Occupy PokerStars Mass Sit Out

Due to recent actions taken by PokerStars:

• First changing to Weighted Contributed costing regs piles of money and moving the vast majority of it not into bonuses for deserving recreational players but rather right out of the poker economy and into Stars bottom line.
• Second, at first offering to make some rake structure changes that would have recalibrated the new system to give some of that windfall back to players (True Rake + Rake reductions to 4.5%).
• Third, abruptly reneging on all of the rake changes except for switching to WC merely one day after the original announcement.

The ensuing uproar after the initial announcement was against the site wide reduction in number of FPPs, FPP value reduction and the increase in rake cap on 5 handed pots from $2 to $3. This was somehow taken as a backlash against the rake changes as a whole. Thus, they have decided to keep the change to WC, but have now removed all of the rake structure changes leaving everyone even worse off than they would have been under the original announcement.

In response, players have galvanized and are planning a 2 hour mass sit out protest for January 1st whereby they will load 24 tables and sit out on all of them politely informing inquiring players about what is happening.

French players on the pokerstars.fr site are reportedly also staging a sit out for the changes that are going to occur on that site.

The current set of demands deemed to be an acceptable way to soften the FPP reduction blow by a high consensus of regs are as follows:

(Originally posted by TheMetetrown)
1. Rake caps of $.50/$1/$1.5/$2/$3 for 2/3/4/5/6+ handed play
2. 4.5% linear rake up to the cap
3. The same proposed reductions [as the original proposal] for Rake at the micro limits. [4% and 4.25%]

PLUS ONE OF THE FOLLOWING TWO OPTIONS

3a. Winner take all rake calculation method
4a. 6x VPP across the board

OR

3b. WC rake calculation method
4b. 6.5x VPP across the board

Note that Stars would still end up with more $/hand using the above consolations on January 1st than they will be getting on the old Dealt method on December 31st. These consolations would quite frankly help some games survive that are going to be killed off under a new WC system due to a complete lack of winners in some games with small edges after rake is effectively increased as well as be enough to satisfy regs in other games just enough to continue to play at the site.

Occupy PokerStars Mass Sit Out Details