What they do right:

Focusing on growing streaming
Stars actually trying to innovate on some level with an introduction of new games
Party trying to give players more RB and offering decent promotions
Party finally updating it's software
Stars has excellent (relative to the poker community) communication (although the things they say may not be universally loved)

Wrong:

Signing names like Usain Bolt or Cristiano Ronaldo, I get that exposure is important, but is there actual metrics that can show these names correlating to long term increases in player pools?

I also don't get the point of signing Fedor, a German poker savant only known to poker sickos is hardly money well spent, what utility does someone like Fedor bring? I would rather sign Streamers or throw money at Doug Polk before I ever considered Fedor

The hyper focus on structures and blind levels is nauseating, as if things can be tweaked where sites will double or triple their traffic because they moved the blinds from 12 minutes to 10 minutes or 6 max to 9 max

Rake increases, goes without saying, but I can't see how this is beneficial, I guess in the poker sites' mind, it doesn't have to be, as long as it's not a huge negative

Not banning bum hunters and bum hunting software

Focusing at all on bitcoin or ethereum or anything like that at all, ultimately people want money, that's why they play poker, not to go through headaches trying to cash out or deposit


Not doing enough of:

I don't understand why they don't reach out to niche content creators and just offer them free money on their site if they stream to their audience, IMO that targeted approach could work far better than using larger than life names that most people have very little actual connection to, especially in the day and age when you can actually interact with B/C tier guys with relative ease and they'll actually respond. I think they could do very well to target athletes with an interest in poker and pay them to stream or offer them free money on the site or target content creators i.e gamers, lifters or anybody with good male audiences

Actual innovation, it seems like there are so many fun variants one can come up with or different tournies that could be run. PKO PLO zooms, different structured PKOs (full, 1/2, no bounty), HU zooms, tournament of the day where they offer something different everyday, just anything to try and actually spice things up and see if there is interest in other variants. I just went on 888 the other day and virtually nothing had changed in the past year and a bit, how exactly is that conducive to growth?

Either I'm wrong about that and people DGAF, in which case I have to wonder why tweak the schedules at all and not just pour 100% of effort into acquiring new players OR there is something to be said for having fun variants that other sites don't offer, something that Stars DESTROYS the other sites on who think going with the most boring and non-innovative schedules will somehow win people over because they can make an extra $10 a week on rakeback or because they'll get to play in smaller fields which Stars is quite abundant in.

I think in summary, although Stars gets A LOT wrong, other companies are so clueless and unmotivated to try new things, Stars just crushes them, their bigger fields, bigger guarantees, excellent communication, excellent software, excellent game diversity and excellent LONG TERM reputation.

What do you guys think?