Amaya Inc, the Canadian based company that owns PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, two of the most popular online poker websites in the world has been rolling out the changes during the last 12 months.
PokerStars has the biggest database of online poker players in the world and recently informed its players that the company was making a number of changes to its Elite and VIP rewards program, upgrading its online poker software and implementing a number of changes to its terms and conditions in an effort to improve the overall online poker experience of its players. The company announced that these changes will be implemented from the 1st of Jan 2016 and outlined some of these changes.
The changes to the new VIP and Elite rewards programs will impact the small group of VIP players but will benefit the majority of other online poker players. A number of PokerStars players have expressed concern and anger at these proposed changes on popular poker forums and stated that they felt helpless as they were forced to follow these changes.
Daniel Stern has decided to take these protests to another level after his post on the Two Plus Two poker forum titled ?“Strike/Boycott of PokerStars December 1st-3rd” got a lot of hits. Stern stated that PokerStars has changed its policies a number of times since Amaya Inc took over and no longer appeared to favor its places but mostly itself. Stern accused PokerStars of lying to its players about their benefits when all it did was benefit the company.
Stern has called for a strike between the 1st -3rd December 2015 and the gist of his thread was also posted on a number of other poker forums which till now has resulted in close to 2,000 online poker players making a decision to strike and not play during these three days. Stern stated that he wanted to send a message to PokerStars that the online poker community was a body of players who stood together and looked after their best interests.
Daniel Negreanu, a PokerStars ambassador had stated earlier in November that PokerStars could have done a better job in communicating these changes to its players and he had voiced his opinion to the PokerStars team.
In a statement, Negreanu said “There have been several issues over the years and obviously there’s an issue that’s going on right now in terms of the VIP program and changes that are going on there, that I have a lot of internal conversations about and I think that in terms of what Amaya’s done – and I think they had a lot of learning curves trying to understand the customer base”