$100k added to jackpot (which stays there until it is won), plus a pretty straightforward shot at $1.54 of free tickets for every player, plus a $5k shootout for everyone who takes part.

I guess it is not for everyone... but six figures ain't to be sniffed at

so the christmas promo is basically all regular promotion randomly placed all over the month?

lmao

For a good number of days, yes... however we have added a few new ones in there too, plus a daily shootout to add a little something for those who don't dig that particular day's promo.

We also had the warm-up christmas-themed 'trip to lapland' beforehand which was a simple promotion, but got a lot of players' attention.

So I enter the stars code REDSPADE to get an eror message stating it's only valid from 2017/11/29 upto 2017/12/03... As far as I know it's still the third of December here...

And the chances of winning the Deal are?????

Pretty straight forward shot at $1.54 lol, how many hands on average would a person have to play to be dealt 88 twice?? And how much would they have paid in rake in that time?? And Ive lost count of how many shootouts Ive entered and won feck all.
You almost made the promotion sound good lol
Lets face it Stars has a bad rep now all round, in every department, money grabbers getting greedy.

Not every promotion is for everyone, and I'm sorry you didn't like this one. Some people like a good chance at a little extra money, some people like a slim chance at a lot of money. This was an attempt to mix the two, for every player on the site.

Always open to suggestions on promotions - I know from previous posts you've previously moved all your play to 888 and subsequently all of it to Party, so any feedback or suggestions for promotions you have are very welcome (here or DM).

How about 40% rakeback?

You're right there, 08 games have died on 888, and yes I have started to play a lot of cash at Party recently, hadn't played there for years. But you're also welcome to check and see how little cash I've played on Stars, compared to previous months/years. And like I've said before, I earned $50 cash back in not time on Party, pretty straight forward.

It's just sad to Stars fall like it is

We've moved away from volume-based rewards and promotions, focussing more on daily and weekly challenges, as well as special event promotions like those around Christmas, COOPs, etc.

On that topic, one of the areas we are reviewing is the rewards for these challenges. Awarding a million or so "ragedollars" in a month plus a smaller number of larger awards is cool, but we have players who say 'forget the ragedollars, just give me a shot at a big prize or nothing' and others who say 'forget the random prizes, just give me the EV when the challenge is complete'... if there's any feedback on that specifically from those who play CardHunt, Spinball, Spin&Go2X, Jacks or Better, etc please feel free to share.

I like to know a few things.


What is the highest cash anyone has gotten from the stars chest? Has anyone here gotten even $20 or more? All i get are 1 and 2 dollar cash if any.


Also with those promotions where you play x amount of sng or cash game, they have the prizes like you get either 5k which is like 0.00005 percent chance, then its like 5 dollars, then 1 dollar and 50 cents and almost every time i get the absolute minimum.


I like to know has any players ever hit that big prize for those promotions?


Also this applies to deposits as well. Has anyone got the big prize of even the 2nd top prize which might be 100 dollars or 20 dollars?

Does Pokerstars offer good deposit bonuses if the first one is lost?

not sure where to put this but david lyons responds here so...

i played 2 x spin and go sng satty $2.75 for half million ticket and both are sat 5.50 tickets...

i played fisrt on demand sit and go and win seat to half milly......

but i try to play second ticket and says no because i have already target seat.....

the half milly is 1 re entry so why i cant not play this to win another seat incase i lose fiorst buy in???

and what will happen with my 2nd ticket??

nothing is mentrioned in any window or on ps.com rules....

please help respond

merci

>weekly challenges
i dont recall seeing a weekly challenge. just very easy daily challenge you can clean in 30 minutes with very low expected value

We've moved away from volume-based rewards
You moved way too far away from it. you guys punish volume so freaking hard. if you play over an hour at nl10, you will automatically be punished. Once the boost and the challenge are up, oh boy you're in for a beating if you're brave enough to play.
Could you like, tone it down a little bit? Maybe offer 3 different challenge (easy, normal, hard) and the player pick the one he want to clean today? something like that.
The hard challenge could reward less in term in term of raw rakeback% than the easy one but will reward longer. Example : 20$ expected on 100$ rake for the hard challenge vs 1$ expected on 4$ rake for the easy challenge.

btw so far everyday christmas promo range from meh to atrocious. Wouldve preferred the cardmatch staying

>Awarding a million or so "ragedollars" in a month plus a smaller number of larger awards is cool, but we have players who say 'forget the ragedollars, just give me a shot at a big prize or nothing' and others who say 'forget the random prizes, just give me the EV when the challenge is complete'... if there's any feedback on that specifically from those who play CardHunt, Spinball, Spin&Go2X, Jacks or Better, etc please feel free to share.
I like the current state; ragedollars most of the time with an occasional good one. EV gain is boring and the 'big prize or nothing' is way too variance heavy

The top prizes - and of course all the others) - are hit frequently. When there is a special top prize (such as the $1k prize) it is hitting roughly 10-20 times per day.

