We are considering ending the Battle of the Planets promotion in early 2013 for PokerStars.com, .eu, .dk., be, and .ee players. We would replace this promotion with the below promotions which would award players with slightly more money overall. Your feedback on this plan is appreciated.

Three main goals of the change are to:
1) Give all Sit & Go players an opportunity to benefit from our Sit & Go promotions
2) Have something 'new' and 'fresh' to motivate new players to play Sit & Go tournaments, instead of the same promotion running constantly
3) Reward recreational players more and in a way that is more interesting to them


Promotion 1
Players will be able to claim a free Sit & Go entry in return for a minimum deposit amount. Multiple award levels ranging from $1.50 ticket for $10 deposit to $30 ticket for $100 deposit.
Frequency: Once
Prize Total: ~$1,000,000


Promotion 2
5 separate bankroll challenges that players can enter as many times as they like within an 11 day period. Players will then have 20 days to complete each challenge.

For each of the five challenges, all players successfully completing the requirements will earn equal shares of a $100,000 prize pool. The bankroll challenges are:
-Turn $3 into $30 at S&G, playing only S&G with entry of $2 or less
-Turn $10 into $100 at S&G, playing only S&G with entry of $5 or less
-Turn $30 into $300 at S&G, playing only S&G with entry of $15 or less
-Turn $100 into $1,000 at S&G, playing only S&G with entry of $50 or less
-Turn $300 into $3,000 at S&G, playing only S&G with entry of $150 or less

Frequency: Once
Prize Total: $500,000


Promotion 3
Sit & Go Tournaments are chosen at random to have prize boosts. Probability of a SNG being selected will be based on rake % and # of entrants, awarding a reasonably flat expected value of 'rewards %' in terms of rake across all SNG. Details of rewards may change, but one configuration could be:
Bronze S&G: prize pool doubled; most common
Silver S&G: prize pool doubled and all players get entry back
Golden S&G: prize pool multiplied by 10 and all players get 2x entry back. Quite rare

Frequency: Twice
Prize Total: ~$1,000,000 ($500k X 2)


Promotion 4
Sit & Go Happy Hours. 50% Extra VPPs and FPPs awarded at all SNG except HU, which will receive 30% extra VPP/FPP only to curb potential abuse by SNE. This might be run concurrently with ring games happy hours or alone as a separate promotion, most likely some combination of both throughout the year.

We could run an extra HUSNG specific happy hour promo to make up for the lower VPP/FPP boost %.

Frequency: Four times
Prize Total ~$1,000,000 ($250k X 4)


Total Rewards
Promo 1: $1,000,000
Promo 2: $ 500,000
Promo 3: $1,000,000
Promo 4: $1,000,000
-------------------
Total: $3,500,000 (exceeds current annual BotP prizes)


Notes
We must have some flexibility to alter this plan somewhat, not the least because prize amounts are estimated and impossible to predict exactly beforehand. We would ensure that we would award more total value of prizes through Sit & Go promotions in 2013 than would have been awarded by Battle of the Planets.



Battle of the Planets conclusion
Speaking of the Battle of the Planets, here is the plan for redemption of outstanding tickets. Keep in mind that those who were earning multiple tickets a month and/or stockpiled large numbers could never reasonably expect to redeem all of their tickets. There was never a promise to run this promotion indefinitely, nor was there ever an opportunity or promise of redemption of more than one ticket per month.

First ticket pays $70
Second ticket pays $50
Third ticket pays $35
Fourth ticket pays $25
Fifth ticket pays $20
No compensation for >5 tickets.

Prize total for 5+ tickets: $200

Players would have 2 months to opt-in to redeeming their tickets in the client. Unredeemed tickets would be expired after two months. Significant effort would be undertaken to notify players with tickets of their opportunity to redeem them.

Based on expected redemption rates, players would receive $290,000 in prizes for their outstanding BotP tickets.


Conclusion
Thanks for taking the time to review this plan. I should be crystal clear: It is not guaranteed that BotP will be removed for 2013. Your feedback is important for both making this decision and finalizing the promotions.

Finally pokerstars thinks about giving something back to HUSNG players. I really hope this is the case and that the HUSNG's won't remain the only tipe of games without any promotions on stars.

A HUSNG leaderboard would have been great though. And i am pretty sure it would've been a win-win situation for both stars and the players.

Loudecho how do you figure this is good for HUSNG? Im pretty sure its not, it seems to me like it discourages fish to play husng and pushes them towards other sngs.

