EPT Barcelona a Mess. Pros worry PokerStars Has Reached a "Tipping Point"

(Photo: Pokerstars.com)

There are already stories aplenty about Barcelona’s EPT and how players have been robbed, cheated, and generally abused during the cash games running alongside PokerStars; Spanish stop, but this week it’s the Amaya-owned giants themselves who have come under fire.

The well-known Dublin poker pro Dara O’Kearney has written a scathing blog post, likening PokerStars approach to big events to “slaughtering the golden goose to sell the meat”, while singing the praises of the much-smaller and infinitely friendlier MPN tour stop he visited in Tallinn, Estonia.

Railing against changes made by PokerStars to starting times, payouts and a host of other things at Barcelona and elsewhere, O’Kearney claims that:

"...even the Amaya shareholders may end up paying a high price for the sheer stupidity and short sighted greed of the people making and defending these decisions.”

The no-holds-barred attack on the poker giants comes in the same week that PokerStars have announced that the EPT brand will be “retired” and the once much-admired tour and many others will be subsumed and re-invented as PokerStars ‘Championship’ and ‘Festival’ events.

(Photo: Flickr.com)

Chalk and cheese or…

“I went directly from an MPN tour stop in Tallinn to the PokerStars events in Barcelona,” writes, O’Kearney. “The contrast between the two tours is not so much chalk and cheese as shop and Mace,” he adds, alluding to his introduction which compares the fates of various shops in his small Wexford hometown on the outskirts of Enniscorthy, south of Dublin.

The small local store was bought over by a bigger chain, but not as big as the nearby supermarket – the personal touch of the local mom and pop store was lost forever, and the ‘Mace’ store couldn’t compete with the supermarket and shut its doors.

Of the contrast between MPN Tallinn and the PokerStars EPT Barcelona event he says:

"Players may come [to Tallinn] for the poker, but they stay and keep coming back to stop after stop for the experience. Stars used to be very good at this. In the early days they treated live events as marketing, and budgeted accordingly.”

"Over time they decided they didn't want to spend money on this anymore, and the goody bags got meaner, the parties less impressive, the hotels simultaneously worse and more expensive, the tournaments simultaneously faster and more raked. In Barcelona I was told that Amaya no longer want to break even from live events: they want to make as much money as they can from them. And boy does it show.”

When a poker pro like O’Kearney - who has sampled the live delights of tours across Europe and beyond – says there are problems, then it’s time for the organizers to sit up and listen.

(Photo: Pokerstars.com)

Is this what the players really want?

Early-morning starts, new and inexperienced dealers, a flatter payout structure, rude and abusive ‘bouncers’ – they all get a mention in this week’s player reports. O’Kearney has been joined in his condemnation of the current state of affairs by fellow Irish pro David Kilmartin Lappin, who wrote:

"Some time over the Summer, PokerStars put up the schedule for EPT Barcelona. The structures of most side events were worse than last year with shorter levels and the introduction of a very aggressive ante. There would be ungodly 10am start times. There were also very few sub-€500 tournaments. On August 17th, PokerStars announced that they were paying out 20% of fields at EPT/Estrellas Barcelona."

Lappin also notes that:

"On August 18th, it was announced that the bottom quarter of that 20% would receive €1100. That’s right – the buy-in back. Not a penny profit. Not even the price of a coffee. A veritable ‘refund of shame!’. Even the 80s quiz show Bullseye used to give the losing finalist ‘BFH’ (bus fare home).”

O’Kearney and Lappin both recount tales of grumpy, angry, and over-eager staff and players, all stressed and ill-tempered by the new PokerStars approach.

No railing, no fun

"I wanted to rail what could be a life-changing score for two close friends but was thwarted in this end by an over-eager bouncer who thought he was emptying out Opium at 6.30am,” relates Lappin. “He was rude, physical, and hostile towards all the railbirds, eventually confining us to a roped off ‘pig pen’ 60 meters away from the table.”

"Only for the intervention of soon-to-depart the tour TD extraordinaire and Mr. Common Sense Nick O’Hara, we wouldn’t have been able to cheer on our friends who both made the final table where they finished 4th (Nick) and 9th (Dan). Daragh Davey, Parker Talbot and myself tried to make the best of it but it really felt like PokerStars were sucking all the fun out of the game."

