Some good suggestions here Steve as I think the current SNG promotion (BOTP) is flawed, ie. too heavily weighted to regs. Even though I am a reg myself, I see the benefits of spreading the SNG budget across the playerpool if it means recs play more and increase ROIs on the table.

#1 - Good idea to introduce players to SNGs. Concerns on how much 'value' you'd get on that type of budget though.

#2 - Interesting concept in theory but I'm not sure how fun this would be in reality.

#3 - This is my favourite suggestion of the four. How will this work though? Will the specific SNG highlight bronze/silver/gold in the lobby or will you just notify ppl when they all register and sit down. Perhaps colour the table felt to the specific prize. How long will this promotion last each time it runs? I'd like to see this run more than twice in a year, maybe sacrificing one or more of the other ideas to make this happen more often.

#4 - If we can find another idea to replace this I'd be happy. This just makes the games a regfest and not a enjoyable experience for ANYONE for the sake of 50% extra VPPs/FPPs. (Experience from Full Tilt that ran this promotion)

Triple Shootout Tickets: I would like to see a nominal value put on this ticket for 5+ holders. Not everyone can play in this tournament when it's on and players shouldn't be punished for earning more than 1 per month.

I really appreciate PokerStars for asking the community for feedback on a big change in the SNG world though and I hope you will actively read and respond to suggestions made in this thread.

I don't think I'm being biased with my opinion because I have a few tickets myself, but let's try a simpler example:

You have a gift cards for Store X worth $100 each which can only be used once a month and only one card can be used each month. There is no mention of an expiry date, you assume the cards will be redeemable going years down the line.

Today, you find out the store has decided to no longer honor these cards after February 2013. Your $100 card will be honored at a rate of $40-$70 for the first 5 cards.

How is that fair? Especially because these tickets were earned?

Lastly, in terms of financials, Steve said that they were prepared to pay around $290,000 for the outstanding tickets. My proposal is a $300,000 valuation, only $10,000 more. This $10,000 will not affect you in terms of a reduction in 4 new promotions; they would still run concurrently with the 6 extra BOP shootouts.

Scrap #2 and do #3 another time I think

Because it was never guaranteed

I just find it a pretty normal line of thinking by Pokerstars that they are not responsible for honouring people with a large amount of tickets. These tickets were meant for you to play a tournament on a Sunday once a month, nothing else. They didn't hold any other value.

The people that had more than say 5 tickets fall in one of 2 categories:

1) They earned more than 1/month on average, and so they would never be able to spend them all anyway.

2) They earned less than 1 month on average, but didn't use them very fast for some reason. This means the promotion wasn't very succesful for the player in question, since they didn't seem to care about it. It is not Stars its fault that someone doesn't have time to play on a Sunday or whatever the reason might have been that they were not using the tickets.

Why not just scrap 2 and 4 and use the money to let 3 run year round with adjusted probabilities? I think recreational players would love love love number 3.

People like that idea or not?

Tickets are prizes which were won, not earned or bought like gift cards.

Then Nothing is guaranteed. When I check my ticket balance, there is no expiry date, so I'm going with the assumption that this promotion is to run indefinitely.

One of the first concepts in business is the "going concern principle", that the company you are dealing with will continue to run in the future. You don't buy a gift card from Wal Mart and expect it to shut down to 3 months and only have such a short amount of time to use the card.

This is all true. My main issue is not the success of the program (I do agree that it's too complicated and does not attract a large segment of the player pool, like the four new ideas suggested), it is the way the remaining tickets are being redeemed to end the program.

Someone with 10 tickets should have a longer time period than 2.5 months to adjust to his change. In Steve's current proposed system, on Feb 28, 2013, that player would receive $200 for their tickets. Under my method, they can play 6 additional months for a value of ~$100 per tournament. That means that they would have to play 2 tournaments to get back the $200 from Steve's proposal and up to $600 under mine.

bbfg, I'm puzzled by why you are against my suggestion. If there were 1000 players with outstanding tickets, are you saying that they would prefer to get paid cash out of their tickets (and have 2 months to use it if they wished)?

