The first thing I would do if I were them would be to pay back the players that they screwed in the previous VIP program. Because they are under new ownership they can reach out to the community in that way and it would be a great way to wipe the slate clean for the mistakes that the StarsGroup has made over the last few years that have damaged their brand significantly.

The second thing I would do is drop the rake by 50% across all cash games and tournaments. Poker games are sustainable only if they can be beaten with skillful play. I've witnessed the damage that high rake has on games. I've played in poker rooms that had the same mentality that the people at Stars Group have. If you want proof go to Omaha Nebraska and visit their 20 table poker room that never has more than one table running. The reason is because they are raking the **** out of the game. Which causes people to talk about how the game is not beatable because the room is so greedy. Then people avoid the room altogether so the room never gets to charge the rake in the first place.

The third thing I would do would be to eliminate chests and the current VIP program.

The fourth thing I would do is double the amount of customer service support people.

The fifth thing I would do is develop a plan to maximize retained float and deposits on the website. This would include opening physical offices in many cities to allow for in person depositing and withdrawal as well as fast KYC approvals and support. I would create a new deposit and balance incentive rakeback structure.

Balance

1-100: 10 percent rakeback
101-500: 20 percent rakeback
501-1000: 25 percent rakeback
1000-5000: 35 percent rakeback
5000-20000: 40 percent rakeback
20000-50000: 50 percent rakeback
50000-100000: 55 percent rakeback
100001-300000: 65 percent rakeback
300000-500000: 75 percent rakeback
1 million or more: 90 percent rakeback

With such a structure float would increase 6x what it is presently. That means 6x the interest income on that money. It's the most profitable path longterm.

Go reg into politics, and get your country to build a government-owned online-poker site with those conditions. At least, try... Your idea is theoretically very good, imo.

Sadly, these ideas won't match with the new german laws.
But someone like Trump might like that idea...

this disgusting shameless ppl have had some many errors this month and past.. this month they screw up their chests programs. neteller cashouts... sending the total uninformed promos that have nothing to do with me. taking days to reply badly to 1 simple issue. no effort from customer service to actually work besisdes copy paste lausy job.
giving farfetched reward targets.. just nasty as hell.. each day less likely i stay there., is there thered looked by them??

Sooooop “starssaviour” wants to bankrupt the site . Your CV for CEO is in the magic basket

Yes, they should have done this years ago. They didnt and they never will


The community you speak of is the community of winning pros who they no longer want as customers. So why would they reach out and why would they care about their brand within that "community

In related news, Starbucks reduced the price of all its coffee drinks by 50%.


This is absolutely false. Poker games are sustainable for winning pros only if they can be beaten. The fact that casinos exist, proves that recreational gamblers have no requirement for +EV games. This is true for slots, table games, poker, keno, lottery, etc etc.

The fact that such a small percent of online poker players are net winners also proves there is no requirement for +EV games.

-------


Though OP was all about home games, most threads about what Stars does turns into these type threads and are like a broken record where the people that dont want to hear the repeating words from the broken record player just ignore it time after time after time after time. Please listen to this chorus one more time....

The industry has changed and is never going back to where it was. Sites will continue to take actions to beat the competition in the race to convert player deposits into poker rake, sports betting VIG, slot/table win, etc etc (I hope this goes without saying, but you are not a "community" you are the competition).

I think it safe to say when this "community" you speak of comes up in the planning meetings for sites, they talk more about eradication than fertilization.

So your goal is to offer high rb% to basically for five players and small rb% for the majority of the players. And even in a situation where stars is one of the most reliable sites anyone shouldn't have more than they need for the daily grind laying on the account when you can easily deposit more in seconds.

I would venture to guess that the decision makers at Stars, a multi billion dollar company, have a better grasp on the economics of running a poker site than you.

Major decisions they make are all backed up by data and research. Why do you think when they do things like add antes to Zoom, they test it with one stake first? They want to see if the change has the desired effect on the game.

You simultaneously want them to cut their revenue by 50%, and increase their overheads by doubling their customer support team and opening more physical offices.

Seriously, man.

