The three-day early December stay away from Pokerstars staged by high stakes players disgruntled by the changes to the company’s VIP program was ineffective, according to a Pokerstars presser released this week.
Communications chief Eric Hollreiser commented on the issue in a statement announcing four new $1 million free roll tournaments scheduled for next year.
Hollreiser acknowledges that the VIP program decision could have been better worded.
“In hindsight, we could have communicated to players more often that significant changes were coming in 2016. We could have been more explicit that these changes would be significant and would take effect in 2016. And we could have noted this on our VIP web pages that gave details of the program,” the statement notes
“Although we did not publicize it at the time, we did recognize that players might not be expecting as severe a decrease in awards, so we provided a higher level of reward in 2016 than originally planned and delayed implementing the full decrease in rewards until 2017. This was explicitly in recognition that players were grinding in 2015 in order to reap the maximum benefit for 2016.”
However, Hollreiser is adamant that the changes will go ahead:
“We will not alter those plans. The current VIP program is no longer fit for its purpose. When combined with the increasing skill gap in the online poker market, the result is an increasingly poor experience for recreational and new players,” that statement confirms.
The Pokerstars statement references the boycott by commenting that it had “no significant impact” because traffic spiked due to a long-planned holiday promotion run by the company which saw the “healthiest consecutive three-day ecosystem results of the year with steady net gaming revenue, even though our net-depositing players lost at a much lower rate than they have all year.”