This morning I went on a long twitter rant about how party poker had screwed its customers over in 2013 (shameless plug to my twitter https://twitter.com/rcdaut ) 140 characters at a time isnt enough to describe what party poker has done to its customers in the past 12 months. I've made short rants about them before, but I wanted to go into more detail here so people could get a better idea of what has happened.
CLIFFS:
imagine if stars got rid of supernova elite on short notice, removed every bonus above the 100k VPP level, changed the $1600 for 100k fpp bonus to $8k for 500k FPP and gave it a long play through requirement, segregated their player base and started charging a 3% flat fee on cashouts using the most popular cashout method. That is what party did in an 8 month period.
Decreased bonuses and made them harder to clear with very little notice
I started grinding party in December 2012. I was having a pretty rough month on stars and decided to try party out looking for better games. The first thing I did after depositing was study the VIP system party had. It was all based on their version of frequent player points. Every dollar paid in rake gets you 2 party points. Accumulating a certain number of party points in either a month or 3 month period put you into VIP levels. In order to reach the highest level of Palladium Elite, a player would have to earn 20,000 points in a 3 month period which equates to $10,000 paid in rake. The second highest level was Palladium which could be reached with 9,000 points in a 3 month period ($4500 rake).
Being in the higher VIP levels had advantages, particularly being able to purchase bonuses that returned a higher percentage of rake. Their top bonus was a 300,000 point bonus worth $75k. This equates to 50% rakeback since it takes $150k rake paid to accumulate 300k points. I dont remember the exact details on how long it took to clear old bonuses, but I believe they were released in 5 installments of $X for X points. i.e. for each $15k installment of the $75k bonus, a player would have to accumulate 15k points ($7500 rake paid). This bonus takes a long time to reach: about 83.33% of the volume of reaching Supernova Elite on stars to buy the bonus, and another $37500 in rake paid to fully clear the bonus.
If you didnt want to wait that long to clear a bonus, they had smaller bonus options that you could clear more often at a lower rate. You could also buy bonuses that didnt require any points to clear at a lower rate. I used the way back machine to find their old bonuses:
As you can see, there were lots of options to receive 30%+ rakeback, and the 30% option took $10k rake paid to buy and (i believe) another $1500 rake paid to clear.
Early in 2013, with very little notice, Party announced it was doing away with all bonuses that gave greater than 30% rakeback out. As a new customer this didnt affect me as I had very points accumulated at that time, but there were players who were working towards the larger bonuses and were sufficiently far away that they would not be able to reach it before the bonus was removed from the point store.
Really gotta feel for the party grinders who were halfway to reaching those big bonuses and had to settle for 10-20% less rakeback than they were working towards.
Fast forward to today, the bonuses are significantly worse. To buy a 30% bonus now you have to pay 100k points for a $15k bonus which takes 90k points to fully clear in 2 installments. So lets compare the old 30% rakeback bonuses to today's side by side:
old bonus: 20k points to purchase 3k bonus, five installments of $600 cleared after $300 rake paid for each installment. Under this system it takes $10300 rake paid to start seeing money back. current bonus: 100k points to purchase 15k bonus, two installments of $7500 after $22500 rake paid for each installment. So it takes $72500 rake paid to see any money with this new system. Under the old system you could have purchased a 40% rakeback bonus and received YOUR ENTIRE $20k BONUS quicker than you would receive your first $7500 under the new system for a 30% rakeback bonus.
Removed Monthy Promotions
This part isnt really a shady management decision, its their prerogative on what promotions they will offer their customers, but its definitely made it much less enticing to put volume in on party. The first month I was on party, they were running a promotion called Advent Calender.
I dont remember the exact details of it, but basically you would receive little gifts after a certain number of points accumulated. So if you were the lowest VIP level, you would receive a very small gift every say 25 points cleared. These gifts would be something like entry to a freeroll or a $1 bonus. If you were the next VIP level you would receive those gifts AND a slightly better gift (sometimes $3 bonuses or 5 free points) every 50 points for your level. This went up all the levels, so if you were palladium elite you were receiving all these gifts all month long. I only reached the 3rd highest VIP level that month, but I think I ended up receiving over $250 extra back in points and bonuses for maybe $3k paid in rake that month. An extra 10% rakeback was really nice.
