After PokerStars announce plans to raise their prices on $20 and below multi-table tournaments, and decrease costs on time tournaments, Lee Davy shares his thoughts on why nobody will care.
The place I rent has a TV. It’s never turned on. We don’t have a license. Not that we care. We don’t watch TV. We use it as a crappy looking mirror, and hide stuff behind it like the Eiffel Tower lamp. Bizarre. I spent decades glued to the idiot box.
I was a big Sky TV guy. I had every channel. But the prices kept increasing, and I wasn’t receiving added value. The final straw came when they lost the Champions League contract to BTSports and then put the prices up.
I’ll give them their due. Sky TV sent me a letter prewarning me of the shafting. I had time to move my arsehole away from the trajectory of the golf swing.
PokerStars didn’t forewarn me of their most recent price hike. PokerNews did. PokerStars’s Severin Rasset wrote about it on the PokerStars blog in an article, entitled PokerStars Pricing Update.
I can picture Rasset in his office, spinning on his panda skin chair, his Montblanc doing somersaults between his fingers, as he thinks to himself, “I wonder if I tie the reader up in knots by using complicated sentences that they will forget that I am asking them to pay more?”
Pricing is a key commercial consideration for every business and we will increasingly use a dynamic pricing model that gives the greatest flexibility to respond to market dynamics.
Ugh?
The changes we make to our pricing are based upon various factors including customer behaviour, commercial and promotional considerations, and the overall long-term sustainable health of the ecosystem.
Pardon?
And he missed the critical part.
The revised cost.
The fee for any PokerStars tournament will continue to be publicly displayed in our client, together with details of the tournament structure.
It’s like orienteering.
I have to go looking for the price hike.
I don’t want to play.
Why Nobody Cares That The Price Has Increased
Perhaps one of the reasons PokerStars doesn’t notify customers of price changes in concise and straightforward sentences ending with a number is because nobody cares.
On Monday, March 26, costs in MTTs that have a buy-in of $20 or less are increasing, and all fees in Time Tournaments (irrespective of buy-in) are decreasing.
I can’t imagine that anybody who is playing at those stakes, who isn’t a professional grinder, gives a monkey about the price changes and here’s why.
Human beings like to use a price point as an anchor for quality. If you go to a restaurant that sells £10 bottles of wine, and visit another with the cheapest bottle of poison ringing in at £100 then you think one experience is going to be cheap and the other, expensive.
But how many people playing across this price range (-$20 MTTs) know the differing rake rates across the broad spectrum of online poker rooms enabling them to select the most valuable online poker room based on price?
Not many.
And so this leads me to believe that price isn’t a factor when choosing an online poker room, and PokerStars knows this, hence the rather laissez-faire attitude when it comes to keeping us up to date with the recent swings.
People like me play on PokerStars. People who are looking for the best quality product. The smoothest software, the liquidity, the help and support – the prestige that comes with being someone who uses the best.
Price?
I don’t care how much it is to play on PokerStars it’s worth it because the last time I waged war on a battleground belonging to the opposition I didn’t feel like returning in a hurry.