O’Kearney describes a similar tale, this time involving players who seem to have forgotten how to behave properly as the new early starts take their tol.

Early morning poker rage

"I flashed back to that moment on Sunday (Sunday!) as I filtered into the casino just before 10 am on a Sunday (Sunday!), part of a human ant trail of grinders heading to play a satellite. An hour later, I'm wishing I had more coffee inside me when it all kicks off at the table behind me."
"You just shut up. SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
"You shut up"
"No, you shut up. You've been talking in Polish to your buddy there for the past hour. Were you born in a barn?"
"Maybe we take this outside"
"Let's do that. But just you. Not your buddies too"
"Ok"
"Go back to your barn in Poland and milk your cows"

O’Kearney’s friend then describes the main protagonist as “normally one of the nicest people you could ever meet at a poker table,” begging the question:

"Is this what Amaya is doing to poker: tilting recreational players who have flown thousands of miles for a poker vacation to the point that they are ill advisedly soliciting car park fights with Poles twice their size?”

The Irishman claims this is not an isolated incident by any means, stating:

"Me and almost everyone I know was barged and shoulder bumped more often in the ten days in the casino in Barcelona than we are in most calendar years, and most of the tournaments I played would rank in my personal top ten of most Ill Tempered MTTs I've ever played. Stars seem to be trying to weed out the pros and other winning players, while making no effort to make things better for recreational players.”

The good old days…

As with O’Kearney, Lappin remembers the ‘gold old days’ of PokerStars fondly, stating:

"…above all, they understood the value of good customer support. PokerStars built a successful live brand because they created a synergy between the live and online experience. Online satellites qualified players into live events. Live events lead to sign-ups for the online site. They hired great events managers and great tournament staff. Tours were essentially promotional vehicles, giving visibility to the brand so it was fine for them to run on a break-even model. Again, they made shrewd acquisitions and partnered well with local operators. Over all, players were treated like valued customers and, as a consequence, they felt valued and were loyal.”

"I am still nostalgic for that time and maybe I need to just snap out of it and accept the new reality, but the truth is a large part of me genuinely believes it doesn’t have to be this way.”

"None of the recreational players I know have much good to say about the way things seem to be going. Many have already voted with their feet,” says O’Kearney, adding, “The pros will always follow the recreationals (and bitch loudly about every new "innovation" that gets rolled out), so hopefully when the recreationals reach the point they are too pissed off with Stars to go on attending, they will at least have a look around at other tours rather than just give up on poker forever."

He cites tours such as the “ WSOP, MPN, Party, Winamax, GUKPT, GPPT andUnibet” who he claims are “all making a much bigger effort to make their events fun and profitable rather than merely profitable.”

(Photo: Pokerstars.com)

Too big to fail?

O’Kearney adds that:

"Poker is littered with the bodies of players, events, and sites that were thought to have become too big to fail. And Amaya in particular have shown an amazing ability to think they can squeeze an extra buck profit by slaughtering the golden goose to sell the meat.”

As a $2million+ winner online, the Wexford man knows what he is talking about, stating that:

"I remember a time when OnGame was the fourth biggest site. Then Amaya took over, and killed them. I remember when Full Tilt came straight back in at number two when they finally got up and running again post Black Friday. Enter Amaya and another death spiral began.”

Of the live UKIPT he adds:

"I remember marvelling at how the UKIPT had grown from very unpromising beginnings to 1000 runner fields in a warehouse in an industrial estate outside Nottingham. And marvelling again at how Amaya had ticked people off to the point that they could barely persuade a few hundred runners into the very sumptuous and centrally located Hippodrome in London back in April.”

"As I listened to many pros say they'd be skipping Malta as the latest changes have sucked all the fun and profit out of such trips for them, and I heard recreationals complaining about a min cash that didn't even cover their expenses and I saw ultimate poker tourist Aseefo depart Barcelona early saying it just wasn't much fun anymore I couldn't help but wonder if this might be a tipping point we will look back on in a few years.”

O’Kearney ends his article with a joke told him by Ludo Geilich, an apocryphal tale relevant to PokerStars and poker’s future:

(Photo: Cardplayer.com)

It’s no joking matter…

‘A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer. “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it you.” The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?” The boy takes the quarters and leaves.”

“What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?” The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game is over!”