Rise of PokerStars
PokerStars started their real money services on December 12, 2001 after a three month beta-testing period and quickly became one of the leading companies in the market. Of course, their traffic back then doesn't even come close to today's numbers, they had to wait one year to have 100 players playing at the tables at the same time. The 2003 poker boom made them huge and by their 10th anniversary, they were the market leader with 47 million registered users.
PokerStars' reason for success was threefold. First, they didn't leave the US market in 2006 after the government introduced the UIGEA (this allowed them to take a huge market share from Partypoker, who left the market). The second reason was the good software, but the third and most important reason was their customer-driven politics. Players felt that the company would be with them under any circumstances and this feeling was amplified after Full Tilt Poker stole customer funds and went under, while PokerStars kept player funds safe and bought up FTP to pay the stolen funds.
The end of the customer-driven politics
By now, the once praised attitude and politics of the room is in the past. The relationship between the site and the players is decidedly bad and many of the players have already left the room.
The reason for the downfall is the new owner, Amaya Gaming.
The previous owners, Rational Group announced on June 12, 2014 that Amaya Gaming Group (led by David Baazov) purchased the company for $4.9 billion, which was a huge surprise considering that Amaya was a much smaller company and Rational Group was by far the biggest player on the market.
Even though Amaya stated that they will still be focused on their customers and that there will be no major changes, this didn't end up being true.
The Scheinberg family (the family behind Rational Group) was always committed to run the best online poker room in the business, but Amaya has only been focusing on short-term profit maximalization ever since the purchase and have shown a complete lack of integrity, lying and deceiving players multiple times.
PokerStars changes since Amaya takeover:
The leaders of Rational Group routinely met with players selected by the community to debate changes and trends on the market/site and this process worked very well, pretty much every implemented change was well received by players.
After the takeover, Amaya still met the ambassadors of the community once in September 2014, but Baazov didn't even show up and after this the meetings seized, even though the room stated that: ''there will be no major changes, the company will follow the same customer-driven direction under the new management and player meetings will still happen at the Isle of Man headquarters.''
Other lies
Amaya has also stated that they are aware that major changes need to be introduced in time to make sure players have time to adjust.
Last November, one year after the announcement, Amaya announced changes in the VIP system from January 1, 2016 with the highest VIP return being 30%. At the time of the announcement, players who wanted to achieve Supernova Elite VIP status have already been grinding for almost a year to get the 58-74% rakeback returns in 2016, which caused a huge outrage considering their previous stance on communicating major changes.
The first strike
The first player strike took place on PokerStars in November 2014 after the room announced a rake increase in most of their games and that they will charge fees for rebuys and add-ons in markets where they have to pay taxes due to local regulations.
Even though Michael Josem tried to calm down players in the corporate blog, some regulars decided to strike on November 5, after which the room reversed their rake changes (although they did decrease the VIP multipliers in some countries).
Yearly TLB rewards removed
In December 2014 they announced a change (once again aimed at increasing their short-term profits), this time they changed the Tournament Leaderboard. The biggest change was imposed on the monthly TLBs, these paid out roughly $200,000 then before.
Investigations against Amaya
In December 2014 the Canadian police searched the Amaya headquarters in Montreal, this was soon followed by an investigation by the AMF and the American FINRA. All of these investigations focused on whether the purchase of PokerStars was done legally, as roughly 300 investors made a suspiciously large profit on the deal.
After the news, the Amaya shares started to drop and even though the investigations showed no proof of insider trading, the case made PokerStars players even more worried about the site.
Problems with the software, support has no solution
Even though PokerStars' software is one of the main reasons they could become market leaders, starting last April players started to experience more and more issues with the client. The software was lagging, players were disconnected (despite the software showing a 100% connection to the servers) and the situation was getting worse instead of being resolved, after a while even logging in was a problem.
PokerStars support could not come up with sufficient explanations for the issues and the problems kept happening. It's possible that the site was under a DDoS attack during this time period, but the fact that they kept confirming that the technical issues were solved while many players still experienced problems showed their incompetence in communicating with the players.
Changes in the VIP system
We have already mentioned that in November 2015, PokerStars announced massive changes to the VIP system that would take into effect from January 1, 2016, which came as a shock to players aiming for SNE VIP statuses. Even though the company claimed that these changes were happening to benefit the recreational players, it was clear that this was not the case.
The effects of the changes on various VIP levels
BronzeStar - no changes
ChromeStar - maximum increase of 10%
SilverStar - no changes
GoldStar - no changes
PlatinumStar - maximum decrease of 10%
Supernova - 0% - 27% decrease
200k VPP+ - 44% - 60% decrease (rakeback capped at 30%)
New strike
The regular players on the site organized a strike once again and they also created an anti-PokerStars website. The participants of the strike stayed away from the tables between December 1 -3, but the initiative didn't have a big effect, mostly because the room organized a Christmas Festival promotion for the time period.
AmayaStars released a statement after the strike, which stated that ''the ecosystem of the room was the healthiest in the whole of 2015 during the strike, thanks to the big-volume players staying away from the tables''.
This made it clear that they no longer welcome the serious grinders at the tables.
Regular heads-up cash game tables removed
The room announced that on February 12, 2016 they will be removing regular No Limit Hold'em, Fixed Limit Hold'em and Pot Limit Omaha heads-up tables and replace the with Zoom tables.
It probably comes as no surprise that the biggest winner of this change is PokerStars, as more Zoom action will bring them more rake.
They communicated the changes as an effort to stop the ''aggressive, predatory behaviour at the heads-up tables, which in return will give recreational players a better playing experience''.
Most players agree however, that the Zoom format will only make recreational players lose their money faster and that they will abandon these games. This of course will result in heads-up regulars moving to other formats, making the fields tougher and decreasing the edges in the games even more, which once again increases PokerStars' profit and decreased the profits of the regulars...
What do you think? What more can come in the future? Are you thinking about changing rooms?
