I realize this is not new information and has been discussed in part in other threads. But I thought I would start a fresh thread on the topic to get a discussion going to see what the general expectation is of the coming changes.

Steve Day, the head of Ring Games and the VIP Club at PokerStars, commenting:

“While we are making only this one change this year, it follows a substantial review of the PokerStars VIP Club conducted earlier this year. We are considering more significant changes for implementation in 2016. Details will be available in the second half of next year.”

Pokerstars are likely to release more information about the proposed changes in the coming months- probably towards the last quarter of the year. Like many, I was considering planning for a SNE run in 2016, however with the amount of uncertainty over their VP program, that might no longer be on the table. The changes in 2015 were an approx. 5% decrease in rewards, and as shown in the quote above, this, in their view, is relatively insignificant in comparison to what is to come.

Following that, if 5% is insignificant, 20 or 30%+ decrease in rewards would not be surprising. A drop in rewards is one way to go, but what exactly is it achieving? If the underlying issue is discouraging high volume winning players (a view backed by Daniel Negreanu), then what reduction in rewards would be effective to this end? I actually think that upwards of 50% in upper tier rewards would be more likely required to effectively discourage winning players (at least at my stakes). If that is the case, should we expect to see a more linear model on VP points?

What are your thoughts? What will SNE look like in 2016?

Deposit bonuses are a better way to generate rake for an online room then rakeback to a select group, IMO.

the issue is stars wants to take as much money as they possibly can. cut rewards player benefits etc. maybe hike the rake etc.

the issue is simple economics though, if you sell your bread for $1 then you hike it to $1.20 if you sell the exact same quantity of bread then you just made a very nice profit increase.

however what Amaya previously did not consider is that if you hike the price of bread to $1.20 you probably wont sell as much bread.

Normally because your competition will continue to sell it at $1.

the poker industry is different with stars monopoly, and whilst I would not say it is going on, I could not say a cartel does not exist either.

However the thing with poker is the grinders want a wage, many of the SNE players actually lose before rake back. if you make a significant cut to that RB they are no longer making money or they are no longer making worthwhile money.

the players wont stay on stars because they have no where else to go realistically they will just quit.

i think of the top of my head there were 400 SNEs. to become an SNE you need to rake $200,000+ sure SNEs can get $120,000 of that back through the vip program but 400*80000 is still 24million.

but were not just talking SNES you can take a good chunk of SNs plats and gold star players that aspired to be better finally just turning in the towel to.

then there is the issue of the games just not running.

I am well aware that the spin and goes are doing well, However unless stars expects that to be there only business soon tampering with the rake or RB is not advisable.

we already saw how traffic for several games dried up entirely when they hiked the rake, what do you think will happen if they destroy the vip program for top levels?

I am currently gold star, this month I might go for plat. neither of these offer substantial rake back. ultimately I hope to progress to a stake level where i hit SN or even SNE.

If stars made substantial vip changes it could lead to me quitting for good even if they later reversed that decision. Because of the message it would send out. there are many of other grinders that have the same attitude.

games do not really run without regs.

too this day the satellite hyper turbo traffic has never recovered to what it was before the rake hike even though stars reversed that decision.

I can't say for definite that they wont touch SN or SNE but I will say it would be a big mistake if they did.

LOL

That is actually true for non HU SNGs not so much cash. SNGs will be a shell of their current form if you get rid of SNEs. They already lost a ton of volume this year due to spins and will go the way of the dinosaur without SNE.

The argument if your game is dying you need to adjust with the time is definitely a fair one. At the same time stars has recreational players that they want/need to cater to, some of those do truly enjoy SNG offerings and it would be -EV for stars for those players to no longer have the game they enjoy the most.

Ya I can't imagine anyone grinding SNGs if they are the same pre BF with a cut in SNE benefits. Dudes were always breaking even at sngs and just making money from rakeback. SNGs might be kinda ghost town as they are reg infested already from what I remember hearing.