2, does not benefit recs at all, also regs not that much either, probably too much hassle for most regs to be worth it, this really seems like the worst option

Rest of the promos really look good imo. some for the recs only (1), some for both (2), and some for regs (3) that also appeals to recs weeee happy hour etc

200$ for 5 bop tickets seems cheap tbh, I understnad that if u a a million tix and u accumulate more tix a month then u can spend u will never empty out ur bop tickets. HOwever, if u switch to mtt/cash/headsup sng/fifty50 sng for 5 monhts ur bop ticekts are gone, idk 5 seems like very fast stopping point to me

yeah, well you might be right. haven't thought about it that much. i was just happy husngs will get something, anything.

So a player can choose to enter the same challenge (say #5) 10 times in the 11 day period and effectively turn 3k into 30k to receive a bigger share of the prize pool?

Is the challenge considered completed if the required BR is met at any point within the 20 day period, regardless of the amount finished on at the end of the 20 days?

Im guessing you wont know what SNGs they are untill they are full?




Not sure how most regs will take this in general because i think the total prize pool is distributed much more heavily towards the recreational player than the grinder with comparison to BOTP.

But imo thats a good thing

Each player can try each challenge as many times as they like during the 11 day period, but they can only qualify for each prize pool one time. So the answer to your question as I understand it is no.

However, players could qualify for all five separate prize pools, one time each.

Yes.


Correct.

hu plays getting stiffed as usual

all options suck imo but if these are the only options..i guess happy hour

hu leaderboard one time?

Love it, way better than BOP! Well done Stars!

+1 $40 only for a ticket ?
maybe u can at least run a special tournament which has 2x prize pool as normal BOP does for those who have 5+tickets.

Why do you think that HU players are getting stiffed? HUSNG are eligible for all of the promotions listed.

Just for clarification, does this mean that formats not covered by Battle of the Planets (specifically Satellites) will now be eligible for all these promotions under the SNG umbrella?

Thanks

well this sounds better than BOTP

lmao

#1 and #2 give nothing at all to regs, so I will have to go to #4 Happy Hours if you finally decide to get rid of BoP.

Edit: thought the question was to choose one of the promos, so don't take the above into account! As it stands let's hope these changes are for good if you follow through

Overall looks like a huge improvement over bop in my opinion.

Promo1: least eyecatching but I suspect most effective at getting net depositors to deposit and driving them straight to sngs.

Promo2: not sure; could look like a daunting task for new sng players, and a depressing task for the rec sng player, telling them something they prob didn't want to know (they can't beat sngs). Flipside is could promote big increase in volume from rec players. Overall, prob the worst of the 4 ideas.

Promo3 sounds good.

Promo4: ok I guess, are rec players really that concerned about their vpps though? Also, why would you run a sng happy hour concurrently with a cash happy hour, seems to go against point 2 of the stated goals? It drives traffic to the site but not directly to sng. Cash players have road to 1 billion which is already a huge promo specificly for them, don't see why sng players should have to share limelight for this promo.

Not true, Battle of the Planets doesnt apply to HUSNG. I still have no idea why we dont have a leaderboard.

That little dig aside, these promotions are bad for HUSNG. It seems like they are aimed towards fish, which is cool, as long as that money is then spread among the game types evenly. I dont believe it will be, because the promotions seem to discourage fish from the husng games.

Promotion 1 is decent and is fairly equal for all sng formats I think.

Promotion 2 is a kinda interesting idea and I havent got my head around it 100% yet.

Promotion 3 and 4 were especially painful for me to read, they both seem to be actively trying to push fish away from HUSNG towards other formats. For Promotion 3 it doesnt matter if the $EV is tecnically the same across all formats, because from a fishes point of view the amount of money they can win will seem significantly more if they are playing formats with a larger prize pool(ie NOT HUSNG's), which will drive them towards those formats and away from HUSNG.

Promotion 4
If you advertise that HUSNG gets less bonuses during happy hour this is horrible for us. Why would a fish choose to play husng during happy hour when he can instead get more fpps playing another format? To him it looks like he is loosing fpps playing husng instead of other games. The amount of regs online during this time will be insane, and all the fish will be off playing 9mans instead. Marvellous.

Someone please explain to me that I am wrong. This announcement feels like a kick in the balls.

The purpose of these promotions is to replace the Battle of the Planets, which would no longer be run. So the one promotion listed that doesn't apply to HUSNG is the one that would be *ENDING*

Note that it is not only HUSNG players who are excluded from BotP but eligible for these promotions. All Fifty50 and some MTTSNG players are in the same boat.


