You're missing the point. Stars aren't centering the promos around reg players or high volume grinders. Instead they're trying to attract recreational players. It'll be worth much more to a rec player who plays 100 hands or so of 5nl every now and then compared to a high volume 200nl grinder for whom whatever prize they win from the freeroll will be too negligible to even bother with it. Obviously regs/grinders would like to earn more, but that's not really stars's intention; if anything they probably want to put off some of these players to help the ecosystem.

You are right,nobody should win anything playing poker.Except the sites of course.
They are entitled to make a fortune off the people dumb enough to deposit regularily.
Now i get it.Baazov for president!!

I expect Stars will just toss this in the trash bin but .....

Very disappointed to see PCA sats for full packages are held strictly on weekends, thereby eliminating the 27% of us who have to work these days. One might think that the signature stop on the B & M circuit would not be so pitifully represented in the sats, the sats being the only option to most players wanting a shot at the dream.

(I am holding up my hand. Tell me. How many fingers do you see?)

PocketDucks is a known troll on this forum. Ignore list is your friend.

Coral Poker is also trying the same, but somehow finding it possible to pay a couple hundred euros a month per active customer in tickets and freeroll equity, also almost regardless of the rake amount. I don't remember the last time when Stars were awarding >=$100 a month per capita to nanostake players.

its not a way to hide the fact that pokerstars is more cheap than ever with promos.
you dont have to be a nl200 reg and play 5 000 hands a day to complete the challege.

but damn, just ask fun players to put a bit more volume than ''10 hands of cashgame to get a 20K shootout freeroll ticket with 23K players in it''. or at least, something more encouraging in some way. atm, they dont even making rake, its not even a fun challenge, its cheap value, etc..

some months (more rare this year) i can get 30$ in value just because the structure of the promo let stupid people making bad decision and result in getting less value in that specefic promo for them. and sometimes the promo is simply a generous one for everyone.

i'm a bronzestar/silverstar myself, so not a big reg. i have complete all my stellar for this year, used all my fpps. i have nothing to encourage me to play at this moment on stars.

To be honest it wasn't the possibility of winning a share of $20K that made me think it was a good promo. It was that some people would be trying to bluff the river for reasons other than thinking it would be good to bluff. Promos that encourage action like that are good for poker imo.

i really dont know who had ideaa of this calendar but he must quit doing this job. ok i understand for some people this could be an amazing opportunity to open the client ( not to play ) , but when you have a promotion for only 1000 players from 150 000 people online , i think this is a disaster. what in tarnation is wrong with today promotion for example? 5 tournaments x 5 ( every 10 min ) x6 ( nr of tables awarded ) x9 players= 1350 players will enjoy this ****ty promotion today.

give a ***** reload bonus and stop doing those bull****s with 0 value

Another great promotion today, unfortunately I couldn't play cash blizzard #1 tourney and also missed yesterday's promotion

Actually most of his posts makes sense

They cant have reload bonus everyday?

Just noticed they were giving all-in shootout tickets for that bluff task challenge, glad I missed that challenge

Good for regs maybe.

Thinking about it, it's ironic that Stars aim this at fish, while saying they are trying to stop fish going broke as quickly as they do.

I really don't see there being any real upside to this promo. The only worse one was the freerolls to win at most $100 for getting through 30k players. I mean, WTF? I know they maxed out but it was still an awful promo.

Well after all the negativity recently, hopefully everybody should be happy with today's happy hours promotion!

where was this happy hour announced? cant find anything on their website.

they announce it in the challenges tab in the client not the website. unfortunately it's over now, just finished 20 mins ago (was fun though, games were much juicier!)

new promotion in less than two hours so make sure to look in the challenges tab again so you don't miss out this time!

today's promo: win a hand with 72 (suited or offsuit)

PokerStars - $0.10 NL FAST - Holdem - 9 players
Hand converted by PokerTracker 4

BTN: 100 BB (VPIP: 15.97, PFR: 12.84, 3Bet Preflop: 4.32, Hands: 2,234)
SB: 62.2 BB (VPIP: 0.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: -, Hands: 1)
Hero (BB): 100 BB
UTG: 93.8 BB (VPIP: 11.54, PFR: 7.69, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 26)
UTG+1: 86.8 BB (VPIP: 27.27, PFR: 2.02, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 100)
MP: 104.5 BB (VPIP: 10.65, PFR: 7.99, 3Bet Preflop: 2.41, Hands: 414)
MP+1: 184.2 BB (VPIP: 20.48, PFR: 13.98, 3Bet Preflop: 2.67, Hands: 418)
MP+2: 127.1 BB
CO: 376.4 BB (VPIP: 50.00, PFR: 0.00, 3Bet Preflop: 0.00, Hands: 4)

SB posts SB 0.5 BB, Hero posts BB 1 BB

Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) Hero has 7 2

fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, fold, BTN raises to 2.5 BB, fold, Hero raises to 10 BB, fold

Hero wins 5.5 BB

It's that easy!

