Couldn't agree more @wildcard

^ But they will only feel punished if a competitor actually takes over a large chunk of their former net depositors. If online poker just dies and depositors switch to casino games/betting, they win.

the whole dealt rakeback get 24 tabling nits teather to their laptop 365 days a year was about short term profit. if they could make more money with blackjack and spin and goes they would be morons not to go that route.

it makes no sense that something that may have been a good idea ten years ago in a drastically different market is a good idea today.

the bottom line is stars rightfully cares about their profit. if lots of people can profit on top of it that's just a happy byproduct.they're the only ones who have all of their finacials, know how much it costs to bring in new players, know how much of that money gets converted into rake and how much gets take out of the poker economy by the players.

New promotion - "Pokerstars makes millionaires". I wonder if they realize that the thing that makes poker is attractive is that you can make YOURSELF a millionaire, you don't need a site providing a lotto service to do it for you.

What's the line on how long before Pokerstars is a wasteland?

7 years

no, if you replace mediocre regs with good regs, the recs will lose more against regs (b/c skill gap between regs and rec is bigger), even if the effective rake gets higher.


again, no operator will be gain much, if the recs would lose faster ... deposits have to be raked over and over again. this is what all operators changed the last 5+ years.

also lol that you keep repeating the problem, but somehow still think that either the old RB scheme is a good thing, or that any operator would be happy to get such loyal customers. industry has changed drastically, way more costs but less deposits. so why are some 12+ tabling regs the heroes, if they 'maximize their EV', but the operators are 'greedy', if they maximize profit? why do you (pretend to) care about the negative win rate of net depositors, if the operator raises the rake, but you don't care, if regs use any possible method, to squeeze a penny out of the 'fish'.

when the first operators started with the whole "rec player model", the regs had less and less options. maybe some of you might remember, what drastic changes partypoker made and how many ppl left. now they grow organically.

This doesn't make much sense though. The recs didn't need servicing, they could have been matched up to play against each other.

If anything it's the environment now that needs 'prop" players to get games running.

Maybe the new live scheme will work like that. Say the system notices that only three $7 180 mans have gone off in the last 2 hours, players are getting tired of waiting and starting to unregister - the system identifies the fact that this game needs propping, subsequently as appropriate people log in they are offered starscoin equivalent to 70% rakeback if they play at least 3 $7 180 mans that day - so the message is that you can be treated as a Scheinberg era SNE used to be but only when you are actually doing what they claimed to be doing (but weren't most of the time) - propping the games to keep them running.

Well the problem is it becomes a group-think echo chamber. Short term traders are just trying to predict what other market participants will think instead of whether the business is actually doing the right thing.

In the case of poker this is a real problem. Because of the similar regulatory environment poker gets given to the same analysts who would analyse "slot machine on your smartphone" type companies, but in terms of why people play there would be a stronger case for giving it to the analyst who deals with the the computer game industry - as a product it strokes the same spot as a product somewhere in the space between Tetris and Age of Empires - depending on the individual player. I don't really have a solution to this (again because of regulatory issues - often poker is often organized by the same companies who offer pure gambling) but I note it and we should keep talking about it so hopefully the message does get back to people who make decisions.

A genuinely private company would be fine - but if they have to answer to VC generalists who don't understand the product then it's pretty much the same.

If anything, recent experience seems to show that the best solution is having poker as a small department in some massive publicly traded gambling company. Of course there are examples where that is bad (Corals, Betfair) but also examples where it is good (MPN skins, Unibet). In the cases where it has worked, I think what's happening is that a typical investor call for Stan James, Unibet or the Rank Group (the guy hitting the massive gong who owns Grosvenor casinos) will have close to zero questions specifically about online poker rake and loyalty schemes. The people running poker in those places have been given enough "time on the ball" by the internal management to do what actually works (not that what actually works is exactly what the SNEs think, but it's also not what Amaya thinks) then come back and "show receipts" in the annual report of how their player pool and revenues are growing while rivals are shrinking, and the question of whether the way they did it matches up with the analyst's "moronic gambler" theory becomes secondary.

The people who personally took the decisions to buy stars are richer than they otherwise would have been.

Also, when we read that they failed to pay Scheinberg his last $200m because they don't have it (he's given them more time) - it looks like they need short term cashflow and fast - which is the context their decisions need to be seen in - not long term brand value.

This is the "baby duck" imprint theory. The idea is that we don't care what game we play, we are imprinted on the stars logo like a baby duck on it's mother, so we will just play something else rather than shifting sites to get the product we wanted.

