Pokerstars has made a fair number of announcements in the last year or so that they no doubt knew would be seen as bad news by their customers. However, it is their prerogative to run their business as they see fit and increasing rake, decreasing rewards and the like is entirely their choice, even if it effectively kills certain game types.

Clearly, Pokerstars have a PR team working on finding the best way to present these sorts of announcements to the player base in order to try to retain the greatest amount of business and keep profits high. The goodwill that Pokerstars had built up over years of consistently being the frontrunner in poker in all aspects of customer care has quickly been used up and given the content of the changes in question and the stark lack of any real good news to help balance things out, working in Pokerstars PR nowadays is an extremely tough job by anyone’s standards.

The issue is that now that times are tough, the communications department are trying too hard to spin each announcement as a positive change and I believe they have gone too far in their methods, veering into dishonesty and deceit and frankly insulting the intelligence of their customers in attempting to trick them.

Pokerstars latest announcement, posted on 21st March, detailed significant rake increases in a lot of their games. The decision was taken by their PR team to feature a section in the announcement titled “Comparison With Competitors”, showing an eye-catching chart that appears to show that Pokerstars rake is significantly lower than the competition, even after the changes. However, there are major flaws in what we are presented with and I believe Pokerstars are knowingly displaying poorly collated data in the hope it will be misinterpreted by many.