The following months they ran a few other really nice promotions.
World domination: http://www.pokernewsdaily.com/partypo...ves-world-domination-promotion-23226/
This one was really great. Sure it was pretty much impossible to get certain cities, but even clearing a country or continent gave nice extra bonuses. I paid >$250 in rake almost every day i was able to play that month trying to get new cities.
Fast Forward Promotion:
fast forward is party's version of zoom/rush poker. They didnt run PLO or bigger than .25/.5 NL, but you could earn up to $100 extra a week in this promotion.
Since WSOP I dont remember party running any worthwhile promotions. They give away tickets to freerolls, but thats about it.
Player Segregation
Not gonna go too into detail on this because apparently it was eventually reversed in November, but basically if you were a high winrate player they made certain games with fish invisible to you. Proof of it happening:
Instituted 3% flat cashout fee to skrill/neteller and other e-wallet sites WITHOUT NOTICE
This was a big one. One day party just started charging 3% on all cashouts to skrill and other sites like neteller and webmoney. I had no other withdrawal options. I dont have player transfers on party, RBC closed my canadian bank account for being a poker player, and the same happened in other banks to other players, and I no longer have an apartment in Canada. After initially moving there for 6 months to get set up on sites, I just travel to Canada to grind online and rent places on airbnb. Skrill was my only option, and instituting this effectively stole 3% of the money I had on the site.
All in all Party is no longer a place I wish to grind due to all of these changes which is sad because for the first few months last year it was my favorite site to play on. The first few months on the site I was probably averaging about 50k hands, 6k profit, 6k rake paid. Basically I was making 6k + 2k rakeback = 8k a month + an extra $250-500 in their nice promotions. Assuming the same winrate, that would now decrease to 6k profit + 1200 rakeback (i bought the 20% bonus to clear my points and get off the site) = 7200*.97 = 6984, a decrease of ~1250-1500 for the same amount of volume. For higher limit players that made more money or guys that put in significantly more volume than me, this was definitely much much worse.
Releasing new software and in exchange wrecking the bonus system, no longer offering good promotions and taking 3% of every cashout is not a fair trade. I realize party will never offer the bonuses they used to, but in order to make right with customers they should cease charging the 3% cashout fee, start offering better monthly promotions than virtually worthless freerolls and to give reward bonuses to customers who put in lots of volume last year while they were busy screwing everyone over.
Note: This has nothing to do with party poker NJ. All of these changes were put into place before party was even up and running in NJ.
NewbSaibot: 18 TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT. Because FUCK YOU, Daut
Last edit: 30/01/2014 23:27
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Joeingram1 United States. Jan 30 2014 16:46. Posts 943
Nice write up to inform the general grinder how much party has gone nuclear vs pro grinders.
I stopped playing on Party poker when they started disingenuously charging money from Cashin/Cash outs by giving HORRIFIC vig on exchange rates. That was years ago. They were charging a vig of 7-13% when exchanging CAD into USD for deposit and on the very same day charging a vig of 7-13% to exchange USD to CAD back for withdrawal,
On top of that, without vip, they charged a flat fee of like $2-10 (cannot remember). Complete fucking robbery for a business that is supposed to take my money via RAKE, not auto profit from simple money transfers to gain the 'privilege' of playing on their site.
--------------
I only joined Party Poker again after seeing some X17 guy find out about a glitch in the promo World domination, where the first people maxing out the points each day unfairly won all the rare cities and all the continents. He binked like $20K because he grinded the first 3 days hard.
So, I waited for Party Poker to have World Domination promo again, loaded up a bankroll and grinded it for 15 days straight maxing out 1000 points starting each day 12am. I ended up winning $12k from the promo because of that glitch. I insta cashed out.
I hope I never go back to a poker site built around unethical financial business practices towards their most loyal and most profit generating customers.
I have learned from poker that being at the table is not a grind, the grind is living and poker is how I pass the time
Also, so Daut, you are saying they are taking 3% directly from transfers, that means if you are also doing a currency exchange with that transfer, Party is taking 3% + 7-13% VIG on the exchange rate. That should be illegal.
