I have a couple noobish questions:

1. If I understand correctly, even if I still have some of my first deposit bonus to clear, I can now additionally purchase cash bonuses from the store and get instant cash before waiting for my deposit bonus to clear first? I think before this was not possible.

2. In the beginning of each year, does the whole VIP/bonus program start again? I.e., if I have bought a couple smallest cash bonuses from the store, do they reappear in the store and can they be bought again next year?

Question on the VIP store bonuses...

If you get one of the bonuses, say the $50 for 4500 fpps, and PS instantly credits the player account with the $50.

Can the player then instantly cashout that bonus, or does the player have to play a certain percentage of it before a cashout will be allowed?

Thanks for clearing this matter up.

you can instantly cashout

Yeah you can buy the instant cash and have it instantly in your accounts whilst your still clearing your first deposit bonus.

You can buy as many bonuses as you like, many people earn enough points to buy 10 or more $4000 bonuses each year.

Now all that is left is for Stars to make all tables 6xVPP and get rid of 20BB tables. Then we can call it a good recovery.

thanks a lot!

+1

Also stop wasting advertising money handing out contracts to anyone with a youtube account or deep run in a live event and do some real advertising.

you guys seem to think that the black card bonus is instant. its not, u still have to earn it.

THIS. I quit playing poker and went back to Uni because the rake is too high for me to make a decent living nowadays.

i played 8k hands of nl5 this morning and the vpp rate seems unchanged. not a very big sample, but it should be a pretty significant difference.


edit: actually slightly lower

Why would it change? 5NL is staying at 10 VPPs/$1, which is where it has been for three months.

my bad. i missed the part about micromania still having been running.

Who has the button?

+1

what happened to the other pages? when i went to bed after work this morning there were 10 pages now there is only 8

+1 to all of this.

Just did a quick count and there's 110 in the Find a Team Pro search. Half of them are rarely online and half I don't even recognize (overlapping halves ldo). Is it really necessary to have that many sponsored? Personally I'd stick to the instantly recognizable faces for advertisement purposes and the Online Pro thing as a promotion. Beyond that, you can slap a patch on just about any no-name that happens to make final tables live for probably a lot cheaper than keeping all of these around.

Getting money back into the economy through advertising and new(er)/micro player bonuses should be number one priority imo.

Also good work on the instant bonus change. Thank you.

pokerstars... you know I love you right?

now this I agree with. I don't understand why pokerstars have all of these pros.

nanonoko can stay and all of the pros who are actually pros can stay. I mean, what are the requirements to become a pro? I believe it should be AT THE MINIMUM having a steady graph

All I'm saying is that people like xxxxK_man2307xxxx shouldn't be a pro. I mean, what was the reasoning behind him becoming a pro? maybe im missing something.

Of course you're missing something. Actually, quite a lot. Most endorsed pros, up and down the map are losing players - even in their best endeavors (tournaments).

You don't need a winning player to bring people to the site; in fact, it's possible it will only bring other winning players to the site. A popular losing cheeseball with mouth-breathing followers makes a much better pro - especially if he includes poker instruction on his site.

That said, stars overestimates the popularity of many of their endorsed players, imo.

What I don't understand is the "Team PokerStars Online" group. I have never heard of most of them. They mostly play on high stakes so I will never get to play against them. For the most part, they don't chat with the players. Some of them are almost never online. What is the point of this?

I think the point of that is, "You, too, can be a PokerStars pro!" Some of those guys play like 5NL, I think.

This sounds great, but the cash game populations are still fragmented and unplayable.

20-50bb needs to be eliminated or a compromise needs to be reached between 20-50bb and 40-100bb before I'll ever put significant volume in again on Stars.

I really wish you'd just announce your decision for buy-in structures for 2011 already.

I really wish you'd just announce your decision for buy-in structures for 2011 already.
I really wish you'd just announce your decision for buy-in structures for 2011 already.
I really wish you'd just announce your decision for buy-in structures for 2011 already.
I really wish you'd just announce your decision for buy-in structures for 2011 already.
I really wish you'd just announce your decision for buy-in structures for 2011 already.
I really wish you'd just announce your decision for buy-in structures for 2011 already.

Yeah these are actually supposed to be spread out amongst the different games and stakes, at least that was where they were originally chosen from. I'd probably end up taking bigger shots if I got picked with the $100k bonus to actually be able to clear it and basically freeroll my shots so I don't know if that's what's happened with some of them.

Partly "you can be a pro too!" and partly "play with a 'pro' in just about any game." I think most of them have been fairly good ambassadors. So it's good for promotional purposes on multiple levels and these people actually play online a lot unlike many of the faces you see in the Stars ads and they come from our community.

+1 for announcing at least something in terms of plans for 2011 structures. Seems like everyone's in limbo right now with segregated player pool on one hand and getting screwed out of rakeback on the other with the new BC fiasco so Stars regs will just grind out their milestones towards the end of the year and then make a decision.

Announcing that you're planning on fixing your games, and how, in the midst of the FTP flaming would be a prime opportunity.

We do not need 3 or 4 separate buy-in structures for every limit

We also don't need all 3 or 4 of those separate buy-in structures to be labeled some variant of "5345-545b---b97b87b9876876b7bb09790b870987bb87b77b-b-b-b-bb-b-b-b-b"

That's like if McDonald's decided to redesign its menu to have 4 different portion sizes for every sandwich they offer, and changed the names from Quarter Pounder to 62577-a for the small one, 486bb34 for the medium one, and 4437985738957389583975 3for the large one

And everyone could call it the Small Quarter Pounder among their friends, but every time they go to that menu there it is, 62577-a and you have to tell the cashier I'll take a 62577-a

And she rings you up, and right after you're done the next guy comes in

And he's never eaten a sandwich at McDonald's before in his life. He likes the pictures of the sandwiches, but the names don't make any sense

So he goes what's a 62557-a and the cashier says "you mean 62577-a?" and he says **** it I'll have a Tournament Salad