A big part of the reason they should lower the rake is because it badly hurts the competition that is trying very hard right now to take market share by competing on price. Stars needs to come to the realization that there is more than one way to skin a cat. Lowering the rake for them is different than it is for brick and mortar places because they don't have the same fixed costs that a landbased casino has to offer the actual game. They can sheer sheep twice or skin them once. The end result is going to be the same.


"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently." - Warren Buffett

PokerStars is not invincible. A lesson that Kmart and Blockbuster Video and Barnes and Noble and many others have learned the hard way historically.

Only recognise Blockbuster but why are you making it like it's even remotely similar to stars situation? Blockbuster is dead because netflix etc happened. Hard to find something that could do the same to stars.

You mean something like UIGEA or Black Friday? Unless they have a license to operate an online gambling platform in a specific jurisdiction, poker operators always have to factor in the risk of getting shut down overnight.

No. I mean bb died because netflix etc appeared and hard to find something similar happening with stars. I allso mentioned this : And even in a situation where stars is one of the most reliable sites anyone shouldn't have more than they need for the daily grind laying on the account when you can easily deposit more in seconds. And by that I mean situations like bf.

stars...

not possible to have a convo about this until you answer the following question

Are you (assuming you are a winning pro) an important customer to Stars?

answer just Yes or No please (for now)

Every decision they make has consequences which might not be apparent right away. They took what was an impeccable customer service reputation, high integrity, and an unparalleled software product and a #1 market position and decided to arbitrage against those advantages to juice up their profits.

Now their only major competitive strongholds are their software and large player base. They took an unbreachable market position and put it at risk. Basically they had a guaranteed profit forever of say 400 million a year and decided to gamble that they could make it 700 million a year and have the same level of loyality out of the player base by destroying nearly everything that allowed them to have the 400 million dollar profit in the first place.

The answer now for them is to restore their unbreachable market position by going back to a high integrity brand position to lock in their assured profit and number 1 market position. Then they focus on growing that market position.

They have only captured a small fraction of the world population. They aren't seeing the reason why poker boomed in the first place. It's because the average guy with hard work can find a way to succeed.

The reason why you want to focus on increasing player balances is because you want to increase player committment to a concept that is POTENTIALLY sustainable. It doesn't mean a guy that deposits 3k and keeps it in his account is going to be able to beat the games or the other players right away. But if the rake and cost structure of the site is unsustainable you can be assured that he will never make such a commitment. The enviornment has to be friendly for people to relax and trust and want to make a long term financial commitment.

If you increase player balances by 3 billion dollars you can cut rake by 50 percent and make the same level of profit because with those incentives in play you'll see more games run, higher games run, and more casino play.

Starting to hope you just trolling on a very high level. Netflix and other services starts streaming and people are "hey I don't need to walk 2km to rent a movie cool" blockbuster goes out of business because of this and somehow this could happen to stars.

LOL. Of all the reasons the poker boom happened, this is not one of them.

starsavior

All your talk is about how you wish the world was, not how it is.

please come back to reality.

The blockbuster demise is a good lesson in survey framing failure. When blockbuster execs recognised the Netflix threat they had a crucial decision to make. Divert some of their significant capital into a competing streaming product or box on

They thought people actually enjoyed coming into the store and socialising with their minimum wage earners/other customers and to test this out constructed a poorly framed survey.

A tonne of responders obliged by ticking that box . Ha we were right! Netflix can’t compete with us without an in store b&m experience!

They did not develop an online streaming service that they should have invented in the first bloody place ...and the rest is history.

I watched the same dynamic at my local DVD store. I only went in there to hire games for my son. I liked the owner and he was all morose about business dwindling. I tried to persuade him to get out but he was all “no. People love coming in, I’m going to build a pizza restaurant in the corner. Pizza and DVDs!”

Cue 80k more to build and then dismantle a mini pizza cookery, along with the rest of the operation, 8 months later. He had aged 20 years in 3. Some people are terrible in business. Too much heart not enough head.

starssaviour has a different problem. He’s just devising a plan for stars that would suit his personal agenda as a grinder and presenting it as an legitimate business strategy.

