I really wanna stick up for the site but alas i cant.

Took 10k off gg. Cant even put it on a stupid regulated site. Will just gamble on the black market.

Fick all regulated sites and governments.

Goodbye

During this timeframe, PokerStars requested me to send them documentation for whatever reason. I replied with the documentation and told them I incurred an expense of like $10 or whatever for generating the documents.

10 minutes later, I have 55 $T in my account with the representative thanking me for verifying my details.

And those Neteller cashouts and ATM card way back in the day were next level.

I think that the founders of PokerStars understood two really important things:
a) Having a deeply reliable online service. Making sure it ran (close to) 24/7 was really important.
b) Employing high quality humans to provide high quality customer service.

You worked for them for a few years, right? And that was in part due to them noticing your work uncovering potripper stuff? And before they got taken over by Amaya? Would be cool to hear more of your input into how they managed to get where they did and how they got to where they are now.

yes Pokerstars has become a bad place, the support is ridiculous. Nobody there is able to take any kind of responsibility anymore or cares about your issues genuinely. I had multiple occasions where I contacted live chat with an issue repeatetly and asked them to please not respond with a pre written text message that they just copy paste, yet as a response i got the very same pre written message.

There is nobody there anymore who really cares about poker and it is obvious. I said it a million times before, the structues become more and more terrible and the games just become uninteresting. Just take the decline of the once prestige Super Tuesday that once was a weekly 400k gtd mtt with 20min blinds as an example.

Talking to support there these days about anything feels completely empty and soulles, basically like any ohter mega corporation where everything is compartmentalized and nobody knows whats going on and can't take any responsibility or be of help for anything. What they care about is getting you do the survey after about how good support was, which is kind of ironic.

Isaac Scheinberg actually loved the game and had empathy for people. That's why stars ended up being so great. Saying that as someone who made way more money on stars when Amaya took over than I did in Scheinberg era, still understanding how massively worse they are. Also it took them a while to mess everything up to the point where it's at now

Would be super interested to hear your view on GGPoker seeing as you have so much experience on the operator side.

i) They have Agency's which they release no information about.
ii) They have deleted sharkscope history
iii) They are deleting tournament lobby finishing positions as the tournaments progress
iv) They have doubled their WSOP "Licence Fee" from 0.75% of prizepool to 1.5% of prizepool on top of jackpot bounty rake, regular rake.
v) They have a built in "suspicious play/RTA/Collusion" reporting tool which never produces any feedback to the reporter. They insist it is "being looked after".
vi) The sattelites in mid to high stakes appear to have a swaithe of regular accounts which are auto-registered perfectly 5 seconds before registration closes.
vii) They do not disclose anything about conifscated funds they have redistributed. I have been refunded a total of $50 over a volume/turnover of $2,500,000 in mtt buyins over 4 years
viii) There is 0 transparency about who owns the operation
ix) One of their european offices is ran by ex Full Tilt employees
x) They openly allow VPN'ing from countries which are banned in their own T&C's

The list goes on but this is all I got for now. Interested to know what your instincts tell you about this shady setup. To me it feels like they were a small site who boomed by chance due to a few stars aligning, and they have totally neglected the ecology of the poker community and the integrity and security of our great game too. They have a "security council" front with Jason Koon waffling on a youtube video for 90seconds about how theyre hunting down cheaters, but only in the highstakes arena. I would not call this a cheating council.....

From 2008 to 2017. That was a long time ago!
Yes.
Yes, long before!
Well, as I said above, I think that the founders understood the importance of reliability: a big advantage that they had in the early 2000s was that their servers would keep running, and they wouldn't lose a chunk of customers to PlanetPoker or others which were not as able to keep their server running continually. Add on things such reliability of payment processing, reliability of high quality human customer support, and I think it contributed to a reliable brand.

I remember a powerful anecdote who was a meaningful victim of the frauds at Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet - and who remains a good friend to this day. He made the point that he trusted PokerStars with his money more than he trusted his bank. That reliability and credibility was very powerful. I would now call this "brand strength" - people thought that the PokerStars brand delivered upon what it promised.

I don't have much to share there, sorry.

I took an active role in the Absolute Poker/Ultimate Bet stuff because I believed that if people knew about bad stuff happening, that they would take their custom and go elsewhere. I was only partly right!

If you don't trust a particular brand, then take your money and play elsewhere. You vote every time you patronise a business. Make sure that your actions are consistent with your words!