And also, should players with plenty of tickets even be given this option? If I was running a poker business, I would end a poker promotion by wanting players to play in a tournament (rather than paying out cold hard cash). My email to end such promotion would be somewhere along the lines of:
"Hello Player XX,
We would like to inform you that beginning January 1, 2013, BOP tickets will no longer be issued. The tournaments will continue to run monthly until August, with August 25th being the last possible date to use up your tickets. All outstanding tickets will have no value."

I just want to stress this part: The cost is essentially the same under both, I don't get why you are so bothered by an additional $10,000? If you have a BOP ticket, you should want full value from these. If you don't have a BOP ticket, it shouldn't matter to you.

#3 is definitely the best of the four ideas. Stars could do this once a week every month and adjust the probabilities + prizepools, as you mentioned.

What's the difference between earned and won? Both sound the same to me:

Player X paid $$$ in rake to play in 20 tournaments and earned a BOP ticket by coming top 10 in the leaderboard.

Player X paid $$$ in rake to play in 20 tournaments and won a BOP ticket by coming top 10 in the leaderboard.

You should do one final BOP freeroll and let people buy in with as many tickets as they want and receive a starting stack of the normal starting amount times how many tickets they are using. People still wont get "full value" because of ICM tax and the prize pool being static, but might be a better option. Especially if you up prize pool.

I really like 3 and 4. Happy hours could help traffic during the slow night times. 1 is meh but ok. 2 just seems bad, i dont like you guys trying to restrict what buyins rec players have to play to unlock promos.

Are you gonna give Gramps a cut for coming up with option 3?

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)


maybe i'm stupid but what does that frequency mean? that there will be 4 happy hours in a year or what?

IIRC they do like happy hour week so itd prob be 4 different weeks where they did 1x happy hour per day.

1,3,4 seem good. Not sure I fully understand 2.

I don't like BotP because it is free money to the top of the food chain and doesn't encourage recs to play SnG's, but do like having a leaderboard. I hope some sort of leaderboard could be retained, even with vastly reduced rewards. It is fun to see how other players you play daily are scoring and on Sundays when scores are reset there is a perverse sense of enjoyment in seeing a good reg or reg you hate posting a horribly low score.

With Bop tickets - they say they are giving two months warning -therefore at least two tickets could be used in those games, they are also offering compensation for a further five tickets. Seems pretty fair to me as someone with more than seven either doesn't participate in the shootouts or earns them quicker than they can use them.

I don't think that would be possible (running it year round) with the current budget allocated to 2 & 4. I would like to see actual probabilities attributed to buyins/entrants before we run with this. Maybe payout prizes in relation to how many run on average at every buyin/format? (ie. whatever format rakes more for you, distributing prizes more evenly)

Sounds Great!

I hope that if this is the case we don't end up having: WSOP week, August week, PCA week...so that most regs can't take advantage of this.

Which takes me to: they should be announced a long time before they are about to happen for planning purposes.

OK, my comments are based on the assumption that the idea of promos is primarily to encourage new or recreational players to either start playing or play more Sngs. Secondly to add value to the games for regs and recs alike. Anything that encourages more recs to play is by its very definition a bonus for regs.

1. Offers value to regs and recs alike - Good Promo. However if I am a rec player who plays $3.50/$7 SnG's how likely am I to make a $100 deposit to get a $30 ticket?? I am more likely to just make the minimum deposit to get a ticket for the level I play at. Maybe add an option to get multiple lower value tickets for the larger deposit. e.g deposit $100 get a $30 ticket or 2x$15 tickets or 4x$7 tickets etc.

2. Quirky, but seems like this could be a bit counter productive as it could highlight to the recs just how difficult it can be to win money at SnGs. Rather than turn $x into $xx how about making it more of an achievement based idea. There are many different types of SnG and encouraging people to try new formats that they are unfamiliar with would be a great promo. So reward them for how many different types of SnG they can win during the qualifying period. This can be done with a rising scale of rewards for winning x no. of SnG types or by naming specific combinations of SnG e.g Win a Regular 9 man, 9 man Knockout and a HU = win a free ticket / win 5 different types = win 5 free tickets / win a 180man, 45man, 18 man = win a porsche!! This would encourage action across all game types, promo all game types and be able to reward both recs and regs alike due to the sliding scale. Obviously, Stars would be able to create a more realistic prize range scale...