I'm not sure to what extent management follows the baby duck theory as they trashed the original logo so presumably we should have lost the imprinting?

Also, it's dumb to think people care more about brand loyalty than getting the product they were originally after.

1a) Imagine you go to a Mercedes showroom and find they are no longer bothered about selling cars and really want their loyal customers to spend more on their new line of caravans which are higher margin. Would you buy a caravan with the tristar logo or go elsewhere to get a car?

1b) Imagine if you went to a Rolex shop and found they had stopped selling that 1970s-tech mechanical jewellery in order to support sales of plastic quartz digital watches. Would your brand loyalty lead you to buy a plastic digital watch or would you look for an expensive mechanical watch elsewhere?

1c) Imagine if your favourite bordello was converted into a same-sex place, would your brand loyalty cause you simply lie face down and consume the new product, or would you go and look for a woman elsewhere?

1d) Imagine if your favourite Georgian restaurant was converted to a Thai restaurant, would you forget that you liked Georgian food and simply eat more Thai food or would you get onto google and try to find another Georgian restaurant?

That's not to say that the above business could never widen their range - corresponding to the above lettering we might see (or have seen) offered:

2a) The Mercedes A-Class

2b) Something with the outward appearance of a Rolex but with modern accurate chronography

2c) Legit massage with or without a happy end

2d) Restaurant opening an additional window onto the street to serve food direct to passers by.

but the key thing has to be getting new customers or giving other customers the opportunity to spend more. Not trashing existing profitable product lines.

Let's see if net depositors feel as strongly about poker as the guy feels about Georgian food. (Good luck to him finding a new place.)
But usually our economy does not work this way. It works "we can make huge profit supplying x, thus we create demand for x".
And it does not matter if some companies eventually go out of business, as long as more profit can be squeezed out in total. Those who make the decisions have shares in more than just this particular company.

Thanks

I think it's all a matter of perspective. For a strong player it could be seen as 'servicing', although it might not be the best wording.

Stars wanted the majority of players. They offered a brand loyalty scheme, that appeals to all the break even, near break even and above players.
(I think it also appealed to a huge number of losing players, who realised that if the can get good enough to break even, they would be winning).
The loyalty scheme has to be so enticing that it keeps people playing 24/7, meaning that games are available 24/7.
This is part of the 'We Are Poker' campaign.
'We Are Poker' = we have a monopoly / everyone plays here / you can find a game at 3am or whenever.

So when you say 'rec', if you mean players who play periodically for fun when they feel like it: they are not making games available 24/7.
Does the intermittent player play a couple of times a week, sometimes once every 2 to 3 weeks? Site would be a wasteland.
It's the people chasing 'the dream' (whether successful or not) who make the games available 24/7.

Sure, tons of 5NL would have run 24/7, but tons of games dry up without those regs.

The variety of games offered during that time on stars was huge. Its no coincidence that their offerings increased around the time the VIP system was introduced.

No way they would have been able to offer the variety of cash games, SNGs, MTTs, and Mult-table SNGs without all those worthless 16-tabling nits. Whatever game a rec wanted it wasn't stars alone assuring they could play that game in a timely manner.

Also, many seem to be missing 2 key elements:

1.) There was a huge poker market and a lot of competition. If stars didn't offer the VIP program they lose all the smart players to smaller networks.

2.) Stars rose to power as THE home of MTTs. Having more players than anywhere else had huge value to them. Even if it meant they churn a less.

Do you really think customers who joined to play Poker and become a Star (a pro), are really just gonna drop everything and play blackjack/roulette or whatever?
Are they really going to throw their poker books away and play slots? And how long will that last? Seems highly unlikely to me.

Ok so, their revenue is about $1Bn a year. Stars makes 70%-80% of its profit from poker. That's all poker rake money.
If all they want is a casino, why get into huge debt buying a site full of people who want to be poker pros? Just start a casino, it's probably cheaper. Could probably do that for less than $4.9Bn, right?

I wouldn't call it a byproduct. It is the exact product they are selling to us: come and play and win money.
I agree, we don't know their financials. I think as a company though, what you really want is repeat customers, not just buying in new ones.

I think stars is buying into the idea of having a huge roster or poker players/degenerate gamblers and trying to get them to buy into different products that will make them money/more money. Or perhaps they already spend money on those other gambling arenas, and can now do so @ stars. Also as interesting in poker gambling wanes/the games are too hard or whatever, perhaps they convert to casino or slots play instead.

Anyways the idea of cannibalizing stars poker gambling base with COOL ADDICTIVE AWESOME, other games where stars does not have to share profits with poker pros is where its at as far as they're concerned.

