Ahhh shiiit, I was one of the "6%" who got every week that 150$ rakeback challenge bonus which was like 18-20 hours of NL25z or 9k hands of 50z, easily doable every week for 2-3 hours evenings after work on 25z. Total with the 300 hands per day leaderboards and gold/plat chests I got like 60-65% rb every month, now I'm capped at 30%, with 30% rb no point for me to play these games anymore, because RB was 4bb/100 now its only 2bb/100 and im not winning pre rakeback.

Guess have to see what GG has to offer at 25z.

ur capped at 25% fwiw you would need to play about 180,000 hands at 25z to qualify for the 30% diamond chests

so ur taking about a 35%-40% rb hit.

micro winning players that were on the 10% challenges are actually losing in rb% as well. they would have been making about 27-30% in rb total. They are also capped at 17.5-25% now.

although now that group does have more flexibility i guess

icing on the cake is they allow players who have not played on stars for over 5+ years to "apply" into 60% rb without having to grind the pyramid.

GG is the obvious choice now if you have access to it (and play somewhat high volume to hit top 10 rake race spots)

Hmm I could still push the 30% If "I Try Hard".

Diamond 1200 – 2500 30% RB 120,000 RPs

Before the weekly rakeback challenge I had the monthly at 600$ and most winter/autumn month I went for it, 1500$ rake to pay is like with my playstyle 88-95k hands per month at 25z, I average 1.1-1.2k hands per hour, yes I just button click but still made with 60-65% rb like depending on variance 300-1500$ per month, average 500-600$.

also have no ability to play for LBs because of lolz real life, I just managed easily to hit the 20k hands per week, clearly now it only supports players playing 50k+ rake per year which is for some guys who doesnt have to go to work or deal with family doable in 25z if they play like 180h+ per month or like 100h in 50z, not that bad for 50z regs who doesnt have to work tho.

just in case you are not aware, you need to complete 5 gold chests 1st in a 28 day period before you move to diamond. That would be 250,000 RP's or $2500 in rake

the promo team confirmed this in the discord

so mayyyyybe 150k hands at 25z. I think my 180k target above might be on the high side. but in that range.

Did not know that, thanks for info, well 25% RB is no point to play there at all, would be losing with RB still xDD

Hopefully they reconsider it at some point in the future, weekly challenges was the nuts, monthly was decent but a bit stressful.

Get back to me when Americans can play on poker stars. Nowadays people in the states have to play on acr or whatever inferior sites are left to play on. A sad state of a affairs really. Count your blessings that you can even play on poker stars. I am not the only angry American out there either our options to play are limited.

+1 This is what I was thinking reading this thread. As well as, PokerStars (with and without players help) being historically better at catching cheats than most poker sites.

send in the rest blackwood

Not convinced this is going to win back a lot of the micro stakes players who now play on GG. GG's player pools are ridiculous on Rush , almost 5 times bigger than Stars. With added bonuses such as the GG cheers and the bad beat jackpot I think Stars need to do more if they are attempting to win back some market share.

People from the US missing the Stars days, but where i live the live games are 8% uncapped rake.

I can play on stars, but never live haha, I don't see a reason to be thankful to god.

GG also accepts players from countries that stars don't like russia that has a pretty big impact on the pools. But yeah gg is wiping the floor with stars and don't think it will change. Even when you get one powerpath ticket for free daily.

Do you know how many points/chest it takes of Diamond to get to Black and if you are on Black chest now do you go to Black on this new system?

I was looking forward to this after hearing about it as I hate the timed challenges and thought this would be something like 40/50% flat for all but there's not much difference aside form lower %.

I was Black chest with 40% challenge but with this new system the challenge is gone but they have increased the Black chest target to a figure that equals around 4/5 weeks of my old challenge figure so I'm 25% down but with the same volume needed over a month.

I also get RB less frequently now so it's even less flexible in that regard.

to get to black you need to rake $6,000 in 28 days

so 5 diamond at 120,000x5

nobody is going to be put into black on the 21st | they either move you down to diamond or move you up to select

If you are black now you will be demoted to diamond. You need to rake 6k$ in 28 days to become black again and get 40%. So if you had 65% so far, now you will have 30% with very little chance of getting more.

This system was made to **** all the 25-200nl grinders raking 2500-4000$ per month.

yes I think its agreed so far this is true

you need to rake more to receive the rb bonus to top up your br if you downswing and you get a ton less rb haha

but hey stars has their internal data yo

the same internal data that Dnegs had when we he said that more rake is better

Well it won't as they have added no real incentive for recs to come back and wiped a lot of the RB from the 25-100NL pool.

"That's why we've made our loyalty program clearer, fairer, and more flexible than ever before."

Can't just be me that thinks it's not clearer or more flexible? You have to rake 200%+ of the target to activate it (while getting a lower RB % I think) and then there's an amount just to maintain it. Anyone not on the select or select+ still has to get their RB through chests and not daily into the account.

Good for 200NL+ and pros who can hit the select and select+ levels but doesn't seem great for anyone else.

No. Thats factually not true. Majority of players are better off.

I hope this fails miserably, although I hate GG more than Stars.
Will be interesting to see in 2 years time the shitregs that moved back to Stars complaining that Stars pulled the rug, as they did last time lmao

I'm less excited than I initially was about it. Just give everyone 40%, flat, paid into their accounts, at the end of the week.

No chests, no %s or power path tickets, a payment every week for exactly 40%.

How is it so hard?!

they do pay out select peeps daily they said

so yeah still the **** 99% of pool logic but that top 1% (maybe less) they get all them sweet perks

Depression hit me hard when i read, i will no longer open 20 chests every week worth of 0.5$ power path tickets that i will never play

A set amount should be flat RB and then you add other incentives on top, pretty much what they had before actually. They just put the requirements way too high that players couldn't reach them. If they just reworked that and added flexibility to it then it would have worked fine.

I don't know if this could work but the rakeback % could be set depending on the stake level. 10NL is soft, you pay a lot of rake but you can achieve a much higher win rate, you should get something like 15% RB at this level then as you move up the RB increases. 25% for 25NL, 30% for 50NL, 35% for 100NL and so on up to 50% at the higher levels.

Bye bye Stars.

This and zoom should give slightly more rakeback on every level. They showed us that they can do this with their select program where regular tables will give 50% rakeback and zoom/spins 60%.

Considering that even on lower levels zoom variance will be higher than regular tables due to lower winrates, i think this would help the ecosystem a lot. Otherwise playing regular tables will continue to be the best choice for $$$. PLO zoom is quite a raketrap for exemple (if you see how much rake I paid there with little rakeback), I think its possible to have at least 2.5x more players on the PLO zoom pools.

By the way, its in their best interest to see zoom pools full of people, since its their money printing machine (wish I had one like this).