Nobody is ass_ucking you, guys! We were all subsidized and rewarded heavily during the poker boom, no company owes us anything. Rakeback is just a loyalty programme, that some of us turned into means of existence.

You all have a few options:
first and foremost, stop playing at Stars
second, play at Stars but lower your expectations and entitlement - we are a minority, we are not necessary for functioning of a poker site, especially while using all kinds of unfair and irritating shortcuts: cartels, HUDs, table selection tools, bumhunting, insanely slow multitabling playing, god knows what software (see Skier case) , so control your greed and realise you will earn less and less every following week and month, and rightly so
third, get another job

Be grateful that for at least a few years you had, IMO one of the few fairytale jobs. I know I will carry on playing profesionally because there is still loads of money to be made, but it is just more difficult then before.

Pure evolution, adapt or die.

Well to be fair mid stakes pro-grinders spend insane amount of money for non poker activities either for to develop their game either for fun and they spend from their bankroll which is bad

Easily the best article about the VIP changes: http://www.uspoker.com/blog/latest-p...program/17047/

Cliff notes: Most of you are wrong.

pretty sure that's agreeing with most of us...

The article clearly sets out PokerStars' position in justifying the rewards changes - something that PokerStars has been very clear about from the start. To me, it doesn't really put forward any new arguments and I doubt it will convince anyone they are "wrong".

Basically, everything bolded in the section "The opposing point of view" is restating PokerStars' reasoning and presented as axioms without supporting evidence.

lol stopped reading at "Mainly, they play an ultra-tight style across numerous tables and rely on the rewards they receive to turn a profit." it was possible smth like 5-7 years ago when they had dealt rakeback system instead of the contributed one.

Most of the USA guys are out of touch with today online poker environment.

According to that article players who rely on rakeback will be forced to move up in stakes, freeing up the lower stakes for recreationals. Not sure how they manage to jump to such a ridiculous conclusion. If they were really concerned about this they would bring in table limits at the micros.

Have you seen how high is the rake in the micros?
In NL25, rake is around 7bb/100-10bb/100 for a reg.
in NL100 it's around 3-5. Volume played at NL25 is way higher than in NL100.

NL100 is 7bb/100 overall, NL25 I don't know.

Ideal solution would be to segregate countries based on income levels. One site for Eastern Europeans, Russians and other 3rd world countries. Another site for 1st world/western countries.

Bovada ecosystem is so much healthier in part because it's only US and Canada. No 20-tabling eastern euro nits grinding 10nl for a living.

This would be kinda nice, but I think it would be next to impossible to implement

Your ignorance tells me you must be an American therefore I don't expect you to know anything about the world outside of US.

Let me clarify a few things for you:
- Russian are in fact Eastern Europeans
- by Eastern European grinders I suppose you mainly mean Polish and Hungarians - these countries are in Central Europe
- Central Europe is highly developed, I don't think you even know what a 3rd world country is
- I am Polish and my income is above median in USA, so go f... segregate yourself, you have quite a history of that in the USA, don't you

We already have segregation with French, Italians, Portuguese, Americans and so on and this dude wants to segregate further... soon enough every country will have their own closed market and you will have nobody to play against, is that what you want?

Yes, exactly that.

It has a better chance of providing a balance between the income level in the country, the incentive to play full time, the difficulty of the games, and the rate of retention of fish.

wow so triggered. He meant Russians and Ukranians mostly, dry your eyes.

To most people (certainly here in the UK) "Eastern European" means anywhere east of Germany. Poland and Hungary (to use your examples) certainly aren't rich countries with GDP per capita of ~$14k.

Their plan will probably backfire in a big way (with a significant decline in traffic), but I think the theory behind a "daily rakeback" system (where you only get decent rakeback on your first 500 hands or so) is that many players would take shots at higher stakes than usual. Didn't the Cardhunt promo lead to people trying to race through 200 hands in games they couldn't beat, because the prizes appeared to be generous? "Rewards" of 10 cents a day at 2NL aren't enough to support a student in Belarus, but a dollar at 50NL might.

