AmayaStars

[MelissaChloe]

I am one of the 'indifferent' people. Won't play the casino games, but don't mind them being there. If people kick off about this, then it's a bit silly, nearly every other poker site has casino games and sports betting anyway.

[verndog158]

the people who complain could be the people who know theyll do their brains trying to win back what they lost on a typical sunday :p

[rfgqqabc]

There have been some Server Issues on 'Stars overnight, & the abuse 'Stars & Amaya are getting is just extraordinary.

Two guys from 'Stars (Stefan & Chris) have been fielding complaints - pages & pages of them - on 2+2.

They might just have the worst job in the poker.

Why would customers not be angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Schadenfreude all over the this thread.

[mondatoo]

There have been some Server Issues on 'Stars overnight, & the abuse 'Stars & Amaya are getting is just extraordinary.

Two guys from 'Stars (Stefan & Chris) have been fielding complaints - pages & pages of them - on 2+2.

They might just have the worst job in the poker.

Why would customers not be angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Schadenfreude all over blonde

[arbboy]

There have been some Server Issues on 'Stars overnight, & the abuse 'Stars & Amaya are getting is just extraordinary.

Two guys from 'Stars (Stefan & Chris) have been fielding complaints - pages & pages of them - on 2+2.

They might just have the worst job in the poker.

Why would customers not be angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Schadenfreude all over the this thread.

You can be as angry as you like when you deal with a virtual monopoly.  Betfair vip's have had this level of service for 13 years when their site goes down occassionally and all come back tomorrow no matter how much they moan.  Betfair knows this.  We know this.  Yet they all still moan every time the site goes down.  Nothing as funny as folk as the old saying goes.

[Doobs]

There have been some Server Issues on 'Stars overnight, & the abuse 'Stars & Amaya are getting is just extraordinary.

Two guys from 'Stars (Stefan & Chris) have been fielding complaints - pages & pages of them - on 2+2.

They might just have the worst job in the poker.

Why would customers not be angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Schadenfreude all over the this thread.

You can be as angry as you like when you deal with a virtual monopoly.  Betfair vip's have had this level of service for 13 years when their site goes down occassionally and all come back tomorrow no matter how much they moan.  Betfair knows this.  We know this.  Yet they all still moan every time the site goes down.  Nothing as funny as folk as the old saying goes.

This isn't really true

£2000 rake per month to £0 rake
2% commission to 5% commission
hardly ever play poker there, hardly ever bet there, and I don't think I am that unusual.  Whenever I meet someone who used to play poker on there we seem to have the same discussion, you still play on Betfair? nope, you still play there? nope. 

If stars increase fees so much that it isn't profitable to play them, those games will suffer.  If they make it too expensive to sit heads up at a cash table the games won't start nearly as often.  It is bad economics to think you can make more from 6 recs playing 2 tables as you can from 20 tables that are mainly pros.  Just because somebody is winning from the game doesn't mean the site loses.  It si more complex than that.  You need table starters as much as you need new recs.  Without one or the other the games will make much less for Stars.  I don't think Stars should sit still and do nothing, I don't see the need for 70% rakeback to make somebody want to start a game, and have always felt supernova elite and the like is pretty detrimental to games.  But ongame really twisted their reward system to favour the recs a lot more, and it never seemed to help them.

Years ago the life assurance company I worked for took over the highest charging life assurer in the country.  The charges on their policies were nothing short of obscene.  Life Assurance at the time was pretty much assumed to be something where people didn't notice the charges and because of the way projections were presented at the time it would have been pretty hard for a stranger to realise this company was charging way more than the rest.  So did that company make my company a fortune as expected?

You can mug many people for a few months, but even the slowest witted of the customers worked out that they were getting robbed in the end.  So not only did it have the highest commissions and charges it had the highest lapse rates and the worst company satisfaction.  Once somenody had bought one of these policies, they never bought another, and neither did their friends and family. Basically after a while everybody knew it was a crap place to buy a policy from and if you had one you should cancel it. 

The company never made a profit all the time we had it, and was closed down a few years after it was bought, well it had pretty much closed itself down by the time the decision was made.

 I don't think the spin and go tournaments are going to suffer much with the big marketing push on, but it will be interesting to see how the figures look in 12 months.  I'd love to see the internal figures on the hyper sats where it is also allaged that people can't make a profit anymore.  It will also be interesting to see if people go back to their previous games after they work out the spin and goes are really bad, or if they just end up drifting away as many of us did with Betfair.  Will the people who got burned still happily tell their friends that stars is a good place to play poker as we have all done for years?

Maybe Amaya will be able to make more money from all those changes than they would have done if they hadn't made any.  I don't think the answer is at all obvious.  Time will tell.

[arbboy]

What will stars do if SNE is a winning sports bettor?  Will they close him down sports betting?

