‘Chicago Joey’ Lets Loose on PokerStars Changes

Joe ‘Chicago Joey’ Ingram took to Twitter this weekend and unleashed an almighty attack on the latest PokerStars announcement of a $9million-added Players Championship for 2019, describing it as an attempt to “build artificial goodwill amongst players for upcoming events.”

PokerStars this week also announced the return of some iconic tournament brands, the EPT among them, in news that was met with some surprise and plenty of positive and negative responses – much of it lamenting the fact that they ever made their changes in the first place.

Ingram, however, was probably the last person anyone in the community expected to go off on one, the PLO and podcast expert often criticised for not being tough enough on his interviewees, but as he explained to his 22,000+ followers…

PokerStars CEO Rafi Ashkenazi had said last week:

"We expect the PokerStars Players No Limit Hold’em Championship will set the new global standard for live poker tournaments," adding that: "We want to demonstrate and reinforce our commitment to the game, and give something back to the players by investing in our live events in a meaningful way.”

Ingram, however, was less impressed, tweeting:

“The only reason something like this is being announced now 1 YEAR ahead of time is to promote the upcoming PCA that has no buzz & build artificial goodwill amongst players for upcoming events.”

While praising the likes of PartyPoker and 888poker for their investment and focus on exciting and attractive new tournaments, Ingram pointed out many of the flaws in the Amaya (now StarsGroup) approach when they took over PokerStars…

He was also less than impressed with the millions spent on the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, earlier this year the site finally giving up on its sports stars marketing approach…

The dual announcements by PokerStars of the Players Championship and the return of the likes of the European Poker Tour (EPT), Latin American Poker Tour (LAPT) and the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT) was also met with healthy skepticism over on the 2+2 forum.

One poster, ‘drhubermex’, of the opinion that the PokerStars announcement will be met with a, "too little too late" opinion that a lot of veteran players and those who agree with them are going to have, adding that:

"It doesn't address the Supernova/SNE 'elephant in the room,' which imo is the major root cause of ill will towards Amaya/Stars Group."

The 2+2 poster also spoke about an area of some concern to many stating that:

"The media coverage of this 'major announcement' seemed to be shot out of a cannon. Several Stars-friendly sites had a story up within minutes and were sharing it liberally on social media until Joey Ingram got on Twitter and reminded his followers why all the hype isn't necessarily justified."

PokerNews recently took the decision to include the information ‘The Stars Group owns a majority shareholding in iBus Media’ on their news articles after the ‘worst-kept secret in the poker industry was officially revealed in October during a shareholders meeting, leading Jason Mo to tweet at the time…

Ingram did however have some positive words, tweeting that: