Are all 5 of those platinum chests, and you're running quite under EV?

Confirmed Amaya cares about it's players

Small stakes zoom (25NL - 200NL) will suffer massively. Majority of regs there were very reliant on rakeback and the number of recs who play is reliant on large numbers in the pools.

I also think Stars may have really fked up thinking the recs would like this new program...

BOOOOOOOOOOM

I don't feel awfully clever for leaving a 3500 points step 99% cleared and waking up to see it was turned into half a blue chest.

Email them again and tell them to take another look. They credited my stars coin in the end - think it was 89% full and I got 89% of my stars coin back but only after I had opened a chest. The problem was, they didnt give a set time and date for the changeover so it would be downright nasty and deceitful and probably break the terms and conditions of their gaming licence if they were to steal stars coin like that.

Hu will face slow and painfull death.

Wasn't HU already excluded from rewards?

It's just a massive blow for everyone out there.

Unfortunetly, on other sites the software is unplayable.

When you look at the graphics of video games it's scandalous that the likes of Party Poker can't create an aesthetically pleasing 2 dimensional poker table to play on

can you guys confirm there is no "old progress bar" to coins conversion visible in StarCoins audit requested via functinality in the client?
but can be calculated from that report. is that accurate?

Have no idea. Only know that hs games were.

A real kick in the guts....I mean chest

Depressing read through the last few pages of this thread. Jdawgs post is pretty sickening.

Gl to everyone out there playing this game for a living. Only gonna get tougher from here...

New reward program:

The first 4 chests were gold, the last one - platinum. (Platinum chests never award less than $10.) His RB EV was 'bout tree fiddy from the gold chests and has gone up to 4.7% from the platinum ones.

If the 4 first ones were gold, he should have gotten approx 30$ (4x 7,5$) but he did end with only 19,6$ orso?

There are going to be so much players that went from slightly +EV to losing. This is just horrible for lower and midstakes. Very bad for 50/100NL zoom. Every reg in any SNG/spin and go is now basically earning 10% less in RB.

Only ones that aren't hurt badly are tournament players, sure a lot more traffic will run to those games.

i haven't deposited in over 10 years. i get exactly 1 point per cent in rake and need 650 to clear a blue chest which averages me 46 cents in rewards. without the boost this results in 7% rakeback. so far i got rewards:
0.33$ 0.37$ 1.26$ 0.37$ 0.37$ plus an irrelevant number of chestpoints, like 20 per chest or so.

$7.5 is the EV, not a guarantee. In fact he will earn less than $7.5 88% of the time.

Yes, these rewards have some variance, which is however negligible as it's much lower than the variance of poker itself in the volume that's needed to earn a chest.

in my opinion amaya is just testing the waters here and it seems is working good for them so far.
although i REALLY hope regs and recs will prove me wrong in 1-2 months time by showing a decline on their product by not playing on stars at all and cash game pools dry up with no action at all. when this happens (i doubt it will) they might consider reversing this awful new program or decreasing rake.

an example why this works for them:
when this 10M$ ''giveaway'' (lol) ends they will come up with another ''giveaway" and another and so on like they always do.
now those ''giveaways'' are proven to work on recreational players
what they are trying to test here is if those are working on regulars and i think they have some statistics from their recent scams that do.

i personally do not believe that games will get softer cause BE regs will leave so easily cause they increased effective rake.
most people just live in denial and are selfish even if they are getting robbed in daylight everyday .
that is a fact (not only on poker)

fingers crossed while watching traffic on cash games not decreasing at all.

The requirement for a red chest has gone up for me from 200 to 240 pts today - Stars' internal player valuation system* has started regarding me as a reg

* which I call Starsense reminiscing of the Essence system which was in place on the Ongame network briefly owned by the same Amaya.

Yeah, i think 50 and 100nl are basically going to get wrecked. 200 will suffer but not quite to the same extent of 100. Will be interesting to see how regs react, i can think of many that should probably instantly drop 200nl fr but they may well be brain dead and hang around for many months.

These changes are good for the game long term. The ecosystem couldn't survive on a bunch of breakeven nits and that's why I applaud 'Stars for the new Rewards system. They've combined a solid concept for player retention (chests) with their award winning software. It's going to take a few months for the badregs to get the message that 'Stars is not the place for them anymore and thus make it easier for actual poker players to get games with the fish. Anyone with a modicum of poker ability is really excited about the fresh opportunities this brings and the only losers are the angry rakeback pros in this thread.

I payed 13.33 usd in rake today and I got 12,14,9,42,25,21=123 starcoins which equals to 9.2% rb. Red chest was 165 points and blue 370. I'm slightly losing/breakeven player at microstakes NL.