I have learned from poker that being at the table is not a grind, the grind is living and poker is how I pass the time
Last edit: 30/01/2014 17:06
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PuertoRican United States. Jan 30 2014 17:18. Posts 13044
Might as well move this to the Main poker forum and sticky it for a week or more. It'll get buried and forgotten about in the Blog section.
On January 30 2014 16:19 drone666 wrote:
I think it's not segregated anymore, at least I read it somewhere
also, you forgot to say that the anonymous HU tables are rigged
yea i wrote that they did away with in november. im sure there are some things i missed though. like removing higher limit tables, getting rid of online support, etc. the site has gone down the tubes since i started playing there
NewbSaibot: 18 TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT. Because FUCK YOU, Daut
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AndrewSong United States. Jan 30 2014 17:50. Posts 2355
stay the fk away from party yall
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MadeInPolanD Poland. Jan 30 2014 20:22. Posts 1383
There was also a bug where the tourney/SNG tables wouldn't pop up, after they registered for them and they started. This affected a lot of mass table tourney grinders. They didn't give back any of the money that they lost in the process :/ Also it took them a shit load of time to get this bug fixed (don't know if they fixed it yet).
On January 31 2014 06:10 aernout wrote:
There was also a bug where the tourney/SNG tables wouldn't pop up, after they registered for them and they started. This affected a lot of mass table tourney grinders. They didn't give back any of the money that they lost in the process :/ Also it took them a shit load of time to get this bug fixed (don't know if they fixed it yet).
if they seriously did not give the money back, than it makes no sense if people neglected to file small claims suits.
I have learned from poker that being at the table is not a grind, the grind is living and poker is how I pass the time
Sound to me like there is material to sue partypoker here. I don't know the law exactly but some stuff looks illegal.
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Royal_Rumble Germany. Feb 02 2014 14:12. Posts 1760
poker is a shady business which has been proven many times now. The list of poker related scandals and scams is amazingly long. I am happy I quit it many years ago already.
On January 31 2014 06:10 aernout wrote:
There was also a bug where the tourney/SNG tables wouldn't pop up, after they registered for them and they started. This affected a lot of mass table tourney grinders. They didn't give back any of the money that they lost in the process :/ Also it took them a shit load of time to get this bug fixed (don't know if they fixed it yet).
if they seriously did not give the money back, than it makes no sense if people neglected to file small claims suits.
idk it might be because if it's just a couple of BI's it's probably not worth filing a small claim suit. Might be also because it's a lot of hassle.
Party affiliates all had their % cut in half, this usually meant it was cut from 30% to 15% and it seems it doesn't matter how long you've had a deal with them or how much money you've made for them. In my case I've had an affiliate account with them for ~10 years and raked them millions, when my % got cut in half, I contacted them immediately to try and work something out and didn't even get a reply for a month, when they finally did reply it was to tell me "we're overloaded at the moment, please try again later". lol.
I think this cut and all the other cuts along with the segregation and 3% skrill/neteller fee came about when bwin took over. Pretty sick stuff and it really makes you appreciate a company like PS that takes fairness/CS/general manner so seriously.
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traktor Czech Republic. Feb 04 2014 11:01. Posts 372
The worst thing is that there are still sooo many regs in cash games :/.
They could allow like 1 cash out per month for free, and rest for 3%, but this is shit also... I know some players were cashing out and in to get VIP statuses at Skrill or Neteller, but they could handle it much better.
I like they are trying things like players segregation, even when it didnt work. Because cash games are all about bum hunting nowadays :/ Even on NL50. 20 people waiting lists on NL 1000 make me sick.
updated list of ways party fucked customers:
-removed palladium elite and >30% rakeback bonuses
-changed structure of bonuses so they take longer to buy and longer to clear
-player segregation *later fixed*
-removed monthly promotions
-3% cashout fee to skrill and other e-wallets
-cut affiliate % in half
-never paid back customers for bug that didnt automatically load tournaments starting
anything else?
moving to main poker
NewbSaibot: 18 TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT. Because FUCK YOU, Daut
Last edit: 25/02/2015 18:39
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TheTrees United States. Feb 04 2014 19:31. Posts 1592
Very little competition = no need to go above and beyond for the players.
United States. Jan 30 2014 16:13. Posts 8955
