Quote:
Originally Posted by PokerStars Matthew
As we evaluate the Christmas Calendar promotion, I'd be interested in your overall feedback and ideas if we do it again.
I thought there was a little bit of good, and a little bit of not so good.
The best promotions are the ones that give away instant cash bonuses, such as the 180-man challenge, and the straight-flush challenge, golden SNGs, etc...
My only complaint about the 180-man challenge is that it was next to impossible to win if you only had an hour or two available to play, or if you have never played these games before. As others have suggested, the promotion might be better off awarding two in-the-money finishes, or two final table finishes. Or maybe even a tiered system with one prize for cashing twice, a larger prize for two final tables, and then an even larger prize for winning twice.
Middle of the road were the challenges that rewarded all-in shootout tickets. It's nice to at least get the chance to win an extra cash prize in the shootout, but at the same time with the pennies that we get back, it's not worth it if the challenge itself takes more than just a couple of minutes to complete. Although maybe that's exactly why the shootouts aren't worth anything; because the challenge is so easy there are 25k players in the shootout. Maybe even these challenges need to be more difficult so the number of players that win entry is smaller?
The worst ones for me personally were the ones that gave an all-in shootout ticket for playing X number of Spin-N-Gos. I'm not a fan of Spin-N-Gos, so the reward of a chance at maybe winning an extra dollar isn't enough to entice me to play any Spins. I think that may apply to most players for differing game types (disliking SNGs, MTTs, Cash, ZOOM, etc...).
Another complaint I have as a casual player is that each individual challenge was only available for one day at a time. I think some of the promotions, such as Golden SNGs, are much better served over a longer period of time (3 - 7 days). For other, simpler challenges (play 1 Spin-N-Go, win a hand with XY, etc...), these fit well within one day but it can be frustrating if we happen to be unavailable to play on the only day(s) these promotions run (e.g. a fan of Spins but can't play each day Spin-related promos run).
One suggestion for this would be to run promotions for multiple game-types concurrently for a period of a few days, but the player can only opt-in to one of the challenges each day (e.g. for 4 days, player can opt-in to either win X Spins, win Y hands of ZOOM, win Z SNGs, etc... and can choose a new challenge each of the 4 days). I think last year had four different promotions, where each one lasted a week in duration. I was a fan of that.