It will be interesting to see how Pstars changes as their vip system was the biggest reason to play there, with out that it might be a better move to go else where.


Why do people say stars is a monopoly? If you can play on stars you can play on a bunch of sites unless its a stars.it type of situation.

really? You do realize I regularly check the traffic of games, there is a noticeable difference between games running when regs are there and how games run when regs are not.

Big difference between "games do not really run without regs" and "noticeable difference between games running"

Maybe smaller sites with smaller player pools "need" the regs for some of the games to run, but the player pool is so large on Stars, that I cannot see how this could possibly be true.

Maybe there are "only" 2000 runners in a given MTT instead of 4000. Or the number of 25NL tables gets cut by 60%. But that is still far, far away from "games not running."

The only point of chopping SNE is if you use the money somewhere else to help the game. And if you guys think Stars is going to do that with the funds you are kidding yourselves. It will go in their pocket and nowhere else.

Also if you think your game won't be affected just because you don't play SNGs you're kidding yourselves as well. If no SNE makes makes high stakes sngs unviable, those regs will go somewhere else. Which means mtts and cash. So all games will get harder as a result.

Dont be silly, they dont going to cut 20%+ to lose 3/4 of sne's and we should expect with the cut to see something like more rakeback % to 1.25m or something like that.

why mess with something that is not broken. How embarrassing would it be announce changes then 6months later cancel chances because the effect it has. All Amaya has to do is to sit back collect the money and pay down their debts don't be stupid and throw it away.

SNE is terrible for poker, I hope they get rid of it entirely

more significant changes (actual OP interpretation)

or

more significant changes? (alternative interpretation)

What a tired old argument. Could you name even one person that played SNGs most of their career and is now a successful cash game/mtter?

Wonder if maybe Stars'll look at the effect the 5% cut has had on peoples' decisions to go for SNE this year - and if they lost few enough people such that it was a net plus then they'll cut as much as they think they can get away with next year?


Guess the harder thing to measure, is if there's a domino effect - like with less rakeback, if people chasing SNE have less of a cushion in terms of rakeback than before, then maybe they'll be faster to move down stakes when the variance hits? And then if some people at their new stake wind up doing the same, and so on ... like, guess there could be a trickle down effect?


I don't know ...

There are quite a few actually, Spacegravy comes to mind right away. There are quite a few in MTTs actually not quite as many in cash.

Jman and Durr i think. But they're both has beens.

Also, I think Amaya stock'll stay flat until they figure out a way to grow poker - or at least keep it from shrinking.


I don't know ...

You're right, Amaya would never be dumb enough to do something like that

Get out of here with your logic, we want all speculation and theories!

There are limits to both sides of that argument. Few people believe winning regs are more valuable than net depositors but its also easy to see that if total NL25 tables were cut by 60% that would be a disaster for PS.

Also for some games like HU zoom, which essentially runs 24/7/365 at NL50 and PLO50 every reg entry increases the number of raked hands directly. Remove those regs, the games will stop running a lot of the time and PS will not realize the rake they would have collected. This is in fact what happened after the Nov rake increase.

People keep doubling down on the mantra that games only play with fish and that PS does not need regs. Yet if you go to nl200 zoom maybe 1% of the players in the pool are fish so wtf are you talking about? You think there would not be less rake generated if everyone just bum hunted and only played if a fish is playing?

http://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/player.php?a=r&n=113409

Lol you knew this was BS before you even wrote it. Most SNG players do quite well in MTTs because they understand ICM very well, which most MTT players are lolterrible at.

Frenzuh
Ansgar2000
Smokrokflock
Slayerv1fan
1_conor_b_1

are ones that come to mind without even trying. If I wanted to sit and look people up and make a list I could come up with a very large number, especially if the criteria was just be a decent winner. And those guys I just listed are all SNE players (I think) that would probably not play HS SNGs without SNE.

Care to elaborate on why?