And The $60k Goes To....

Pogo650 at a 5/10 Limit Table. $102k total. Congrats.

I'm just thankful it's over. These volume promotions always seem to reg infest the tables to no end. I woke up this morning and went to see if the 60 billionth hand had hit yet and they still had 2 million to go, so I quickly fired up the 50NL lobby to see minimum 5 on the waiting list for every table. No problem, I'll just start up my own tables. I play mostly stacked and was pleasantly surprised to find my tables insta-filling.

That is until I actually started playing and realized that it was every reg imaginable filling seats. I play at a lot of different hours so I've seen just about every reg there is and I think just about every one of them from every part of the planet set their alarm clock to get their 0.2% chance at 24 tabling into free money.

This was confirmed by the mass exodus that occurred on hand 60,000,000,001. Within 2 minutes there were literally 25+ tables in the lobby with one reg left on them who hadn't bothered to kill the table yet.

I don't really understand how Stars thinks this is a good promotion. Scratch that, I do know and it's why they've set it in stone for the next 40 billion hands -- note: 40 more billion hands, once completed, will equal about 1/3 of Stars' entire existence to that point in time. That takes quite a bit of confidence and commitment from the marketing department. But what it does is irrationally motivate people like me to fire up 24 tables and play till our ears bleed trying to win the lottery while they rake the shit out of us.

But from an actual promotion point of view in terms of bringing new money to the site, it's just laughable when you constantly see some random fish, after hearing the whole spiel from the moderator, say "WTF does this mean? zzzzzzz.... [folds]."

That's kind of counterproductive considering that Stars' stated VIP program goal for this year was to simplify things. A lottery with a payout structure based on VPP rates over the last x hands (including this one), is not simple when one fifth of the table doesn't even know the difference between a VPP and an FPP or how many they're earning or why everyone's shoving or why they're being berated for the next 5 minutes by the railebirds. Deposit bonuses, small instant cash bonuses at Supernova rate, even throwing more money onto the new depositor bonus would all beat this.

This lottery promotion doesn't help improve the poker economy at all. Stars rakes in x times more than usual and redistributes some of it by throwing random token amounts at a very select few. I seriously doubt anyone is making a deposit to try to hit one of these even if they somehow knew what was going on.

Of course this post would be completely different if I wasn't so bitter about not being dealt into the 60B hand...