[The Camel]

What will stars do if SNE is a winning sports bettor?  Will they close him down sports betting?

Of all the insults Betfair pays is customers, limiting punters who have paid hundreds of thousands in commission to max bets of pennies in the Sportsbook is the most obscene.

[Sulphur man]

This thread and another nail in the coffin for online poker is depressing. And I thought the last owners were slightly shoddy.

[arbboy]

What will stars do if SNE is a winning sports bettor?  Will they close him down sports betting?

Of all the insults Betfair pays is customers, limiting punters who have paid hundreds of thousands in commission to max bets of pennies in the Sportsbook is the most obscene.

Totally agree with this.  I was never offered a bet on dogs on bf sportsbook even though i could bet on any other sport when they first opened for max limits.  My account was clearly reviewed from it's exchange business to never allow me a dog bet as that was my core product on the exchange.  I think it's really fundamentally wrong that betfair is allowed to use my exchange info to make decisions on their sportsbook without ever accepting a bet from me on that sport.

[tikay]

There have been some Server Issues on 'Stars overnight, & the abuse 'Stars & Amaya are getting is just extraordinary.

Two guys from 'Stars (Stefan & Chris) have been fielding complaints - pages & pages of them - on 2+2.

They might just have the worst job in the poker.

Why would customers not be angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Schadenfreude all over the this thread.

No schadenfrude from me, but I have a view that shouting abuse at 'Stars reps is not an effective way of registering a protest, when did shouting or getting all angry at anyone solve anything? If someone shouts at you or abuses you, do you give them what they want? I doubt that.

Those 'Stars reps have been scrupulously polite throughout - they have to be - so I don't think anyone has the right to shower them with personal abuse. Imagine if it were the other way round, & the 'Stars reps abused the players, there'd be murders! Honestly, abusing guys who are just doing their job, regular guys like you & me, does not impress me at all. That may be a generation gap thing, I suppose, but that's how I see it.

Angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Sure, when a site has an outage, it is annoying & frustrating, whether you are a pro, or a recreational, it just is. But I think 'Stars "site availability" is well north of 99.9% measured annually. That is an imprerssively good number, especially bearing in mind that the internet is still, relatively, in it's infancy. It's only 15 or16 years ago that Online Poker arrived, & we were using dial-up then!

99%+ availabilty seems a reasonable achievement to me, for any business. Does that give us the right to hoot & holler when the 1% unavailability arises?

To me, demanding better than 99% availability is not a realistic entitlement. Of course it's a bummer when it goes wrong, but we need to keep a sense of perspective.

They are the points I was making. 

[teddybloat]

in the infancy of my interest in poker, and long before i'd even considered depositing on a site, i browsed 2+2 occassioanly. one thing that stuck out clearly amongst the usual griping, bad beats and 'onlinepokerisriggedtomakemeloseOMG!!!ELEVEN!!!-type guffery that infests most gatherings of poker players was the incredible high regard that stars was held in. i chose the word incredible carefully there. few companies in any industry were or are as well regarded by their customers, or of the customers of their rivals.

maybe apple have had similar 'approval / satisfaction' ratings, but we are talking about a poker site here. that sort of reputation is incerdibly difficult to attain, and must take years of not just high standards amongst staff, but an actual ethos. you simply dont get a reputation like that by doing your job well, you do it by somehow managing to align your interests with that of your customers -  whilst making billions of $$$ of those customers. dizzying achievement when you pause to think about it.

that they managed this year after year must put the original owners up there with the very best businessmen in history. i dont think that is bombast. to make billions off your customers and have them extol your virtues and have such a great reputation when it comes to values like 'trust', 'integrity' service etc must near unique in business. again this is an online poker site too. there's almost certainly an aspirational book to be written on how pokerstars conquered their market and how it could inspire other compnaies outside of online poker.

what price that trust? what price that reputation? difficult to build up, but oh so easy to lose.

i think the anger is that borne out of loss. not monetary loss of losing x% of rake, or having to adapt to new formats but knowing that poker has lost an outlier. they way pokerstars understood, served and interacted with its customers was pretty damn impressive. impressive for any industry, market or product you care to think of. we've lost a world- class company really. that ethos has gone. are amaya's interests inline with that of online poker enthusiasts? it doesnt seem so, and when it comes to trust apperances are everything.

pokerstars strapline 'we ARE poker' was unarguable. cant say that now.