3. Sounds like a great idea but chances of winning are going to be slim, basically the SnG equivalent of Santa promotion or Road to a Trillion. Should attract recs though.

4. Happy hour is a very reg centred thing. Recs dont really care about vpp/fpps as they dont have nearly as much impact for them as a deposit bonus. Also as already mentioned there is no benefit to running a SnG happy hour at the same time as Ring Game happy hour.


Just my 2 cents.

Promotion 3, followed by Promotion 3, then Promotion 3, and finally Promotion 3. Btw, Promotion 3 would be awesome and reward both recs and regs.

Promotion 4 would be nice too!

Hi Steve,

These sound like welcome changes from BOP.

Regarding the bankroll challenges - will it be possible to grind all the possible challenges at once?

Since Omaha players can not get lots of volume at one stake we are forced to mix stakes when we grind.

This promotion would be very unfair on Omaha players if it were not possible to compete in them when mixing stakes.

I hope this will be set up in a way to be inclusive of all player types.

Cheers,

Bob

**MOD NOTE**
This is the new PS suggestions thread.

Scrap promo two

Dont think that would work

3 and 4 are my favs.

3 sounds good if it runs year round rather than small portions or atleast more than half the year.

4 can incude a lot of regs to play them so you'll need to have a few happy hours in peak and also non peak times.

Hi Steve,

thanks for coming up with some proposals and engaging the sng community in deciding what to do. Was there any discussion of a medal system or stripped down leaderboard, as that seemed most popular before if BOP was to go as it would be fairly consistent? The main criticism of BOP that I recall was that the prizes were so unattainable on a regular basis at low-mid stakes. Similarly, the first three replacements listed her all seem like expensive money shots that are not likely to generate much long term benefits:

1 would give a quick shot to the games for just a day or two
2 would do the same for slightly longer but is extremely confusing to regs and also seems to incentivize reckless gambling (good short term, long term not so much).
3 is likely to do little unless the chances of being chosen are good but what are they - 1/1000, 1 in 1m?

Obviously I can see you are going after recreational players, but I would assume that they too need consistency after the initial hook or will just go broke/float away. Therefore happy hours sound like the best idea as they are simple and consistent but but how often would the run on this budget? 4 hours of happy hour per year? 4 weeks of it? 4 per day? I think it would be better to put most of the money there, and maybe test other promos in a smaller way to see what happens. These promos also do very little for high stakes players so it would be nice if we had a bankroll challenge, free ticket etc. It would likely pay for itself in terms of people depositing more and playing higher anyway and soften the loss of BOP. Speaking of which...


BOP

I assume you know my views on this from elsewhere but to reiterate, I think one option you could offer people is a reformed version of BOP. I only say this again because I think the above options are pretty dire compared to what was being thrown around as a previous replacement, eg basic leaderboard and medal system etc.

Therefore Id like to know how people feel about the above options compared to simply revamping or rebranding BOP with rolling scores to incentivize more play, and better promotion. The former is an obvious improvement that would hook people in and keep them playing on hot streaks and is presumably not that hard to program, and the latter would I imagine be a good fit with the new PS7 client and the drive to making the games more fun/achievement driven- all that is needed is the default of telling players their scores and positions constantly like congratulation emails (which can be turned off), and perhaps giving badges/achievements for highscores. I can't emphasize enough how much I think any current failure of BOP is in large part due to failure to adequately promote it to recs. Can you share any of the survey data you previously mentioned on this?

Also, as a high stakes player I can tell you than getting rid of BOP will pretty much be the end of 300+turbos as no-one is making much without it and there are no 300 hypers yet. I dont mind so much as it takes forever to play 100 games in them and I mainly play hypers now where BOP is less important, but I assume youre going to lose a few people over this. Please therefore do something for them if radical changes are made, and introduce 300 and 500 hypers asap for the rest of us.


