Very hollow sense of anticipation. Kinda like when you buy a scatch ticket.

All these random prizes is a bad look on Stars IMO. Poker has always been a gambling game which is different from other non-skiled games. These random rewards seem tricked up and scammy like the other palour games.

5 star trolling

I've noticed I seem to be getting a decent amount of tournament money. It gets eaten up because I play so many sit 'n' gos, but I could actually be doing as well if not better than I did under the old scheme.

I totally agree. I don't play poker to try and win something random from a chest, and I think the scheme kind of misses the point of why so many people love poker as a form of gambling.

Hey, sorry if this is the wrong thread for this kinda stuff, but I am wondering if there are any solid stats ref the new stars rb. So far I've received 4.06% RB.

its less then 5% and the higher you rake the lower the %

What's that, approx 4% rakeback?

now that rakeback is so low anyway can we get some for 5/10+? was kind of tilting when I was trying to get me $600 deposit bonus and then saw that I was getting no VPPs after paying who knows how much in rake...

Oh yea I totally forgot about the first deposit bonus. Supposing recs are going to benefit from this aswell.

The sad thing is if the rakeback % hadn't been slashed so much and players were still getting say 15-25% rb on average this chest malarkey actually could have been kind of fun.

+1

I play kitchen table poker with my kids and I am surprised how often we are walking around the town and they point to something and say "poker!". I turn round thinking "There's no poker club here" and always see they are pointing at some slot parlour whose outside decoration is based on chips, suits from the Anglo-American deck, cards etc.

In other words, the scammy parlour games keep stealing our clothes because they know poker is cool. It makes no sense to turn it around and try to market poker by stealing the clothes of the sadder types of gambling.

Would be nice if the community had some balls and in protest all stopped playing zoom, and really bust ps balls instead of just taking it up the ass. Micro zoom is probably unbeatable now long term, waste of time.

Micro zoom is still very much beatable.

Now thats clearly a point proven, if there ever is one.

its beatable 100% but the problem is not many % of people beating it long term and micro recreationals are getting raped big time . and thats the worse advertisement for online poker.

that equals less action on mid stakes and so on . fish that love cash games just have nearly no chance of getting an upswing and blow those $ on midstakes.

hypers still run, zoom still runs

regs dont care, they just think variance and i am not the fish so i win.

Good regs stop with -ev games

So you're saying a site which wants to grow the game should refocus its rewards program on recreational players? This sounds like a good idea, I hope someone thinks to do that.

me too atm everybody is just trying to scam them .

EDIT: Never mind, found it.

If you want to see the site that did just that you should look at unibet not pokerstars. I followed pokerstars discord AMA thread and they answered question about the new rewards system there.
They confirmed that the new system gives less in poker accross all spectrum of players (with regs losing a lot and majority of recreational players getting simmilar amount to the previous system). So there is nothing about ecosystem in this change they just want to pocket the money. So please explain how taking even more money out of the system and ginving nothing in exchange is good for recreational players.
I mean Pokerstars doesn't really have major shareholder now just several closed/open funds owning the company and being interested mostly in short term results so they could exit profitably.

I saw you mentioned the current CEO of Pokerstars who I believe was working before with Playtech?? So basically casino group who offer poker mostly because they have to rather as a part of their core business. Just look at what they did with poker already( the enire network of the biggest bookmakers in the world being simmilar in size to unibet poker/slightly bigger)
There was a case of something like this in the past when bwin merged with party poker and they burned the business to the ground (the poker part) because they tried to execute the same strategies as they did previously in sport betting and casino with terrible end result.
Hence now they hired former poker players to manage the network and it seems working at least from what we see now.

I mean granted I don't offer anymore knowledge that anyone else just I believe this is the general attitude shared among 2+2 crowd. If you look at successful companies now in poker (unibet,party poker and to some degree winning poker network) they do use experience of former poker crowd extensively and they do listen to the feedback they are getting here. Not the case with Stars.
I think most of us just worry that your friend Rafael will do the very great job he did with Ipoker poker business and burn pokerstars to the ground. Same as the bwin did with Party. Just guys with extensive experience in casino industry destorying poker business because they consider the very existence of winning players as an issue to deal with .

KptBomba that is some very good insight that I had not considered at all. Especially the part about the winners and not wanting them.

I always thought Poker operators knew they need winning players to keep the games going and ultimately make them more in rake.

So if I understand correctly Amaya took over Pokerstars in a bad deal. Pokerstars is now basically a hostage of the people pulling the strings, who simply want short term profits?

I never thought Pokerstars would do something stupid as reducing rb to <5% but in light of this deal it makes perfect sense. In the short run this makes them a killing on the 25-30% they save on rb. Once they cashed that money they cash out of PS and are leaving it drained of any volume/liquidity.

These guys don't understand or don't care that pushing out all the regulars means a massive drop in volume over the long run and therefore a massive drop in rake paid to PS.

Love this
Winning players are an issue .
Biggest Red Flag at poker stars is a Withdrawal.

Well if you look at the entire casino industry that what they have been strugling with. I mean younger generation wants to play skill based games (they even now try to introduce skill based slots). So they sort of had to offer poker. But if you look at the numbers (new jersey and stock trading company that public the data like William Hill or Unibet) the profit numbers are like 7:1 casinooker (simmilar to bettingoker I believe? but not sure about it tbf). The sad true if Amaya lost like 4/5 of their player pool but made the other player switch to casino (or casino like games like beat the clock)they would be extatic about this outcome. Their profits would increase a ton.

I mean thats part of the problem now with poker that except for couple of exceptions no one wants to offer poker. I mean think about it. The former CEO employer Playtech. They are home of the biggest bookmakers in the world (bet365,betfairpaddy,william hill,landbrokes) yet they are simmilar in size to unibet?? It makes no sense unless you realise they do everything for their players not to play poker.

There was a very big US bookie bovada.lv that got rid of poker and sold the network because they decided that losing the profit from rake is still worth more in profit than letting their fish to play poker.

Sucks for us that Amaya bought Pokerstars because they even said that-we bought customers not poker and they do everything to make you play casino/betting or play unbeatable poker games even if it means killing the game most of us love.

There are definitely $100 prizes, I received one.

This. In addition, Stars Reward points are still based on rake, not on flops seen or other metrics that encourage loose and friendly play. I'm disappointed as I was expecting a more Unibetesque reward program from Stars.