

Isn't PokerNews owned by Tony G?

They won't go anywhere with that software.

He sold it before he went into politics.

They are spending a fortune though which isn't sustainable. Without this money it's hard to judge where they'd be in the Live arena. Kudos to them for spending money but I think it's going to the wrong people.

Also it will be interesting to see how the outing of a Live Events overlay stable getting extra benefits from Party pans out.

I was more talking about live but even so the software is waaaay more playable that it used to be and more has a few niggles than anything now.