Likely everything in the above post is wrong, consume such balderdash at your own risk. Haha, its too late you've already read it. Sucker.

1) i said IF they could make more with spin and gos and a casino they should. I didn't say they would. my point was so many on here think even if they could make more money that way they shouldnt bc they're a poker site blah blah blah.

2) it is a byproduct.
casinos sell dreams to people in unbeatable games. for most people poker is unbeatable anyway especially in todays dog**** online games.

as much as i would hate it if my local poker rooms for example could rake the games in a manner that they just get all the money and i can't win and they can do it on a sustainable level they'd be fools not to. people need to realize their interests don't align with either poker stars (or as in another thread thw wsop) or in many cases with fish.

stars should do whatever makes them the most money long term.they do not exist for regs to make money. they exist for themselves to make money. people who don't realize that or think galfond's site will be some answered prayer need to grow up.

the dream they were selling was never be a grinder. it was you could bink a huge tournament or win a satellite and win the wsop main event.

i agree totally you want repeat customers. i wish the grinders realzied this 5-10 years ago when they did everything possible to make more money short term and help kill the games long term.

@borg23
ok fair enough. I think we might agree it's not a case of "shouldn't" but a case of they can't because of their brand and the customer base they have acquired.
We can agree to disagree on our definition of the word byproduct .
Although I will say, I do think they were selling the dream of grinder at some point, I remember seeing a video created by Pokerstars of Nananoko playing 24 tables not that long ago, for example. It's probably still on youtube somewhere.

Right ten years ago when it was actually a viable dream.

Crap like nanako playing 24 tables at once shouldn't have been promoted at all. That's not a dream.moneymaker winning a 30 dollar satellite then the wsop is the dream.

You need fresh blood coming in to keep the poker economy going.nit grinders collectively sucking money out of the economy and the fun out of the game add nothing to the poker experience for new blood.

The problem is tons of people either realized the dream was total bull**** or tried it out and were bored to tears.

The problem is the majority of people on this site or grinding stars understand poker,are at least above average, understand ev etc so they look at why people play poker from their standpoint of why THEY play.which means nothing.

If they ever put the ****ing tablet down in the poker room and looked up from their movie or Doug Polk videos they might learn why the fun players play.they play bc they like to socialize and they like to gamble.and I mean actually gamble not play with a bunch of set miners.why on this planet would these people play on stars? Why would stars LOWER rake when these people are fewer and far between these days on their site? They're running a business not a printing press for poker players.

In fantasy land it would be nice if falcons site was this printing press but realistically that's going to be a business also and if it's not a profitable one it won't last long.

I think you've got that the wrong way around.

Chris Moneymaker won that satellite seat in 2003. That's over 10 years ago.
The Nananoko 'be a grinder' and play 24 tables video by Pokerstars, is from 2011.

Most people probably saw the nananoko video some time after it was created (it being youtube and not TV). I think I remember the Pokerstars commentators Hartigan & Stapleton mentioning to check it out, while watching a Pokerstars tournament.
So that seems to me more like, sometime 2012 or after: Enjoy casually watching big tournaments? --> go see our promotional video on being a 24 table grinder.

so whether you like it or not, they did promote being a grinder.
here, see for yourself:

I didn't get it wrong.
I said nannako shouldnt have been promoted not that he wasn't.

Just wanted to point out the promotional material is 4/5 years old at most (not ten years, you kept saying). I think both dreams are fine, you can have a grinder dream and a bink a big tournament dream One is a cash game dream and the other is an MTT dream. They are both really quite hard things to do, so I can't see a problem with promoting either

There were definitely people who dreamed of being the next nanonoko.

What I find most interesting is how little most regs seem to care. The vast majority of former high raking customers have already dismissed Stars a few years back.
Indifference is even worse than outrage because anger means you at least care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AvK_C6-f_U

tons of people started playing because of this guy lol(me included haha)

that's good marketing, gamers love to go tryharding on stuff and are good in grinding, it's a good public for online poker

First, sorry for my bad English. I thought of a way for regulars to protest against the PS. "Sit out" campaign - How much did you generate from rake to PS over the years? $ 50k? $ 100k ?. And all together? $ 1 Million? $ 10 Million?
* We must fill in the twiter, facebook and email of the PS with phrases like "We are Regs and we generate X millions to you !!! and now you are going to turn your back to us? WE ARE SIT OUT! We must organize a day to stop and we all sit down SIT OUT on PS tables! We need to show strength!

brazilianREG

regs clearly aren't particullarly +EV for pokerstars, they don't care about ya. Sorry.