I hide my head in shame

All of this. Raidalot on point as always.

This.

Yeah, pretty much all of this. Stars/Amaya had to work pretty ****ing hard with screwing their clients over so much and giving us a whole lot of BS for the community to completely change their opinion on Stars. It's been said a lot, but people used to love Stars. Now the community's opinion of it/them has understandably/justifiably changed right round to it being maybe the most hated site.
At this point it's pretty reasonable for everyone here to be expecting that and have that attitude.

I doubt ps expected this type of backlash when making the change. Sad it'll all be a distant memory in 30 days.

I agree this is a bizarre and crappy move.

Although I have no intention of playing the new Spin and Go Max, there was no way of finding out the rake being charged for these without entering one (I guess it is available then under the small print).
Unlike the normal spin and goes if you go to the webpage it does not state what the rake is.
So as a Spin and Go I presumed it would be the same as the normal spins, but after contacting stars (twice as they did not tell me the first time, but pointed me towards the cash rake web page) they finally advised the following:

For buy-in $1 -- 9% goes to rake
For buy-in $3 -- 9% goes to rake
For buy-in $7 -- 8% goes to rake
For buy-in $15 -- 7% goes to rake
For buy-in $30 -- To be added later (games not launched yet)

So across the board 1% more and this is rake is as hard to find as sand at the North Pole!

Not what I call transparent, I wonder what "spin" Lee Jones and Dnegs would put on this. Pretty much had enough with Stars and their BS.

It's a great reference (bank hidden fees). With that said I actually agree 100% with Lee, you reduce the confusion of what your money is going to by only showing the entire cost. You don't want confusion or questions when you're putting someone else's money in your own pockets. It's much better if it goes unnoticed.

It is very well hidden in a link in the second bullet point.



**** you Stars you scummy ****ers.

$200+$15 is like a $200 hotel room with a $15 resort fee tacked on, so some people could see having a single number as more honest.

lol

Incredible, lolStars and lolLee

So they literally introduced a format, which is a raketrap mere DAYS after hiding rake from tournament lobbies with Lee Jones completing a sidequest in the meantime to lie and spout garbage to us.

This is our lives now:

So I just played a couple of these and it's actually incredible.

Start with 25 BB as in regular spin-n-go.

Random number of players between 3 and 8.

Blinds go up every 3 hands!

The SNG lasts 20 hands, then becomes forced flipaments.

1st place chooses between 3 prizes at random, possibly winning less than 2nd place.

9% rake.

Amazing stuff Stars.

215 goes to the hotel so one number is good. It's different since 200 goes to prize pool and 15 goes to stars so we know how much juice they take.

You can't see the difference? 95% trolling but I'll take the bait just in case.

In your hotel example it wouldn't matter to the customer whether it was $200+$15 or $150+$75 or $15+$200. Regardless of the arbitrary way the hotel chooses to split the number, the customer gets a room for $215 and that's all he cares about.

In the case of the tourney, the components go into 2 completely different buckets. The customer retains 100% equity in one of the buckets and 0% in the other so he cares hugely what the split is.

A better comparable might be buying shares in a mutual fund where the broker takes a fee. You don't just want to know the total paid, you should be very interested in how much of your payment buys you fund units (where you have 100% equity) and how much in fee (where you have 0%). Any broker that didn't disclose this clearly up front would be considered scummy/illegal.

So it would be more honest (less misleading) for the hotel to quote a single number up front (rather than burying part of it). However, it is more honest for the poker site to quote both components up front (rather than burying the split).

The truth is they are deliberately deceptive in hidding the rake fees. Just as an example they prize pool equivalent in Spin n Go is always buy-in multiplayer so e.g. in 30$ Spin n go the prize gonna be 60,120,240$ instead of say 57,115 etc. I mean this is deliberate to hide the rake from people so recreational player sees that he buy-ins for the said 30$ and always plays for the multiplayer of hi buy-in without being really ever aware how big % goes to Stars.

raidalot for prez

Good point. I had never thought of that. Those dirty, sneaky ****ers.

Would they eventually make the step to change MTT buy ins from $10+$1 to just $10 with a hidden rake? The whole point of the buy in being $11 was that the money to the prize pool was rounded. If they want to make it more convenient and easy, they really should because a rounded $10 is much simpler.

Well as radialot wrote many people assume that the buy-in and rake will be rounded but instead now they can change the rake and people won't notice. Say making Sunday milion not 200+15 but 196+19. They can do the same with Spins etc too so increased the rake while majority of the players (the people that don't read 2+2) won't notice.
I mean thats the very reason they made the changes. Even recreationals would get super pissed when they saw that the buyin went from 200+15 to say 196+19 and would get really pissed now if the changes happen they won't even notice. I am just waiting for the Sunday Million to decrease the buyin "because it is good for recreational players" with buyin 200$ (185+15)

I mean what Stars does is a deliberate deception to take more money from the players and hoping they won't notice. It isn't far from directly stealing from them tbh. Now just wait for the rake increase accross all the MTTs etc. (I mean they already increased it in fact by taking out the vip program and leaving us playing with 0 rakeback or close to it)

thank god I'm just a rec now. I actually can't wait to see what pile of dump they try to pull next

Lee Jones:

"As to our lack of prior announcement about the change, that was a dropped ball, pure and simple. If you go back the last couple of years, you’ll see that we’ve done a far better job of announcing our plans and coming changes. We are committed to that and believe it’s absolutely the right thing to do. In this case, wires got crossed and we didn’t do it. We apologize and are working hard to prevent it from happening again.

Regards, Lee"

The last couple of years!!? Oh, **** off! So you can't think of ANY communication issues that have occurred since August 2015!!? What a ******* idiot. You can't even communicate accurately about your communications.

It's crazy how good a reputation Lee Jones once had and how slimy he's turned out to be.

Good thinking. It's all cleared up now.

Hello Isaac,

Thank you for contacting us.

Well, is part of the latest changes that we have been deploying.

Since our Stars Rewards program is not a traditional volume-based rakeback program, we don't see as important to display the rake at the tournaments anymore.

Also, we take into consideration our players feedback and sometimes this small changes are precisely the consequence of this feedbacks, however, management has the ultimate word about this.

If you are not happy with the change or you feel it affects you or anything else, please feel free to send your feedback or comments about it and we'll gladly review it.

Please note that under the tournament structure>Tournament Information>Buy-In: you will specified how much is going to the pot and how much is the rake back.

I hope this helps you clarify your doubts, however, please don't hesitate in contact us back should you require further assistance. We aim to please.

Regards,

Tatiana M.
Stars Support

Turns out that since we don't get rakeback anymore, it's hard to conceive of why anyone would even want to know what the rake is.

Or maybe it's because players had requested that the rake be hidden. Tatiana thinks that might be it.