PokerStars Protest T-Shirts Worn At EPT Prague Final Table

Disgruntled poker pros recently staged a three day boycott of PokerStars to protest the site’s drastic changes announced to its 2016 VIP program. While around 2,500 online players took part in the strike, PokerStars dismissed their efforts as ineffective, with the increase in traffic noted during this period serving merely to demonstrate the importance of recreational players compared to the site’s online grinders.
PokerStars’ lack of sympathy towards its online pros obviously has not gone down at all well, and last week at the EPT €50,000 Super High Roller half of the tournament’s final table were wearing t-shirts showing a cracked PokerStars icon, surrounded by the words “we are against the changes in the PokerStars VIP program.” This group of protesters also included eventual winner, Steve O’Dwyer, obviously showering more negative publicity on the world’s biggest poker site.
On Sunday, Justin Bonomono then scored a small victory against PokerStars after he managed to eek out an apology from Lee Jones, Director of Poker Communications at PokerStars, who expressed some regret over what he called a failure to communicate the VIP changes adequately. As Bonomono’s tweet directed at Lee Jones stated:
“I paid $181,800 in rake to earn Supernova Elite this year. I’m talking about MONEY THAT I GAVE YOUR COMPANY. In return, I was promised benefits for next year. If you don’t want to honor them, then you owe me the money I gave you.”
Whilst acknowledging the “communication failure”, Lee Jones did point out that PokerStars had already postponed its VIP rewards revamp by 12 months in an attempt to address the concerns of its high stakes, high volume players. He also insisted that PokerStars implementing its new recreational player model was essential for the development of the online game, and as he fired back:
“We can’t afford to pay for a communication failure by stopping the absolutely necessary changes that we’re making to the VIP program. At some point you can only say sorry so many times and in so many different ways.”