While Occupy Wall Street has surpassed the 75-day mark accented with police barricades and corporate threats and pepper spray, what some are terming “Occupy PokerStars” lasted less than a day.
Protesters were acting in response to a policy change by PokerStars for the New Year that changed their rake attribution system from a “dealt” model to a “weighted” or “contributed” one.
To understand the difference between the two, it is important to note that there is no change to the collection of rake itself — the same percentage is still taken from the pot with the same cap. The difference is in how the rake is attributed to players for the purpose of tracking Frequent Player Points.
Under the old system, each player dealt into a hand was attributed equal rake for that hand, regardless of how much they contributed to the pot. For example, if at a 10-handed table, the first player to act went all in for $50 and everyone folded except for one caller (making the pot $100), then every single player would receive equal attribution of the rake ($5 divided equally among 10 players for $0.50 each). Under the new system, only the two players who were involved in the pot would get credit in direct proportion to what they “contributed” to the rake ($5 dollars between the two or $2.50), and all other 8 players would get zero credit, just as if they had not been dealt into the hand at all.
Regardless of which system is more intuitive, this puts a severe dent in the VIP points heavy-volume players stand to make, as they tend to play tighter and contribute less money to less pots. Since these “regulars” are the most frequent users, the most Terms-and-Conditions-savvy and the most reliant on achieving VIP rewards, the backlash was quick and vehement. Poker forums were in a frenzy within a day of PokerStars announcing the change with threads reaching as many as 25,000+ responses.
Players planned a “sitout” on the site reminiscent of demonstrations that were previously successful on sites like PartyPoker and PokerStars.fr. They would open up their 24 table maximum and sit out on every one of them, killing action and drawing questions from other players as an opportunity to spread the word about the detrimental changes.
PokerStars representative Steve Day pre-empted the protests with a statement saying, “We may take measures, not necessarily punitive, to minimize this disruption.” Measures were taken indeed, some as harsh as disabling accounts altogether. For the most part, though, PokerStars staved the disruption by placing table restrictions on the participants so that they could not join as many tables. Before long, the resistance dwindled and the site resumed normal operations.
In spite of the anti-climax, PokerStars regulars hold out hope that the negative attention is an impetus for serious reconsideration. The site has a reputation for being heavily influenced by public relations, so now players wait to see if their display of displeasure sways them.