[tikay]

in the infancy of my interest in poker, and long before i'd even considered depositing on a site, i browsed 2+2 occassioanly. one thing that stuck out clearly amongst the usual griping, bad beats and 'onlinepokerisriggedtomakemeloseOMG!!!ELEVEN!!!-type guffery that infests most gatherings poker players was the incredible high regard that stars was held in. i chose the word incredible carefully there. few companies in any industry were or are as well regarded by their customers, or of the customers of their rivals.

maybe apple have had similar 'approval / satisfaction' ratings, but we are talking about a poker site here. that sort of reputation is incerdibly difficult to attain, and must take years of not just high standards amongst staff, but an actual ethos. you simply dont get a reputation like that by doing your job well, you do it by somehow managing to align your interests with that of your customers -  whilst making billions of $$$ of those customers. dizzying achievement when you pause to think about it.

that they managed this year after year must put the original owners up there with the very best businessmen in history. i dont think that is bombast. to make billions off your customers and have them extol your virtues and have such a great reputation when it comes to values like 'trust', 'integrity' service etc must near unique in business. again this is an online poker site too. there's almost certainly an aspirational book to be written on how pokerstars conquered their market and how it could inspire other compnaies outside of online poker.

what price that trust? what price that reputation? difficult to build up, but oh so easy to lose.

i think the anger is that borne out of loss. not monetary loss of losing x% of rake, or having to adapt to new formats but knowing that poker has lost an outlier. they way pokerstars understood, served and interacted with its customers was pretty damn impressive. impressive for any industry, market or product you care to think of. we've lost a world- class company really. that ethos has gone. are amaya's interests inline with that of online poker enthusiasts? it doesnt seem so, and when it comes to trust apperances are everything.

pokerstars strapline 'we ARE poker' was unarguable. cant say that now.

Tremendous post.

[teddybloat]

i genuinely believe that the current standing of stars is a loss to poker, tony.

not just the players on stars, but to everyone involved in online poker. no matter how many shady sites, scams, bot-rings etc out there are uncovered, and whenever online poker catches some flack we, as players / room managers of other sites / poker - ambassadors / whatever could point to the overwhelming market leader and say "show me another company in ANY industry that serves and understands its customers like that"?

they were an upward pressure on other sites' standards, and the positives of that outweighed the potential pitfalls of having a dominant site in the market.

when the market leader sets incredible standards its all gravy, everybody wins.

i'm not in 'the sky is falling' camp, but i am saddened to see the old stars morph into this.

[rfgqqabc]

There have been some Server Issues on 'Stars overnight, & the abuse 'Stars & Amaya are getting is just extraordinary.

Two guys from 'Stars (Stefan & Chris) have been fielding complaints - pages & pages of them - on 2+2.

They might just have the worst job in the poker.

Why would customers not be angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Schadenfreude all over the this thread.

Those 'Stars reps have been scrupulously polite throughout - they have to be - so I don't think anyone has the right to shower them with personal abuse. Imagine if it were the other way round, & the 'Stars reps abused the players, there'd be murders! Honestly, abusing guys who are just doing their job, regular guys like you & me, does not impress me at all. That may be a generation gap thing, I suppose, but that's how I see it.

Angry at not receiving the service they paid for? Sure, when a site has an outage, it is annoying & frustrating, whether you are a pro, or a recreational, it just is. But I think 'Stars "site availability" is well north of 99.9% measured annually. That is an imprerssively good number, especially bearing in mind that the internet is still, relatively, in it's infancy. It's only 15 or16 years ago that Online Poker arrived, & we were using dial-up then!

99%+ availabilty seems a reasonable achievement to me, for any business. Does that give us the right to hoot & holler when the 1% unavailability arises?

To me, demanding better than 99% availability is not a realistic entitlement. Of course it's a bummer when it goes wrong, but we need to keep a sense of perspective.

No I don't think getting angry will solve the issue, nor do I think it is particularly right/clever, but I don't think expecting people to not get angry is realistic either. It certainly isn't what I'm about. I imagine most of the anger comes from Stars now requesting players do their own audits and asking for exact tournament ids before they hand out refunds when they have the capability to do it easier themselves. Just another way of taking advantage of people who don't know the rules. People lose money during the 1% downtime. It can be quite a lot. If they went down for 2 hours during a Saturday, I'd estimate I'd lose over $2k in equity. That is a lot when I probably have an ev of $30k-200k this year. At that point I wouldn't particularly care about the 99% of good days. Before I wouldn't worry, I'd have been sure I'd get the money back. I would also argue that a company making hundreds of millions of dollars can put enough backups into its system that it should never ever go down. 38% profit margins remember? How much would 4 more backups cost? $100k?

Of course people are angry at the moment. Many people have had their livelihoods taken away, or their dreams of playing poker professionally taken away. Stars continue to treat people like idiots. They send out Negreanu to tell professionals its our fault. That pros are a drain on the system, and that we take more money out than them. They have put several rake %s up to make games unbeatable for anyone. They've moved the stars brand from friendly and most importantly fair service providers to a company that seems to be trying to hoover up everything as fast as it can.