Similar issue, can't see sports client on the desktop so I have to go on my phone to bet sports. The link at betstars just downloads the client clink, tried clearing my local files and unistalling / reinstalling the client, sports tab just doesn't show up.

Betstars is only available on Mobile.

so is this new rewards program the same as ROW stars or have the numbers been changed for the NJ market?

because if its identical to ROW stars, congrats on handing over more market share to Party/WSOP on a silver platter...

Fairly sure it's ROW style although I can't say for sure. No RB numbers given, pretty sad that Stars used to set the standard and now it's rewards are by far the least appealing option in Jersey

So before the launch of this new "rewards" program, heres how all the sites stacked up against each other.
WSOP: 32% max rakeback, 500-1000 a month in deposit bonuses
Party/Borg: 30-35% max rakeback, the occasional 300-500 reload bonus
Stars: 30ish% max rakeback, the fewest deposit bonus offered of the 3 sites

heres a general compilation of what this new "rewards" program actually entails since Stars is laughably vague in providing specific numbers, under the BS guise of "personalized customization"
https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...stars-1678823/
The new "rewards" program takes the effective rakeback from 30ish to about 5%. what a truly rewarding program!

can't say I'm shocked at all to see Amaya gaming stock down 50% over the last 6 months lmao. the last earning report showed stagnation in the NJ poker market, im sure handing over more market share to WSOP/Party will change that stagnation!!!! I think whoever was reading their forecasts had their chart upside-down.

This is not fair, as it gives short shrift to the (albeit unquantifiable) equity of being able to open chests. The raw exhilaration of opening PSNJ today to see that I had 10 chests is worth way more to me than getting that other 23% RB I used to get, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

can't tell if this is a troll post or not...

if serious, you can easily have chests and not actually cut the rb percentage. im sure the pure joy of opening chests worth a penny wears off really really fast.

if a joke, ya got me

Minimizing the delight one may take in opening up a chest is a big mistake. Whether it's worth a penny or even ten tournament pennies like several of mine graciously gifted me today, it's that enchanting feeling---like a sea captain coming across a buried treasure---that truly makes chest-opening a one of a kind experience.

Here's the Chest frequency for the site. Haven't compared it to ROW but little doubt it's been a pretty steep cut.

https://www.pokerstarsnj.com/stars-rewards/faq/

the frequency for what is in the chests is the same for both NJ and ROW, the main unknown is the points needed to earn each chest which is supposedly personalized.

whenever something this convoluted and secretive about the numbers is released, theres just no way the average person doesn't just think that they are going to be getting screwed. only people intentionally looking to hide truth about how much they are screwing over their customers would ever release a rewards program such as this.

what are the reasons anymore for a new NJ player looking to get into poker or even just looking to gamble a little bit to choose Stars over Party/WSOP?
-both have better reward programs
-both have better tournament schedules/guarantees

what a shame that the people making decisions over at Stars seem to be completely incompetent at their jobs...

Hi all,

I understand the skepticism and expect you to each draw your own conclusions on Stars Rewards, but I wanted to share a few notes from my side as the program is still new to New Jersey and this may provide a bit of context on our perspective:

-The majority of the NJ playerbase will be receiving more with Stars Rewards than the previous VIP Club. This is especially true if they play more than just poker (Sports or Casino). If you are a higher-volume winning poker player, you'll be getting less and I appreciate the above isn't much consolation if you're in this group. It's worth noting that when you first join Stars Rewards, you start on the lowest Chest level (red Chest) but as you move up Chest levels, your rewards on average increase. So it may take a week or two until you get to the Chest level that's indicative of your volume of play.

-As others in the thread have noted, we don't advertise rakeback percentages; that's because Stars Rewards isn't a traditional rakeback program. It's designed to allocate rewards based on your profile which includes criteria such as net deposits and the types of games you play. So one player to the next may be receiving a different amount of rewards depending on their profile. The rewards themselves are personalised to be relevant to the games that you play. For example MTT players will receive primarily Tournament Tickets & Tournament Money, a sports-bettor will receive mostly Free Bets, and so forth, as well as everyone receiving a mix of StarsCoin & cash.