It is, but you paid substantial rake in the process of waiting for the 72.

As far as today's 10x$0.25 Spin ticket deposit bonus... well, it would be -EV to me to get those tickets and actually play them through - it would take 20-30 minutes of 3-tabling, I'd end up winning ~$3.50 on average, and my winrate in my usual games is higher than $5 per half an hour (at least I hope so, lol).

Four $1 Million Freerolls Planned for 2016

"We are happy to announce plans to hold four $1 million freeroll tournaments in 2016 on PokerStars. These tournaments will surely create buzz and generate excitement among players at all skill and experience levels and the injection of $4 million into the economy will help many players' bankrolls. These tournaments will be on top of an already exciting - though not-yet-announced - series of promotions, events and new products that are planned for 2016.

The recent three-day boycott by some players that disagree with our announced VIP changes did not have a significant impact on PokerStars, as traffic actually spiked through the period as a result of the start of our long-planned holiday promotion.

In that spirit of transparency, we can tell you that we did see effects from the recent boycott that give us even greater confidence that our strategy is on the right track to improve the health of the ecosystem. During the three-day boycott we recorded the healthiest consecutive three-day ecosystem results of the year with steady net gaming revenue, even though our net-depositing players lost at a much lower rate than they have all year."


https://www.pokerstars.com/en/blog/c...1-159457.shtml

Would be interesting to see how Stars servers handle when 235235+ players will be playing these freerolls

Also, $100,000 Privilege Freerolls will be discontinued on December 31.
"The final $100K Privilege Freerolls will run on December 31. All Privilege Freeroll tickets claimed with any active bonus code, or via the VIP Store, will expire at 21:40 ET on December 31, 2015, and unused tickets will be forfeited. The 100K Privilege Freerolls tickets are non-transferable, non-exchangeable and non-refundable.
Use your tickets now to win your share of $100K!"

Christmas Calendar = Worst promotion on earth

Though some might think Stars might actually be acting strong when they're weak and scared, I actually believe this report, as I expected such a turnout.

Don't worry about the servers - I'm sure that enough money will be spent on the extension of their capacity in anticipation of the 2016 growth.

How come?

Current vip system definitely needed a change but obviously this is going to hurt sn and sne(no fault of theirs)

Hope that happens

Speaking of, Pokerstars Matthew, isn't it a good idea to make those $1M freerolls phase tournaments to reduce the server load at any given time?

Also I hope those freerolls not be open to all but only for players who completes tasks/missions/challenges like when you had zoom accumulator freerolls. They were great, only downside was that not everybody could have played those freerolls because of different timezones.

My thoughts on the December calendar so far. As I tend to mention fairly often when making these types of posts, I am usually a Chromestar with the rare Silverstar appearance. I admittedly haven't played that much over the last few months, which is a change from when I would play 4-5 days a week.

Over the last couple weeks of November I was excited for the promotion. I was excited that it might actually encourage me to play more frequently, maybe getting back to the frequency with which I used to play.

The first day I logged in was the milestone hands. Not a bad promotion, played for a few hours, but never hit a milestone hand. Not a problem, I didn't really expect to (and never have in any of the previous milestone promotions). It was just nice to be playing again.

I missed the next days because by the time I got home from work it was already over. It was added value to the Big $11, which I couldn't afford to play anyways, so even if I were online at the time I would have skipped it.

The challenge to win a hand by bluffing on the river was fun, and again, I was happy to play a couple thousand hands of poker that day (even if I didn't win anything from the freeroll). I played a little more ZOOM the next day, and haven't played since.

Since that day of playing ZOOM I have passed over the Happy Hours day (would have been a single hour of $2 NLHE, which would have earned me a whopping 9 VPPs if I was lucky), I skipped the challenge of winning 3 Spin & Gos in whatever the period was because I don't like that type of game and for an all-in shootout it wasn't worth it, and I skipped yesterday's "deposit to earn 10x25cent Spin tickets". Depositing is a pain in the ass (from Canada, my bank doesn't support online gaming), I'm lazy, and $2.50 worth of tickets to a game that I hate playing just wasn't worth it.

I really like the idea of the promotion and I check back every day that I can to see what the new challenge is. It's unfortunate and a little frustrating that the majority of the challenges that have been available so far have been a little underwhelming for me (although I would have enjoyed the win with 72 on Wednesday, I just wasn't available to play).

Does anyone know what the chances are of hitting a golden sit and go? Or is it literally just random?

Spin & Gos can't be golden tonight, can they?