Flutter aren't much better. They've destroyed the SkyBet, PaddyPower and Betfair sportsbooks (StarsGroup / Amaya operated a better book at SkyBet)

You'd convince us more if you posted specificities.

also, as far as i care they can "destroy" sportsbooks all they want. Its called pokerstars not sportsbookstars

For contrast: little while ago I deposit a few hundred. Stars freezes my accounts asking for documentation. I give it, they unfreeze my account. A week or two later, I deposit a few hundred again. I start playing a HUSNG. I'm winning 2:1 chip advantage. Stars freezes my account asking for the EXACT SAME documentation that I already gave them, and meanwhile I'm booted off my HUSNG. I send them the exact same files I already sent in the other week and ask for a refund on my HUSNG. They unfreeze my account but no apologies. No refund for the HUSNG. Let alone compensation for my chip advantage.

Word is that Stars has virtually no staff anymore, including on the Support side of the business.

Unfortunate but not at all surprising to read all the comments. Thanks

poker games are objectively a lot better when the same site has a good sportsbook and/or casino though

I would be interested in any information about PStars seeking licensing as an operator in any additional US State.

(They ain't the same operation Isai ran or Josem worked for.)

Any heads-up would be appreciated.

They messed the software up for german accounts, I am assuming this is a german only problem, I had this happen now several times. I make a deposit and it now takes long before it even shows up on stars. Then I restart the software to see if it shows up then and all of a sudden I am sitting out in all my games with no sit in button. I just get blinded off. Had this happen in zoom games even without my restarting the clients once and just completely blinded off until I could sit back in a couple minutes later, not before restarting the client several times.

I do not know what this is but it happens constantly now for me. On top of that, besides the already ridiculous 1k deposit limit per month, I just found out they set a default 1k per month spending limit for me which i never agreed to. Now have to wait up to 7 days for it to be removed not being able to play wcoop games.

I chat with support request to please immediately remove it and of course not possible. In regards to the sitting out games: remove the cache and restart. Great....


edit: here screenshot of how sitting out without sit back in button looks: https://ibb.co/JQy1PJq

The 1K deposit limit per month is to comply with German regulations. You can be mad at PokerStars all you want for everything else, but in this particular case, your issue is with Germany, not PokerStars.

It really is amazing how far they have fallen.
I remember back in the day I would email customer service and get a response.
Sometimes promptly sometimes it took some time but I had actual an actual conversation.
There was a time when I had an issue way back in the day and I jokingly put a reference to Game of Thrones and the CS Rep responded with excitement at the end of the email.

No longer the case.
The amazing thing is they were PRINTING money. Software, Security and Customer Relations.

I heard from a friend maybe 7-10 years ago that I would be amazed at how much money PS pulled in from PLAY MONEY.
Turns out they cooked that goose too.

Would be an interesting case study. Feels like it falls under the traditional - Two generations of growth and success and the grandson comes along and wrecks it.

that is the deposit limit, not the spending limit.

Why would they also just set my spending limit as a default to 1k without even notifying me?

Trust me i am mad at the german government. But stars handles this as badly as possible. They have to work with some cross operator payment system now which it looks like they sloppily created software for it as it is super buggy. Big delays in deposits, tables sitting out.

Just saw this advertised during NFL game today. I would say this answers OP's question

I imagine that in the 2010s, the ranking of online poker sites by revenue would have likely been:

Zynga Poker
PokerStars Real Money
PokerStars Play Money
Every other online poker site

I think its probably a perfect example, assuming its an ad for non-skill based games ? This has been a contentious issues historically and I think as we begin to discuss the new paradigm the evolving lexicon will help sort it out.

We noted before... back when Josem was working for pokerstars marketing ambition that the marketing plan thru negraneua was to advertise to the players that increasing the rake would make the games more profitable (dnegs used a certain metaphor on chigaco joey's show trying to sell the idea.).

Always when this comes up, some ALLEGED poker players chime in laughing and berating the obvious and known players for their critisms of 'higher rake equals better' poker based policies.

Without arguing the benevolence of certain sites however we can note that a site with no interest in serving the game other than maximal short term profit will favor comparatively higher rake policies while showing "little regard for the long term reputation of the <site> and the associated effects of that on the reputation of <poker economy/sport>" as a whole (<<<a reference from the works Ideal Poker).

Isn't it basically Amaya legal structure to suck the profitability of the games to oblivion as fast as possible? Why should poker remain profitable for the players and not the other games.

We shouldn't at all expect a company like Amaya to do anything but raise the net rake as high as possible with no regard to the game or the players. But as a most basic premise to what it means to be a poker player, I think it should be axiomatically defended that poker is a skilled based game and that its natural state implies a game that has profitability for the player pool.

That would allow for a lexicon where we can point to a type of unskilled based poker and say 'its not poker', perhaps even while looking at play money games and calling them poker under the same scope/definitions.

Stop it man, this is furrowing my eye brows

Shout out the Lee Jones era of PokerStars.

Barry the GOAT ainec