PokerStars the world’s leading online poker website has continued to implement numerous changes to its policies and procedures during the last couple of years as the company strives to offer its players the best possible online gaming experience. PokerStars released a new blog post on April 3 informing its worldwide player database that it plans to make more changes to its rewards program.
This will be the third consecutive year that PokerStars is making changes to its rewards program. The first change was made in 2015 and it did not go down well with the players as they received very short notice of the proposed changes. The second change happened in 2016 and PokerStars learnt from its earlier mistakes and informed its players well in advance but it still wasn’t accepted with open arms – especially by its VIP players as they felt the new rewards program wasn’t as attractive as before to them.
PokerStars has once again decided to make changes to its rewards program in 2017 and confirmed in its blog post that these changes will affect players all over the world. The post made by Severin Rasset, the Director of Poker Innovation and Operations stated that the numerous changes being made had one mission in mind and that was to create the best rewards program in the gambling industry.
Rasset provided players a glimpse into the thinking behind the decisions to make changes to the rewards program highlighting the fact that back in 2006, the loyalty or rewards program focused on volume and proved to be a massive success for the company for a long period of time.
However the company realized that the online gambling industry has changed over the years and so have the demands of players. As a result, PokerStars was forced to make changes to a number of its policies including its rewards program in order stay abreast of the changes and continue to be the leading online poker website in the world.
The company states that the changes which started to be rolled out in 2015 have already had a positive impact. The company introduced VIP Steps which caused its VIP players to make a change to their gaming strategy and instead of focusing on a strategy that helped them win more reward points, they now focused on winning more at the tables. The company also wants to reach out to a wider audience and encourage amateur poker players to also be a part of the action and the new rewards program is designed to do just that.
The blog post goes on to say “We have seen additional concrete positive signs: more hands seeing the flop, bigger pot sizes, new players playing longer on the site than the year before, and players playing more frequently. These are all good indicators of a more fun and engaging playing experience across PokerStars. These were all positive results, but we want to be even more ambitious in delivering the best gaming experience.”
The company also states that with the popularity of mobile gaming, PokerStars will continue to innovate and release more online tools to provide its players with a better mobile gaming experience. The experience will not just cover online poker which has been the key offering for PokerStars for a number of years but this time around will also focus on online casino games and sports betting. PokerStars will not push any particular product on its players but instead allow them to choose whatever offering they feel like playing.
The company will use StarsCoin to be its common reward currency for all offerings including online poker, sports betting and online casino games. The new rewards program will also focus on rewarding players with exciting prizes and packages more frequently during their playing session unlike the old model which rewarded players on a monthly basis.
PokerStars plans to introduce these changes for all countries but will start with Denmark and expects the changes to come into play before the end of May. The changes will be rolled out across all countries before the end of the summer and will keep its players informed via email as to when the changes will be rolled out in their respective countries. Some players are expected to be significantly impacted by these new changes and PokerStars has promised to contact all of these players via email giving them more information on how they will be affected