VIP rewards in PokerStrategy

Pokerstrategy is a for-profit business. As long as it has a self-replenishing army of happy customers (who are mostly newish to poker so have yet a vague understanding of the impact of rake and rakeback on their winnings), it will prefer to keep a wide profit margin (i.e. a big difference between players' gross rake and their overall rewards from both rooms and Pokerstrategy itself, on which affiliate commissions are based in the case of high volume players, as far as I understand). The army (the market share) is so huge that its growth if additional player incentives are given away won't compensate for the money lost on those incentives. If you're unhappy, you can find other ways as you wrote, but new happy customers be recruited into your place anyway.

Hi tony, I think that has been the business way up to this days. but actually the poker is not growing as it was a few years ago. An example is Strategy searching translator for others laguages when they have all the European, English and wide part of the Hispanic.
And I don´t know how is it going there around, but in this lands they're losing "happy clients" because of better promotions.
And that is exactly my point. Maybe the business should be reevaluated.
As I said before, I can join other schools, but I like Strategy as I have grown here as player, but we need some extra motivation between "gold status" and "black member".
I´m just saying my opinion and the opinion of a wide range of Hispanic players. Thanks again.

Hi Txusco11,

thanks for posting (and welcome to the English community!).

I understand your concerns but at the same time, I'd like to reassure you that we are trying to make our promotions and offers competitive and of a best value to our customers. The offers that we have will depend on many thing, e.g some offers available for the .com markets will not be available for members in the regulated markets. Also the location plays role (some countries are excluded from the central promotions).

We do strive to provide the best (legal, of course) offers on all the partner rooms - in terms of the first deposit bonuses, rakeback deals etc. We also run some exclusive promos on those rooms (e.g rake races, points chases, exclusive freerolls and tournaments). Having said that, there are poker rooms on which we have some limitations which are based on the room's own policy (an example being widely popular PokerStars not being a part of the Gemstone promotion).

On top of the central promotions we run local projects (e.g the HU Championship Promotion, It's on You!) where we throw in additional prizes like cash, merchandise, status upgrades and so on.

The status system is based on your current activity on the tracked account, as you know, and is not permanent. Reaching the higher status every (other) month seems like a good motivation to me if you care about your poker skill development. The higher the status, the wider the access to our teaching materials. Black Member is a different case - it's the only status that once reached, cannot be lost. This is a sign of appreciation for a long term commitment and a very high activity.

We are aware of the competition out there who also base their offer on different business models. However, looking at PokerStrategy.com as a whole, you get all in 1 package - where with many other sites would not be that easy to find. What I mean here is: a great helpful community with experienced players & staff ready to assist, you get a good offer for the beginners (free money, freerolls, first deposit bonuses) and for the regular players (rake races, exclusive vip promotions, reloads, vip events). A wide range of educational materials in all shapes and forms (videos, coachings, hand analyses).On top you get a refer a friend system with rewards, discounts on the poker tools, assistance from our support and other things that make the package of services complete.

I'm not trying to convince you that our offer is the best possible - it does have a room for improvement as you mentioned. I'm just trying to show you that it's not as bad as some people might think it is (if they limit their view to one room where our offer might be basic).

Best regards,
Marta

Thanks for the answeer Marta, I know we have several services, and I'm glad of it.
I'm not saying that there's no motivation at all, but that we need some more.
By the way, I´m talking about the whole Hispanic community (not just the Spanish one).

For example, It would be perfectly reasonable to give players more permanent status. As a player after doing 20k SP he could have the silver as permanent without any problem for anybody. As actually some forums are restricted to some status, this would be great if, for example, I take 1 holydays month. the same could be applied for the others status.
100k SP should be enough to have gold permanently, etc. Anyway, it's just a proposition.

Hi again,

I see your point, however I'm not totally convinced if the proposed scenario would be satisfactory for the mentioned group. Please also note, that once you've earned StrategyPoints, you don't lose them. This in theory means that in time, we are getting more and more users who reach the certain point tiers (with this logic, we'd end up assigning fixed statuses to more and more users - which would have a negative impact on their motivation to play - and this, as mentioned in this discussion, is essential for us to be able to grow and develop).

Having said that, we're reviewing the current offer and we're looking at what could be changed or modified in order to make our services more attractive. There is also a way of getting a "fixed status" for a certain period of time (this can be done by purchasing points from our shop).

Hope your motivation stays up, you've been with us for quite some time now.

Saludos!

I have another idea, which was suggested through a ticket some time ago, but didn't get any response about. Maybe I refresh it here again. I just give two examples.

One player could put HUGE amount of play in a short time (higher stake player) and would gain all kind of benefits like higher PS status, rake races, higher rake back and all other promotions, but than stops playing through PS affiliated room.

Another player plays all the time regularly, but only manages to rake smallish, lets say 300$ each month. He gains nothing except being gold member all the time. Stone promotion is a step toward this, but still not reachable for many.

There we have life time PS points, which are of no use except being black member? Maybe add some little promotion (cash, bonus, status upgrade, etc.) for certain amount of lifetime reached, to keep players motivated with the grind through PS affiliated rooms.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ferdy81!

Your idea of exchanging points for an X product or service is good. At the moment, due to the technical reasons, it is not possible to introduce this option. Any changes would have to be implemented on the IT side which is quite a lengthy process and currently we do not have enough resources for this.

As I have mentioned - our goal for the next months/years is to improve the offer in all aspects: quality, form, functionality (some changes have already been done to the page, further like making the website mobile-friendly are on the agenda).

By the way, you might be happy to hear that our Level Up promotion is coming back in March. This means that by playing regularly during 20 days in March and earning a number of StrategyPoints, you could get a higher status and some cash! News will be out shortly.

Regards!