Player Protests Hurt PokerStars Weekly Rankings

PokerStars is seeing red after a number of poker players, disgruntled by the room’s changes to its handling of player operations.

On December 28, 2011, PokerStars announced that it would be making a change to its VIP Program and ring game rake structure with the intention of implementing these changes on New Year’s Day. Basically, these changes would see a different method of VIP’s gaining player points and a different method of calculating wagers, effectively giving more money to the website’s owners and disadvantaging certain types of players.

These changes can be seen to affect certain styles of play, with high volume players who play a very tight style of poker seeing less player points and effectively being disadvantaged as a result. Alongside this, the upper level VIPs are set to receive more Frequent Player Points (FPPs) per VPP than lower VIPs, further strengthening the imbalance in the new system. These FPPs can be used to redeem cash as well as bonuses which may relate to access to limited tournaments, resulting in high volume players losing out even further.

Changes undertaken by PokerStars to the VIP Program since January 1st and the proposed rake changes have been declared as a “cash grab” by some players of PokerStars, and that the site will gain on the difference between high level player losses and low level player gains.

A ‘sit-out’ protest on the website on January 1st was conducted by many PokerStars players, who opened up the maximum number of tables, taking a seat and then sitting out. The ultimate goal of this protest was to prevent hands from being dealt, effectively limiting the flow of money to PokerStars. The protest event was organised by many members on public forums, which PokerStars eventually caught wind of and began cracking down on. In response to these sit-outs and player outburst, they were quickly kicking players from tables and enforcing restrictions that only allowed them access to one table at a time.

For the first week of 2012, PokerStars, a usually strong and profitable site saw a decline in its overall activity as a result of the player protests and sit outs. Amongst other poker rooms, despite the slight increase in game cash cash for the week of 5%, this was marred by the astonishing 29 percent increase by rival poker room, PokerParty.com

PokerStars may be set to amending further changes in an effort to quell tension with its players, having reached out in some parts of the globe. A player representative from the clubpoker.net has planned to meet with representatives of PokerStars at their offices in the Isle of Man sometime this week to discuss and dissect further the issues at hand.

Action is necessary, as players are still threatening to continue with these protests further, denting the traffic into the website, which may see some of PokerStars competitors gain a significant jump on the booming Poker Room. PokerStars had repoted recorded more than 5 million Euros during 2011.

[Source: Internet Poker]