-What we've seen with Stars Rewards in the ROW is that there is a high-level of engagement with the program and players open their Chests and use the rewards inside at a rate that exceeded our highest expectations. Again, I appreciate that most in this thread would probably prefer a traditional rakeback program, but our learnings with Stars Rewards have been that most of our players, who are primarily casual players, want a loyalty program that rewards all of their activity, is easy to understand, gives rewards relevant to them, and offers the chance to win something meaningful. Stars Rewards aims to address these points.

That being said, we'll be monitoring the program closely and will make changes and adjustments as needed for the New Jersey market. Feedback & suggestions are always appreciated and I'll continue to monitor this thread.

Thanks,
Dylan

Casual players think this is easy to understand?

Anyone else having a problem withdrawing...getting the following error:

""We cannot process your request at the moment.

Internal Error (204/5514). Please contact support@pokerstarsnj.com. Include the above Internal Error number in your correspondence."

I've made several withdrawals in the past.

Try emailing them, my buddy had the same problem and they helped him cash out

i know you're just a CS rep, so its not like you personally made these decisions, but thats a load of BS. and its pretty easy to see why with the following line of questioning.... its not like supernovas were even all grinders, people playing on a somewhat regular basis could achieve it.
- why does increasing the RB of casual players mean you have to cut current supernovas RB?
- why does rewarding casino gamblers or sports bettors mean you have to cut supernova RB?
- why does increasing the rewards for net depositors mean you have to cut SN RB?
- why does switching to a chest system which rewards based off of game type one plays mean you cut ones effective RB for SN players?
- why does adding a "jackpot" element to chests mean the EV rakeback for SN has to be cut?

seems incredibly disingenuous to say that people are upset over the change to a personalized chest system when its pretty clear people are upset over the change to the EV rakeback %...

obviously people are going to use non cash rewards at a higher rate since they actually want to extract the equity of their prize....

its pretty clear this is just a blatant cash grab in the form of a big "**** you" towards anyone who plays regularly on the site, conceived by some corporate higher up, in order to make more money in the short term.

can't really imagine whomever thought it would be a good idea to apply the same exact ROW rewards system to the NJ market where Pokerstars does not have anywhere close to the market share needed to pull this type of gimmick. regs are more gamestarters on PS NJ rather than mindless mass multitablers, and its hard for games to start under high rake. not even the nightly 100 starts every day...

while "protecting the ecosystem" is the mantra of the poker industry nowadays, imposing table limits or stake limits (such as can't sit more than 2 different limits per format) for cash would do infinite more good for that goal in the NJ ecosystem than rakeback changes. just objectively observing the cash lobby and seeing 500-1000NL regs sitting 50NL seems more cancerous to the health of the game than RB%.

while i doubt you'll answer this quesiton, what reasons do you think someone new to poker would actually choose to play on Stars over Party or WSOP?

at the end of the day, the proof will be in the pudding when Amaya's next fiscal report gets released. the last report showed stagnation in the NJ market, and this was corporate's genius solution to that...

Since I know im ranting at a wall, who if does decide to respond will just nicely tell me to go **** myself, here are some Post Rant Suggestions that perhaps you could actually do:
1) can you guys make the Thursday Thrill a re-entry tournament already for at least 2 hours?
2) can you guys bring back the Nightly 100 second chance? its massively overlayed twice mid october because the dumb site glitched out twice ending the registration period like 20 minutes into the tournament when registration is normally like 2:30 hours. perhaps fix the glitch????
3) can you remove the Big 50 from the schedule or change the starting time? it never runs because no one in NJ wants to start their session at 6 pm when all the main nightly stuff across all sites begin at 7pm? I would recommend just removing the big 50 from the schedule and adding a daily $50 PKO RENTRY tourney starting at 9 PM.

I know that it doesn't really matter much but I agree with a good bit of what zapzer wrote. As an aside, steep RB decline probably renders a small-edge variant like Spin-n-gos (essentially) unbeatable at this point.

I suppose it makes sense, given that PS software is just so vastly superior to the other two providers, that they can really skimp on RB and still not lose too much market share. I guess we'll see.

Hi Dylan,

I've been a fan of Pokerstars for a very long time and want to give my 2 cents with regards to the chests.

