Thoughts on the PokerStars UK Promotion and the May Instant Bonuses

Posted by icemonkey9 on May 3, 2009 in pokerstars | 0 comments

Unless you live in a cave you've probably heard about the amazing promotion PokerStars is running that basically gives SuperNova status for 2009 for all players in the UK if they play to a platinum level in May.  This equates basically to a free $2,100 in "rakeback" which makes it just about the best promotion PokerStars has ever run in the 1.5 years I've been on or following the site.  Unfortunately, it sent the rest of the world in an uproar, myself included.

My beef basically is that this promotion doesn't bring any new "fish" to the site, just rewards the good players from the UK and gets them to play more.  Secondly, by not offering the promotion to the rest of the entire EARTH, they've managed to upset a lot of people (specifically US players who have yet to have a single promotion of their own).  I was in a chat thread at a popular site where Jurn8 basically boiled down the argument to (btw he is from the UK) PokerStars being able to do something like this for UK players and not include the USA players because those players from the United States don't have a choice in where to play, so PokerStars can treat them any way they like.

Well, that was exactly my point in the argument.  If PokerStars is going to give preferential treatment to a certain segment of consumers and exclude others (publically mind you), how loyal are the segmented consumers going to be?  Not at all.  In the USA it's only a matter of time before online poker is legalized, and when it does, regular poker players will remember things like this indicent when sites like iPoker and PartyPoker come back and offer huge promotions to come back to their sites.  A loyal customer group would stay, and a disloyal group would leave - it's that simple.

Zach, a good guy and an online friend who plays 200nl+, basically said all the whining (he is from the USA) is akin to one kid bitching about having a worse lunch than another kid.  I couldn't disagree more.  My business mind says that this is actually akin to a business offering a "special discount" to a customer base while making sure it's biggest customer knows about it but not offering the same discount.  In business, this always leads to disaster; you simply cannot offer lesser clients a bigger discount (in this case rakeback) while your biggest client knows about it and offering them nothing at the same time.

This week I'm hoping to get in touch with the PR guy from PokerStars and get an interview to run on one of the sites I write for, it'll be interesting what their response is.  And I'm not buying the whole "we're testing this promotion for the rest of the world" smoke-up-our-ass.

Anyways, where I have to be critical of PokerStars, I also have to praise them to be fair.  They ran a special "May Instant Bonus" promotion (available to the world mind you) where for 11,500 FPPs you basically get $185 in instant cash (which I have taken advantage of thank you!).  This comes at a good time in light of my tilt-a-thon 22-tabling massacre at 50nl!  Also I bought the 25,000 FPP cash bonus of $285 which will hopefully be unlocked around the middle of the month, so I'm looking at $470 in bonuses which is fabulous.  I have about 15,000 FPPs left, so by the end of this month I should be able to buy another $285 bonus award.

Anyways, I've taken the last 2 days off completely and doubt I will play today.  I have spent some time watching Stox videos specific to 100nl 6max, and I am hoping the first session with ChuckTs is scheduled soon.  That's it for now!