Chris_TC
Cardschat Elite
Silver Level
ChrisTC01 on Stars. What's yours? Maybe I've played you before without even knowing.
PokerVic
Visionary
Silver Level
Anyone remember the 1 Million hand promotion poker stars ran, where certain ring tables just had money dumped onto them? Ie, if you were dealt a hand on the milestone table, you took a share of a cash reward. Here's hoping it's something sweet like that.
robwhufc
Cardschat Elite
Silver Level
Yup, and more emphasis on how many VPP's you accumulate, obv!
The fascination and excitement regarding accumulating VPPs and FPPs is the one thing in online poker that I find hardest to understand. The way I see pokerstars is - You play against opponents, and everytime you win a pot, a portion of what you would have received goes to Pokerstars as rake. They then give you a small percentage of that deduction back in VPPs which you can then use to buy books or Pokerstars branded merchandise.
Shouldn't people be playing poker to accumulate MONEY, and treat the VPPs as an additional bonus, and not keep focusing instead on acheiving a certain VPP status (with the actual money won/lost in doing so apparently being a secondary consideration)? Or am I missing something here?
zachvac
Legend
Silver Level
You can buy those things, or you can redeem cash bonuses. The fpps is what you actually use to buy them, but the vpps allow you to accumulate fpps faster. For example if I get 10k vpps/month, which I've done the last 3 months, for each vpp I get 2.5 fpps. Currently working out the math, the rake takes away from my money at a rate of ~2.5 BB/100, meaning if I break even on pokerstars it means I would have won at 2.5 BB/100 at an unraked game. Currently I get back about 0.6 BB/100 in VIP cash bonuses. But now with the double I'm getting back 1.2 BB/100, which is literally about half the rake.Yup, and more emphasis on how many VPP's you accumulate, obv!
The fascination and excitement regarding accumulating VPPs and FPPs is the one thing in online poker that I find hardest to understand. The way I see Pokerstars is - You play against opponents, and everytime you win a pot, a portion of what you would have received goes to Pokerstars as rake. They then give you a small percentage of that deduction back in VPPs which you can then use to buy books or Pokerstars branded merchandise.
Now if we take it a step further, pretend I was SNE (to get that you need 1 million vpps in a year). Normally you get 5 fpps per vpp, but now that's 10. You are literally getting about 100% of your rake back. And actually it'd be more since supernova's have better value for their fpps. The way I work it out is that they'd be making 2.7 BB/100 if they played 100nl meaning literally pokerstars is paying them to play poker. Understand what's so exciting?
Explained above, but VIP status impacts how many fpps you get and fpps can be converted into real money.
Chris_TC
Cardschat Elite
Silver Level
Well, that would obviously be great for a select few, but most players won't receive anything. The 2x VPP promotion on the other hand is something that everyone can take advantage of.
zachvac
Legend
Silver Level
What is week 4? Is that week 4 of next year? 4 weeks from now?
G
GabryRox
Enthusiast
Silver Level
That's the 4th week of July I believe...
And to clarify something in regard to the comment made by Robwhufc... yes, your ultimate goal should be to make money and have the F/Vpp's as a bonus additional to that. But... those FPPs can be used for a lot more than PS branded merchandise. As mentioned, a lot of people use the cash bonus system and actually, the prizes in the electronics section aren't bad either. I think the best merchandise deal is the Electronics Store gift certificates, which come out to about 1.6 cents value per FPP. Almost every other piece of actually merchandise is at about 1.0 or 1.1 cents per FPP, so you get a lot more value there. I'm almost 1/3 of the way to the $1,000 GC, which is about 62,000 FPPs.
Anyway, if you can maintain at least GoldStar status, you can accumulate pretty quickly. Less than that can be tougher of course.
And to clarify something in regard to the comment made by Robwhufc... yes, your ultimate goal should be to make money and have the F/Vpp's as a bonus additional to that. But... those FPPs can be used for a lot more than PS branded merchandise. As mentioned, a lot of people use the cash bonus system and actually, the prizes in the electronics section aren't bad either. I think the best merchandise deal is the Electronics Store gift certificates, which come out to about 1.6 cents value per FPP. Almost every other piece of actually merchandise is at about 1.0 or 1.1 cents per FPP, so you get a lot more value there. I'm almost 1/3 of the way to the $1,000 GC, which is about 62,000 FPPs.
Anyway, if you can maintain at least GoldStar status, you can accumulate pretty quickly. Less than that can be tougher of course.
vanquish
Legend
Silver Level
Yup, and more emphasis on how many VPP's you accumulate, obv!
The fascination and excitement regarding accumulating VPPs and FPPs is the one thing in online poker that I find hardest to understand. The way I see Pokerstars is - You play against opponents, and everytime you win a pot, a portion of what you would have received goes to Pokerstars as rake. They then give you a small percentage of that deduction back in VPPs which you can then use to buy books or Pokerstars branded merchandise.
Shouldn't people be playing poker to accumulate MONEY, and treat the VPPs as an additional bonus, and not keep focusing instead on acheiving a certain VPP status (with the actual money won/lost in doing so apparently being a secondary consideration)? Or am I missing something here?
umm obviously it should be more about the money than about the points. but it should be even more about making the right decisions than both of those things.