The players they're trying to attract and keep on the site aren't rake sensitive so your suggestion makes no sense. Casual players lose way more money to winning players/regs than they do to rake.

Their competitors have invested heavily in the past few years into catching up to them, and only GGPoker has recently gotten close thanks to a huge investmentment in signing Negreanu, partnering with WSOP and giving away tons in overlays.

partypoker tried these exact tactics and had to pull back as they were losing so much money. Time will tell if GGPoker is able to continue with their momentum and turn their big investments into profit, or if Stars is still too big to compete with.

I don't agree completely that casual players are not sensitive to rake. But let's forget that for a second and talk about why it doesn't make sense to eliminate winning players. One of the major reasons is that as soon as you force one group of winners off of the site, lower skill players start to take their place as the new group of winning players. It just becomes a question of who is the best player in college basketball instead of who is the best player in the NBA. Another big problem with squeezing out the most skillful players is that they tend to be very influential. So it generates a ton of bad publicity on blogs and in forums. People eventually get mad enough that they make very damaging threads on popular poker forums with thousands of views with titles like "Could Pokerstars Suck Any More?".

The ultimate question should be: How can PokerStars make winning players a good thing for PokerStars?

The major reason heavy grinders were so damaging to the site in the past is because many of them focused on exploiting the system in a way in which they had almost no risk of ruin and very high rakeback. There were limit hold em' players playing 12-24 tables of 1-2 limit hold em making over 100 percent rakeback who even during terrible downswings had at most 2k in risk. It's not right for someone to get 100 percent rakeback and make 5k in rakeback per month and not have any real risk.

The main secret to why focusing on player balances to determine rakeback will work is that it will force players to take bigger risks. For example, a player with 50k in his account has a real incentive to play both higher and more volume consistently. It would be ludacris of that player to stick to 1/2 limit hold em because then 48000 of his money would essentially just be sitting there doing nothing. So he would have a pretty good incentive to move up to 5-10 limit or even higher. At 5-10 limit (and above) Stars makes maximum rake every hand.

If they listen to what I am saying it will be the most profitable decision they have ever made. The site will be so juiced up with money that they will make record profits. Give my idea three months sitewide as a test and see what happens.

I guess I shouldn't have added the "hard work" part. But the average guy having a chance to win big money is part of the reason the poker boom happened.

There is a lot of room for Stars to grow poker and gaming worldwide. But they aren't going to get into many more markets if they don't change their strategy. IMO it's impossible for them to grow market share organically with their current strategy.

everything in the above post is wrong. not some of it or most if it..... ALL of it.

please come back to planet earth.

I just downloaded GGPoker. The software looks decent enough and at this point if they have over 2000 players on their site I rather play on a site that doesn't have total contempt for me if I happen to win money. I'll probably still play on Stars though too.

smh /thread

No, they obv don't. They just frenetically milk their former cash-cow poker, while it's already on the road to become bad hash. That's not just kosher butchering

Only game-integrity is still great/best.

Poker is a game that really pays off in the long run, not just from the player's perspective..

They will slowly lose business to sites with lower rake, as time goes by.
NVG'ers saying "but fish no care bout rake" will do a 180, as soon as some site with 3% rake cash and 5% rake on rebuy-MTT's will catch up.

But so far, NVG'ers are right. And you are not, starssavior...

PS has the lead in the EU, and won't lose it any time soon. They combined France, Spain and Portugal (nearly also Italy, iirc). 3 Countries with more savings per citizen than Germany has, as a comparison...

But if PS simply adds Germany to that pool next year (new laws etc etc), that'll look really greedy, in a way too obvious style (all fishy countries, at high rake, paying low VAT).
I promise you that this would be the turning-stone.

PS is greedy enough to make some more big mistakes (next short-sighted decision) very soon, and then, others will take over the lead with biggest MTT's (=most traffic) in the EU very quickly.

Vaikkus and win2day are currently the best bet to get that done (maybe if they get Svenska Spel to join the pool, first of all).

Whoever says "fish no care bout rake" is... wrong, at least, imo.
I'm not humble, I'm angry because those peeps basically gave up on their love to poker. You should never give up on something you love!