I know it's been said numerous times before, but the prize reveal process (in Stars Rewards in particular) is too boring. Make players choose 1 chest out of 3 options like in Spin & Go Max, or, better, choose several chests from a big number of them (like coffins in the bonus round of the Blood Suckers slot, or baskets in the bonus round of Ali Baba in case you're more familiar with it*), or discard 2 cards out of 7 like in The Deal (with a large prize for a royal flush), to give them a better illusion of control.

Fwiw, I'm in the 'win all or nothing' camp because the variance of the rewards is currently much smaller than the one of poker itself (in the volume that's needed to earn the chest), and an increase in the former wouldn't make much of a difference to pros' bankroll management.

* Actually, you may tailor the graphics to the player, e.g. use images from either Millionaire Island, or Megaspin, or whatever slot with the same payouts that Stars ever comes up with, if there's historical data on which slot the player has been preferring (if there's none, and the player hasn't specified a theme in the settings, then randomly).

I guess that the reason why you're staying away from the variable difficulty is that professional players would tend to make optimal choices because they tend to be disciplined and have daily schedules and a good idea about their expected volume, while recreational ones would tend to make suboptimal choices as you've said, and you don't want to overreward the former category.

i can confirm that this is the case....i won the 5$ prize....

dear mr david lyons

ty for past responce quickly , but i think it is not fair i cannot have use of my ticket......you are essentially holding my money i win, without me having acces to the 2nd ticket i won for 5.50 sm odsat. there is renetry in that target mtt and we should be allowed to have 2 bullets like everyone by winning multiple sats ....if rentry u csan win 2 ....if 3 rentry u can win 4 ect...
ty for listening to and for reply.


also in
the freeroll that just went down at 1130pm et.....dec 6th u have glitch

i didnt get an opponant in the first round...and am still waiting for an opponant in the 2nd round but the freeroll is over......please check out the problem.

ty
iamslayer666

also no hh and no instant hh of the hand played....because there was none...

please fix this glitch

ty

Wow ... i was major lucky to get that $20 then ... even though i gave it back on the cash tables afterwards

Absolutely. Anything that changes / rewards player behaviour is interesting to me, and we will have learned from it.

I'll see can I find out more about this for you.

Do you have a screenshot of you waiting for second round please? I'll ensure this is looked into.

Dont make any challenges and ******s promotions its just a joke .If u dont want to return atleast bronze to supernova 8%--30% rakeback just dont try to makes us u care about ur moneymakers.Im micro stakes player and i dont care about SN and SNE but im not blind about ur joke,ok u remove rakeback ,then why not lower the rake by 10-20% expecially on sng ... u have enough traffic for a big profits but now its going down cuz not only markets leaving but ur wrong moves about players ,its poker not bingo,at least not bingo for all the players which u are trying to do...

ty mr david lyons for all the help u give me
and the time you took to resolve my problems.

slayer666

I appreciate they are not for everyone, especially those who got used to being rewarded for volume, but a large number - a seriously large number - of players opt-in, play, and enjoy these every day.

what are the chances to hit each category from sng? I searched your site but i cant find anything

It could be just me but I'm not feeling the same excitement as I used to feel for Golden sit & gos promo before. Also, I think Stars is missing the trick by not revealing infos like how many players got awarded, how many tables got selected, top prize awarded etc. These info used to be shown in the main lobby before and those big numbers are what used to attract people to try out sit n gos format which sadly is dying thanks to the introduction of newer formats.

They dont even reveal how they reward. The site is a complete joke now

Hello George,

Thank you for writing back to us.

Unfortunately we can't share the probabilities. Golden Sit & Go's will be selected at random.

Please let us know if you have any other questions. In the meantime have an excellent weekend!

Regards,

Eliise
Stars Support

Meaning if you are a winning player you have something like 0,5% to hit.

hey guys, dont you have any info if goldens are only today or for a longer? cos we cannot play them because of fokin czech law and i play only sngs, than means i have to take a break at least today, but i cant afford to wait longer

The on demand's are excluded?

Golden sngs were a huge disappointment for me today. So far I ve played like every low-mid MTT SNG running over the past 6 hours and didn't encounter a single golden SNG. Excluding the on demand ones from the promotion was also disappointing.

What kind of promotion is this where one plays virtually everything on offer and doesn't encounter the promotion once?

A stars promotion

Same sentence repeated i heared 200 times allready.Im not volume grinder and giving back to the player by flat percent is more liked even by fun players that these all in shoutout 5 k granted for 80 k or 15 k players.Anyway say it again that nowaday promotions are good and are for the ecosystem...i played and check these sng;s and there was alot alot sng but only about 0.5% was with reward but bronze not gold or silver,anyway i see 2 times silver .Why nowheres posted what are the chances.Have a nice day ,hope someday u reverse and start recover cuz now i see big downsing in traffic in PS and lowest guarantees ever

Random thoughts on various promotions:
1. The likely prize has to be worth it. I logged in the other day, saw that it was 98% to win 25 cents, and logged right back out. Didn't even bother checking for a couple days after that.