We ran Spinball for just under three weeks in November on the main PokerStars site. Five players won the $5k prize in that period (a little lower than expectation), with over 2,500 prizes of $10 or more paid out in the same period.


I don't have exact data on this to hand, but I'll dig it out.

The only large-scale weekly challenge recently has been the Bolt Road to Glory... it had a daily but also a weekly 'boost' element.

We've tossed the idea around about promo 'difficulty' choice for players. We've steered clear of it because generally when choice is offered the risk is that many players can make a choice that is suboptimal for them (high reward but too hard OR too easy with non-meaningful prize).. and a bad choice for the player = bad choice for us.

Feedback welcome. We're giving away about $2m but of course a lot of it is in the form of shootouts etc, so some players - especially more skilled players - feel they have less control of the outcome. There's a couple of weeks to go, and some cool stuff coming that you may feel is a little more to your taste.

Noted. Thanks again for feedback.

I've been told "the subsequent tickets won can be used in any $5.50 tournament from monday"... hope that helps.

David, can you respond to this query? Also would be cool if you were giving away merch as prizes in near future...

i see VIP levels/statuses back in cashier. any info on that?

ppl also reporting them at the tables:

^ You can still see the vip statutes of the players (*players who had opted to show their vip status on the table) if you're not logged in. This has been ever since the star rewards were launched.

Btw, regarding today's challenge payout probability - would definitely prefer this one rather than the top-heavy payout where I'm almost certain to win $1-$1.50. Hope to see this more often in the future. $10,000 top prize may look good to the eyes but when you start seeing this type of payout on the regular basis and when you realize you have to be very very very lucky to win that prize, you lose the interest. I have skipped many of your recent challenges where you have to play these many games only to win $1.

Well i got $20 in today's challenge which was a pleasant surprise that's 2 buyins at my cash table level.

All i need to do now is to cash in one of these shootouts ... i think im 0/60+ in these silly things so if you could just tweak it a little David then all is good thank you.

I agree with most and say the normal daily challenges payouts are just way too top heavy and need balancing out better.

They had made an error with the payouts. Now they are at:

$100 0.05%
$10 0.1%
$1 1%
$0.25 98.85%

Quite a change from the earlier, which was:

$100 0.5%
$20 10%
$10 20%
$5 69.5%

Grats to all that got there in time, you got a piece of how challenges used to be, and should be.

I obviously have less info than you on this and no studies of the market at my disposition. Even if a player make a bad choice one day, can he just decide to ajust tomorrow? It seem to be a very light risk for both parties since its a daily goal. if that was montly, that would be another story
Maybe you could 'suggest' a difficulty according to the player gambling habits? Or maybe the hard challenge could be only available after the player cleared the normal one once

One could argue that by removing the choice, you force a good portion of players to make a bad choice for them every time. And like you said, a bad choice for the player = a bad choice for you

Apologies for the mid-day change. There was a mix of cheers (of relief, from players who already got the $8 EV) and jeers (of irritation, from players who hadn't seen it before it was reduced).

There was a transcription error in the preparation and setup that caused this. Leaving it was not an option in this case as it was beyond generous into mega-exploitable. Any player who had opted in was still able to complete at the pre-change level.

We added $5k to the end-of-day shootout to partially compensate for the reduction. With 60-70 distinct promos running over Christmas, it's tough to be completely error free.

The issue we find is that a player - especially a less regular player - who has a bad experience on day 1 is less likely to engage with the promo on day 2/3/4/etc.

That's an interesting idea. We'll mull it over. We did something kind of like this with Spinball... where the first stage (completing 5 / 10 peices) earned a reward, and also completing 10/10 earned another. It worked super well.

Oh wow, it was a mistake? No way ...

Well, something interesting that Stars may have noticed, is that some of us who haven't been playing in a while were enticed into playing thanks to the enhanced payouts - and was even persuaded to try a MTT SNG hyper-turbo knockout! Like maybe fresh people will fresh games, with the right offer?

Guess this was an extraordinarily huge offer! But maybe there's still a little takeaway that may help Stars develop different offers in the future?

Thank you for the generous bonus Stars!