Home / Poker News December 2015 / Did the High Stakes PokerStars Boycott Accomplish Anything?
Did the High Stakes PokerStars Boycott Accomplish Anything?
Posted by: James Carter. - Tue, 2015-12-22 08:27
Some 2,500 of PokerStars' High Volume players organized a sort of high-profile walkout at the site to thus protest the radical - and for them unfavorable - changes that the operator has set out to implement starting in January. Just to be clear: some of the announced changes will benefit recreational players, but they're mostly about PlatinumStar, Supernova and Supernova Elite players taking major cuts. So how effective was the boycott? According to some, it did attain some results. According to others, it fell on deaf ears with
PokerStars...so at best, its results were a mixed bag.
December 1 was the first day of the boycott and instead of taking a hit, the ring-game traffic numbers saw a jump of some 65%. Obviously, the effect was due to the $1 Million Milestone promotion so it wasn't exactly surprising after all. According to some though, the traffic spike caused by the promotion could've been bigger, considering the fact that since it ran last year, week-over-week the traffic has increased by some 133% at the site.
Register an account at PokerStars right now. For recreational players, the time to jump into the fray has never been better.
Over the following two days (December 2 and 3) the traffic spike lingered, although its effects were beginning to slowly dissipate. On December 2, the increase was 12%, falling to 9% on December 3. At this time, the drop at the high stakes cash tables was already quite obvious. On Tuesday, the high stakes games registered a volume-drop of some 29%. Perhaps more telling than anything though was the fact that high stakes action generally makes up some 1.7% of PokerStars total, but during the boycott, this number fell to 0.69%. The Super Tuesday took a bit of a hit too, its number of entrants declining by 13%.
Everything accounted for though, it's obvious the boycott did not have a particularly impressive impact in any way.
Play at PokerStars: despite the high-stakes boycott, the site is now more attractive for recreational players than ever before.