2. I don't mind the daily dollar because I play stakes where $1 is actually a good percentage of a buy-in. However, anything less I don't think I would bother wasting my time.

3. The reward has to be worth the time investment. As mentioned above, I don't mind the daily dollar, IF it only takes 30 minutes or so to complete. I really enjoyed the first iteration of Spinball. The prizes were pretty good for the investment. I did not enjoy the second iteration of Spinball because the prizes dropped by 67% (prizes were as low as 50 cents), but it felt like the time required to complete the challenges was about the same.

4. Promotions need to end, otherwise they don't feel special. Card Match (or Card Hunt, or insert promotion here) runs every day for a couple weeks? Great, I'll get excited and try to log in most days to complete them (see point 3). If the promotion runs indefinitely the excitement quickly disappears. It is instead replaced by a feeling of "meh, it will be there tomorrow". It makes it feel more like a normal occurrence and less like a special promotion.

5. I'm in favour of giving players a choice. If a player makes a bad choice and decides not to return, that's on them. If you make a bad choice for us, that's on you guys. A player being angry at PokerStars I would expect to be even less likely to return than the former. FWIW, I'm in favour of slightly more difficult challenges if they result in a larger prize. No matter what, you will never satisfy everyone. But which option satisfies a larger number of players?

6. I liked the Usain Bolt challenge. It offered larger prizes on weekends, encouraged me to play more often throughout the week, but didn't force me to play every day, which can lead to burning out.

After being all salty and mad after having my account hacked yesterday I would like them to implement a daily stop loss feature (would also be good for responsible gambling) that freezes your account for 24 hours when you lose 20% or w/e of your bankroll so that you have time to notice that your account email address has been changed to some Russian one and can contact support before your balance is chip dumped......

Obviously this would be something you have to opt in to and takes a week or w/e to opt out of.

Good feedback, thank you.

I hear this, loud and clear. It is tough to balance between an achievable challenge (not an impossible TLB or rake race) and a valuable and meaningful prize.

We do try and look at the BI size when working out rewards.

Good feedback, and appreciated.

We look very closely at the 'decay' in take-up rates every day. Some promos have great staying power, and some - as you say - can get a little stale (and then a lot stale).

I'm convinced. This is something we will try 'at some point' (translation: don't hold your breath, but we'll work on it).

I agree. It had a great mix of elements that ended up working well together. Moar.

Needed 20 mins or more today to make the challenge in cash games and got 0.20 cents another joke i paid mby around 2 $ rake on the lowest limit what a promotion for me.Better to not bother anymore... I have question:Is the holiday prizes in the chest allready inside them ? The chances is 1 to 135 i have 100 chest so if again dont hit for me will be another scam.Thank you for the responce in advance.

This winter season has the worst winter promotions I've ever seen on Pokerstars. Shame, PS, shame.

What makes you say that? What have you not liked about this year's x-mas promotion and what type of promo would you like to see (or missed)?

I can totally understand your frustration as even I feel some of these challenges have payouts which are very less rewarding for the amount of time they take to complete, but its not easy to design promos to please all type of players. So if you could share here about what would you like to see, that would be great for all of us.

For example, yesterday's Jacks or Better challenge, I was asked to play at 2nl stakes for some pocket change prize. I don't prefer playing cash and I play only when they run a decent promo. My bankroll this year has been much lower than the previous years which may be could be the reason for them offering me this challenge at 2nl which is wrong imo. What I absolutely DON'T LIKE is that they decide which stake I should be playing. If this same challenge asked me to play at 5nl or even 10nl, I might have opted in and even attempted to complete the challenge if the reward was high enough but please give us the options at which stake you want to play. Even last year I was asked to complete the challenge at the stake which I never play and I even asked the support to modify/customize the challenge but they refused. But I think I may have an idea why I was given 2nl, because recently they had some challenge where the task was to play at any stakes and win this xyz prize, so obviously I decided to play 2nl to lower my risk, so maybe this could be the reason why I was offered 2nl as I played this stake very recently.

Btw, was going through some of the old posts here (Page 7-15), good days



^ This dream payout EV = $400+ and win with straight flush that year also had a nice EV = $50+ something.

There was some discussion above about the idea to let players 'choose their stake' (like they can in CardMatch). There are risks and issues with this, but definitely something we are going to try.

Many players would be annoyed and put off by being asked to play higher stakes than they are used to. For most of 2016 promotions were NL10+ only and paid a reward appropriate for NL10 players... we are now a little more nuanced, and getting more nuanced all the time.

Obviously not ideal. We try and match the stake and reward to the player, but it is difficult to do perfectly.




As always, the feedback is really appreciated Anuj22.