RE: Promotion 3, players would have a chance to win each time they play a SNG. The fastest SNG are typically HUSNG, so single-tabling players would get more chances to win per hour in HUSNG. Also, in the case of a doubled or 10x prize pool, players would have the maximum chance to benefit in HUSNG as they could expect to cash 50% of the time.

I can't argue as to how the promotion would be perceived; this would be different by player. But the actual benefits are not skewed to any one particular SNG type.

RE: Happy hours, if there were a happy hour period that were just HUSNG to make up for the disparity in % during the main happy hour periods, it would seem hard to argue that this portion of the promotion would not drive people to HUSNG.

I understand that the money isnt actually skewed and will be fair between game types, Im not trying to argue that.

But I do strongly believe that the percieved value of this is weighted heavily towards larger prize pool games. The point about more games per hour and the chance of cashing etc is most likely not even going to come into a fishes mind.

I think their decision will look like this : "shall I pay $60 for a chance at an extra $4500 prize pool (9man turbo w extra 10x prize pool), or pay $60 for a chance of an extra $1000(husng)?". Sure, its tecnically a neutral EV desicion for them (all else being equal), but it wont appear that way.

Just my opinion though, Im sure you will hear plenty more from the HUSNG guys about this.

3 sounds really good for more rec players

At first, i thought we were being asked to choose between the 4 promotions. I was against the ideas because their frequency was too low in that players would only come on during this time.

When I realized it was all four ideas together, I think they would be really good and will definitely incentivize all players (not just recreational ones) to play more.

Promotion 2 sounds a bit confusing. If I'm doing the first challenge (-Turn $3 into $30 at S&G, playing only S&G with entry of $2 or less), how will this be tracked? If my account balance is $1000, does this disqualify me from playing this? If I play 10 $1.50 SNGs with a $7 SNG in between, will this interruption disqualify me as well?

The wording of "bankroll" makes this quite confusing imo.

Other 3 promotions seems very simple and easy for an average person to read and play. The only thing I would add is a % of occurrence for #3 (rather than common, quite rare) to the probability of winning. These are essential scratch tickets and those actually have %s assigned to them (whether true or not).

Currently BotP awards yearly are 3.304.000$ for those wondering.

I am very confused by the "frequency" you are providing. Could you elaborate a bit more on that?

1) does it mean that once a year there will be a deposit bonus where people can get a SNG ticket? I think this will be a good bonus but it is key to provide a ticket that is only usable on SNGs, since otherwise it wont do much, the key of this promotion is to introduce new people to the SNG format, not let them just use it on a MTT. Is it really realistic to expect this to cost 1 million dollars to Stars if it runs once a year? Obv you can estimate this way better, but it seems a bit high.


2) Does this also mean that this promotion will run once a year? I think this promotion is deff the least interesting one of the bunch, but a fun one to introduce more people to the game, and it costs relatively little compared to the total promotional budget so I don't see much wrong with it.

3) What does the frequency mean here? 2x a year there will be a period where this promotion is active? I think this promotion would be much more effective if it ran year round, even if that means making the probabilities a lot lower (which would be required obv). Regardless a good promo though.

4) I guess this means 4x a week? Another good promo

Sounds interesting overall. As long as in a months time we are not being told that the VIP cuts to tournament/sng players are due to the extra rewards being offered through the new promotions.

kiss, slap, kiss.

I have a problem with Pokerstars' thought process. As a person with three unused tickets, I feel that I am getting screwed pretty badly. The amounts you are proposing is a lot less than what tickets are worth on average, which is $100.

We should not be penalized because some of us cannot play on Sundays or have "too many" tickets. The fact that this potential change is being announced in December is sudden (there have been rumors in the past of potential change, but nothing put on the table like this). This would mean that for the second time in two years, Pokerstars is making a drastic change at the last minute (VPP calculation method was changed at the last minute last year at around this time).

These kind of changes require reaction time from members of the affected party like myself. In my opinion, if you're going to implement the proposed changes starting in Jan 1st, you should continue the Monthly BOP shootout for the next 2+6 months (not 2 months). Any tickets not used at this time will be worthless, and this will represent a very, very small segment of the ticket holders.

As mentioned above, two months is nowhere enough time for a change of this magnitude.

This would result in an additional $300,000 being paid, $10,000 more than the $290,000 you are expecting to pay.

How exactly is it fair to keep running the BOP shootout when the promotion is no longer running? This would create an enormous advantage to those that didn't use their tickets as they got them, since obv people participating in these shootouts will drop massively.