Calling this an article is a bit ambitious, its mainly an expanded press release based on the same pr nonsense Negreanu and others were given to spout, its also right next to a PokerStars New Jersey ad... who knew there were such biased malcontents in the media

There's no money in the micros. According to Pokerscout, all the money is in Zoom NL and PLO at $100+.
"In general, PokerStars reaps the most profit from its mid-stakes games, where high average pots intersect with decent traffic levels... Not a single one of the site's top five most popular games is a top 15 revenue generator." http://www.pokerscout.com/news/weekl...ar=2015&week=7

lol euros, we're gonna build that poker wall and ur gonna pay for it!

Whether Russia is or isn't part of Europe is not the point.

The point is that these countries (Poland, Ukraine, Russia - basically any former communist country) have vastly lower average wages than western countries, hence you have eastern euro grinders at nl2-nl25 who destroy the games at a level which wasn't designed for pro players. A Western player can dust off a few nl5 buy ins and he's barely lost a couple of beers worth of money. The same guy from Russia has probably lost his weeks rent money after doing the same thing.

You cannot deny that the ecosystem would be far healthier and games would be more fun for recs if these players were segregated into their own separate player pool.

As for your point on not having anyone to play against - plenty of games run on Bovada and I believe plenty also run on pokerstars.es, pokerstars.fr and other segregated sites. They are far from a situation where there is "nobody to play against".

Most of you just talk without knowing anything about Central/Eastern Europe.
Do you think that you will be some kind of a baller with 1k at places like Moscow,Sankt Peterburg,Warsaw,Budapest?You will be below middle class with that income.It all about where you are located even in Central/Eastern Europe.If you live in the big cities good luck making big money at nl5/nl10.For the american half rettards i can give you an example.If you are a corn fed trailer trash, living with his inbreed relatives in the trailer park , you can probably live with alot less money than trying to pay rent or mortgage in New York or LA.

start of TL;DR

Depends what you define as western Europe but if it includes the southern Europe and you use the definition of Eastern Europe that includes the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (some people call it Central Europe but most of us who can remember the period before 1989 just split Europe into two halves with no centre), then on a lot of pairwise comparisons what you write is not really the case these days (right hand side of the data) while it might have been in 2004 (left hand side of the data).

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/tab...pcode=tec00113

If you break it down by region
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...regions_by_GDP (sortable)
then you find regions of Eastern countries (particularly around the capitals) which are richer than most regions of western countries. As pozdrominony points out - if you break it down to the individual then you have even more overlap - a Budapest businessman has more money to deposit than a Birmingham barman.

Also the direction of travel is important - countries like Poland, Czech Rep, Slovakia, Slovenia have just about chased down Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy now, but with sensible debt/GDP ratios and laws that don't ignore the need for some kind of rough balance between the numbers of people who want jobs and the numbers of people are willing to be the mug offering them this trend will only continue.

end of TL;DR

So in summary the difference isn't that great and its getting smaller so if you are going to segregate it's not that clear where to draw the line.

I've suggested this a ton of times before but they should use the easy-seat feature to soft segregate cash tables by language spoken. So yes, if the stakes are low enough to have enough players to do it, seat all the Polish players together so regs can actually talk to the net depositors from their country and motivation to be nice - because of the soft segregation there is high chance to see the player back at your own table and not some Greek guy's table. On the other hand, at higher stakes, unusual formats or the European night time then they would probably get a mixed-nationality table.

MTTs could still be global to help the big guaranteeds.

If Vladamir from Mother Russia is smarter than you and prepared to work harder than you and he's not running some bot, he deserves to be a bigger winner than you regardless of whether he plays at a stake which you think is 'too low for pros' and regardless of what the average wage in his country is. I don't like having a bunch of eastern European grinders in my game but it's not my place to say they shouldn't be there.

The general sentiment ITT and on 2p2 in general is that the VIP changes are just a money grab, this article says the changes are necessary due to the different landscape.

Steve Ruddock is one of the most respected poker writers and I'd be very surprised if he were to write a piece like this if he truly didn't believe the words.