BOP Tickets

I appreciate that youre trying to do something to compensate but this could do with being bumped up a little especially given the lack of notice implied. Of course there were no promises/guarantees but BOP has run for 5 yrs or so which gives it at least an implied air of permenance in peoples eyes. Even players with lots of tickets stockpiled therefore could reasonably expect that at some point when they are not playing sitngos full time anymore for whatever reason that theyd still be able to return and play the monthly shootout. A ticket is worth $100 typically and each additional one has less implied value if people accumulate lots (but not zero value, as they still would theoretically have got used at some point) so I'd suggest:

1st ticket - $100
2nd - $90
3rd - $80
4th - $70
5th - $60
6th - $50
7th - $40
8th - $30
9th - $20
10th and beyond - $10 each

I don't want to hate but I find it really weird that the only thing keeping the 300+ SNGs alive is the 620k Stars invests yearly in the BOP bonuses. It is not an enormously significant amount compared to the stakes. The only way that it could be that significant is if there were only a few regs playing those games regularly and well if that is the case I feel real sorry for you regs that were getting an extra 620k in bonuses from Stars these last few years .


Which is the main goal of any promo, and which is why BOP sucks. Recs making a run is too unlikely and even IF there are some recs that love this promo for some reason, whenever they are running bad they have less incentive to play because they know they can't turn their run around and gotta play x games before they get a new run. With the lottery thing every SNG is a new shot!

I don't really support changing BOP to this smorgasbord, I think the idea of having promos only 10% of the year is meh. Of course my opinion doesn't really matter since I do receive quite a lot of money from BOP as it stands.

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Jackal, I know you suggested "rolling BOP" many times, but functionally it is little different from BOP. Clearly, its even worse for recs because a reg that plays 1000 games that week has ~900 "entries" instead of 10, and a fish that plays 200 games (realistically fish don't even make high orbit but lets just say) only has ~100 "entries" instead of 2. If that is your motivation then see the next section.

As for 300+ turbos, bbfg echoes my beliefs.

The "problems" BOP suffers from is basically that recreational players don't win very much.

====

But then we have to ask ourselves, is the point of BOP that it is reg centric or recreational centric?

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Someone very smart and senior at PS meetings reminded me that BOP is a type of TLB. If this is the case then it is/was intended that BOP gives money mainly to regular players. Based on this assumption, transforming BOP to a leaderboard would seem logical.

If a leaderboard is salient, then consider this one: Every 20 games you get a score just like low orbit BOP works now. Your total for the week is just 10*your best score + 4*your second best score + 3*your third best score + 2*your fourth best score + 1*your fifth best score.

This has the advantage that you can always improve your score just like the MTT TLB, so you can play more to "battle" other regs to overtake their spot.

I like playing SNGs but don't really play enough to class myself as a reg. It probably puts me in a bit of a minority here on a specific SNG forum.

From my point of view:

1. Always a winner, maybe a sng allowance or choice of tickets rather than a specific value ticket.

2. Seems to get pretty negative reactions on here but I quite like it and would probably try and put some volume in for this.

3. Good idea. Do it.

4. Not fussed by this really, might make players on the cusp of making the next vip level put in extra volume but in reality recreational players won't be particulary attracted. Maybe run 2 & 4 simultaneously.

On a side note, I love HUSNG and think a HUSNG specific promotion would do really well. The player v player format is tailor made for some sort of league or cup competition. Perhaps players could qualify for a Champions League style event with added prize pools depending on the buy in level award according to your finishing position. Difficult logistics but massive prestige for the winner.

Now I will give my comment on each promo.

Promo 1: free entry for deposit
- very good

Promo 2: bankroll challenge
- don't think it is super appealing but I could be wrong, it's clearly aimed at casual-ish players and could be very very popular.

Promo 3: golden sng
- fairly good

Promo 4: happy hour
- Intended at regs, but actually doesn't do very much for an individual in practice. Basically because of the free money, games are induced to become 6 reg, so everyone is winning very little anyways. Actual profit increases only slightly because its spread out a lot more than usual - some players move up to catch this money etc.

BOP conclusion:
- I think the ticket payout is more or less fair. Everyone seems to equate X tickets = X*100$ but you have to remember that each ticket that you have now is likely to get unplayed (because of the fact that its been years and you haven't played them yet), so in fact getting any $ for them is a huge boon. If I could cash all my tickets now for $200 I would be very happy -- I know logically that I will be getting on average more than one ticket a month, so therefore the tickets I have now are more or less essentially worthless.