I think the chests are a good idea, and while I personally am not a fan of the randomness of the rewards, I can see how many other people, including (most?)recreational players, would be. While I am not a fan of the actual games being lottery like(like spin and go's), doing it to the rewards further encourages people to keep playing to hit them, which is in both your interest and in the interst of the general player pool.

With all that said, I have been paying close attention to the changes made to the rewards in the rest of the world and it is hard to see many of those changes as ways to alter the program so that more money ends up in PokerStars pocket. As a former supernova elite, who was highly encouraged by that program, it is disheartening to see that, and was extremely disheartening to see what was done to the SNE in the last year of the program.

You said the majority of players will be receiving more with Stars Rewards,
and while that might be true, I imagine that more money finds it way to PokerStars and less to the players. Hiding being "it isn't a traditional rakeback program" to not give out percentages seems disingenuous because I am sure you have calculated exactly what percentage goes to various player types and even created models in case something changes. The ROW received significantly less rakeback under this program than they did previously/

The high volume players, who will receive lesser rewards from this programs, are the ones who start games, play late, and pay a ton of rake. You are hiding the amount of the decrease from them and while this will not end pokerstars overnight, the market is not strong enough that you can afford to alienate even a few of the players who start games and who might decide to take their play to other NJ sites. I for one, rarely start games on PokerStars because you have not lowered the rake heads up and it is significantly higher than other sites.

While I applaud you for creating chests, I discourage the reduction of rakeback to the high volume players and strongly encourage you to be transparent in the reduction of overall rewards going forward.

Best,
Jason

Hey, does anyone have NL50 6max 50k hands sample size about how much the rake is in bb/100 at Stars?

Well said zapzer. Its terribly disappointing that Pstars has done this in NJ, and it does seem counterproductive for the reasons you stated.
Of course, you are also right in stating that you will get no useful response of any kind from anyone.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to enter the rakeback % in HM2 with the chest system?

Was just ready to settle in for a decent sized session and realized that the new rewards system makes it a mistake to play for too long with this x-mas promo where you have to play every day. Keeping your chest requirement small benefits you for days you don't have much time to play, right? Seems kinda odd that your rewarded more for playing less, but that seems to be the case until x-mas I think.

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the feedback.

I don't intend to be disingenuous by saying it's not a traditional rakeback program but not sharing specifics. I say that because the mechanics of the program are designed in a way where your rewards can change over time, so to tell you that you're getting, for example, 25% rakeback would be disengenous, since a month from now that figure could change, plus it can change based on playing behaviour. Players who spread their play across multiple days get a higher level of rewards due to better leveraging their Boost (which doubles your reward point earning rate). Plus, as you're probably aware, your progress bar requirements can change based on certain factors, primarily the game-types you play and wins/losses. I appreciate that for those who view rakeback programs as part of their bottom line calculations this isn't ideal, but Stars Rewards was designed to be more personalised and fluid and this is one of the tradeoffs.

Regarding the level of poker rewards in New Jersey specifically, as a whole we're not rewarding players any less than the previous VIP program (individually players may get less or more), and we're rewarding players more for their Sports & Casino activity. In December with two Stars Rewards promotions running on top of the base program - $1,000 Chests plus the Christmas Calendar - it will be the richest month for rewards in New Jersey in a long time.

The daily reward you get for completing a progress bar scales upwards based on your Chest level. So the reward value for your daily Christmas Chest is bigger if you're on the Silver Chest than the Bronze Chest, and so forth.

Thanks,
Dylan

Yeah, but is this true if you can't complete a Silver Chest every single day, but can complete a Bronze (or lower level) chest for each of the 25 days? I don't have the software open now, but isn't there an extra bonus for not missing a day?

There's no bonus for not missing day. If you collect 3 keys (25% chance each day) before Christmas you'll get the "special" Christmas Chest which unlocks on the 25th, but the cash value inside that Chest is also scaled based on your Chest level. I suppose you could try to stay on a lower Chest level to try to get the 3 keys (which gives you the big Christmas Chest that unlocks on Dec 25th) and ultimately this depends on your playing habits, but overall you're better off completing fewer Chests on a higher Chest level than intentionally staying on a lower Chest level.

Thanks,
Dylan

Did not realize that. Thanks Dylan.