Online poker rooms to take advantage of PokerStars boycott with tournament boosts and rake discounts

As a second round of the PokerStars boycott comes to a close, many players could be left wondering about poker giant’s ability to hold on to its high stakes players. An initial protest, which appeared to have been overridden by promising Christmas promotions, ended last month in response to how PokerStars are changing the way it rewards its players – beyond hard cash winnings, of course.

Generally, all credible online poker rooms offer rewards, or points, when a player risks a certain amount of money. These points can often be exchanged for online tournament tickets or physical items like chipsets – or even holidays or designer watches. Wild changes to PokerStars’ longstanding VPP point system has seen recurring players earn considerably less points, limiting their expenditure options.

To take advantage of that, 888Poker have introduced a number of low-rake cash games and guaranteed a number of large tournament pots, to tempt PokerStars stalwarts on to their tables. One of 888’s flagship tournaments, the Tuesday Volcano, which used to have a guaranteed prize pool of $85,000, has also been boosted to $100,000. The online poker room’s move offers players the suggestion that 888Poker put players before profits – an ideology perhaps not shared by the PokerStars elite.

Negreanu

Such was the response, even Pokerstars Pro Daniel Negreanu spoke out against the changes. Despite calling lesser rewards for high-stakes players an inevitable eventuality in the world of online poker, he described how the website used communicated it with the poker community as a “broken promise”.

PokerStars announced the new system at the end of last year, with an initial protest taking place over the first three days of December following widespread backlash. A second, which ended on Jan 7, saw more than 2,000 high-stakes players take part.  Leading the protest, Dani “Anksy” Stern rallied many of his troops on online poker forums such as TwoPlusTwo.

Anksy

He wrote in an initial thread: “We ask everyone who values the game of poker at all, recreational or pro, to show their support. We especially ask those who put in high volume on

Stars to do so. Please do not play a hand of poker on PokerStars for those 72 hours. It goes without saying that games are likely to be softer on those days, and we hope that you can resist the urge to play because of that. I truly believe that these changes will bring about devastating effects to the online poker community.”

Online poker rooms work by taking a small percentage of winnings from cash game players, called rake, or a flat 10% of tournament buy-ins, so losing a plethora of high-stakes gamblers could cause a huge dent in profits.

PokerStars could rake-in up to $5 per hand – or 4.5% of its total if below – on some of its highest stake games. No Limit Hold’em games of $100/$200 or constitute some of the highest individual rakes per hand, compared to the maximum of $0.30 rake (or 3.5%) of its penny stakes ring games.