On January 16th Cardplayerlife.com published an hour long interview with Eric Hollreiser, the marketing director of Pokerstars, on their website and YouTube. The next day it was pulled. A few hours later the written transcript on their site was gone, too.

Here's the tweet with the preview:

https://twitter.com/erichollreiser/s...86831020826626

Does anybody have any idea why it was pulled? Something smells fishy here.

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQp9RC2sfT0

https://webcache.googleusercontent.c...g_cs%7Clang_en

Thx man. Still would like to know, why they pulled it.

ty

wtf stars, probably one of best communication from anyone inside stars over many years and it pulled.

Wouldn't exactly call them hard-hitting questions.

Generally, a pretty good interview.

There was a cryptic comment at the end that may have foreshadowed the article being pulled:

Q: "Last question. I’ve been around comparatively a little while versus other members of the poker media, but you don’t really give that many interviews, at least like this, publicly. ...

A: Yeah, we’ll have to talk about that later.

I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but I'm guessing corporate feels quotes like the following are not ideal either legally or from a PR perspective:

"we had a lot of challenges. So we didn’t do everything well...I know a lot of the changes that we made disappointed and upset and hurt a lot of our customers. And that’s terrible."

"Some of the decisions that we made and when we implemented the changes and how we implemented them I personally regret and I wish we could do it over again, and do it differently."

"We certainly heard and have felt the pain that we caused, a portion of our customer base, and we lost the trust from a core and important part of our customer base, and that’s a terrible thing."

There's lots of mitigating language I left out, but Stars might not want those floating around. They don't exactly have a history of transparency.

.... there are other troublesome comments as well.

The interview and descripton are online again. Seems to be the same, unedited. This is all so very strange.

Reportedy a wordpress issue.

The most interesting line is still there.

No, it is the full interview.

Robbie Strazynski just replied on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/cardplayerlife/s...17494131847171

Hey houston - I saw you had commented on Twitter as well. Promised you a full response here, so here goes - and will also include replies to the other commenters:

I became aware of this thread a couple days ago already. I refrained from answering until things were resolved.

What happened was that unfortunately, a few hours after posting the article while I was asleep my site - which is Cardplayerlifestyle.com by the way - received an automatic Wordpress update. It made the post disappear, but the URL "still existed" and had, indeed, been indexed by Google (as the cached link indicates).

I then made the video (hosted on YouTube) private until the issue could be resolved. I have been working together with my developer to that end to investigate what happened and how to fix it. While I could have in principle just re-posted the article, that would have caused major "duplicate content" issues, which would then likely have triggered a Google search penalty of my site.

Thankfully, all seems to finally be working again now without any issue.

I agree with you wholeheartedly and I think it says a LOT about Eric and the higher ups in the company that they were willing to grant me this interview in the first place.

I had 24 hours notice on this opportunity. I also asked a number of unprepared questions (beyond the ones I had drafted) based on Eric's replies; challenging him on a few points. Moreover, the interview was conducted between 11pm and midnight after the end of the PSPC event; i.e., it had been a very busy day for us both.

I am always looking to improve though. What sort of questions would you have suggested I ask?

Thank you for the kind words, David. They mean a lot coming from someone with your pedigree and experience in the industry. I sincerely appreciate that.

No need to read anything into that "cryptic comment" though. It was made laughingly... and again, the hour was late.

Re: the other language you pointed to in your more recent comment, as well as the comment from OnMyBike... I'm not a PR professional, nor am I any sort of legal or corporate expert as far as public companies, but the facts of the matter are as follows:

- I didn't even request the interview; Eric OFFERED me the chance (as mentioned before; I had 24 hours notice).
- The Stars Group placed their trust in an 8-year veteran at the company with tremendous qualifications to do an "open" interview like this with me, on camera knowing full well that it would reach far and wide within the greater poker community.
- At no point did Eric waver, hedge, or redact in any way. He answered every single one of my questions head on, thoughtfully and openly. For an hour. Without any break.

To the best of my knowledge, corporate/PR at Stars have never been this open and transparent in years, ever since the company went public.

I was stunned to have been given the opportunity and even now - more than a week after conducting the interview - am impressed with the openness and honesty expressed.

I genuinely believe that this interview represents a very good, big step back "in the right direction" towards proper engagement with the greater poker community. Long may it continue...

For anyone who would be interested, the article and full 7,500-word transcript can be found here, with the YouTube video embedded.

Well that's no fun. Couldn't you have said that some Pokerstars heavies had you at gunpoint until you took it down, only for you to retaliate with some compromising photos of Lee Jones and a range of farmyard animals until they agreed that it could be reposted?

I wasn't trying to dig at you or say it was a bad interview, I just felt like Eric said a lot but also said very little, in the sense that "we made mistakes" or whatever doesn't mean anything to anyone in the poker community. Stars have made so many negative poker changes over the past however many years since Amaya took over so it would've been more interesting to hear specific questions asked about the poker products they're trying to offer, the SNE fiasco etc.

Software aside, Stars built up its brand because of the way that it treated its customers and the great games/big tournaments it had to offer. As someone who followed the Stars MTT thread for a while, Luke (I think?) stopped replying because he pretty much didn't care about anything that was being said by the players, there were a ton of those player meetings where people went to IoM and I'm not sure anything positive ever came out of those? If Stars wanted to take the company down a specific route, it'd be better if they were just honest about it instead of pretending what they've done somehow benefits the players, not too dissimilar to the whole "more rake is better" and Daniel 'let's keep digging a hole' Reneg.

Maybe it's just me but in my opinion Eric said nothing that I would consider 'out there', I mean it's great that you secured an interview with him but it seemed mostly corporate guff.

Great to hear it all back.

Why would you pull a YouTube video down because of a missing transcript? That explanation doesn't make any sense, Robbie.

LOL

I hear what you're saying. I do think my perspective is somewhat different because I'm not an online player and I wasn't affected personally by the changes made to the rewards program. So, it's tougher for me to have adopted that mindset and ask questions from "that perspective".

Good food for thought here if I get another opportunity. Also, as I mentioned in my previous reply, I think this is a very good first step... hopefully they'll continue to be just as forthcoming.

That's just a matter of "business" for me. I want/need traffic to be driven to my website, which helps me tangibly. Statistics and engagement on my YouTube channel are very low, it's not my major focus, nor can I currently monetize it in any way. That's why I always share a site link rather than youtube link via my other social media channels for all content I create.

@Robbie

Sounds fair to me. I was impressed with the transparency (and a bit surprised tbh) so I’m glad it’s back up.

Thanks

Will listen to it later. And thx in advance to Robbie and Eric for doing it.

Instinctively I think Stars is trying to change course to some degree... even if it's going to be a slow turn. The big Bahamas event seemed to be a success so perhaps they'll keep down the path within reason.

You got it!

Hope you enjoy

Are you aware that your videos on YouTube are set to public? If your strategy is to minimize exposure and not grow an audience there (???), you should set them to unlisted. They'll still be embeddable, so you can confine viewership to your website only.