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new promo

gregkdy82gregkdy82 Member Posts: 528
Wait all year for streak week to come around and you get this dog shite instead? booooooooooooooooo
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Comments

  • DozzaDozza Member Posts: 286
    I returned to the site recently after a 3 year break in order to prepare for streak week. Now I really don't know what to do - this promo seems like a real slap in the face to all streakers.
  • DozzaDozza Member Posts: 286
    It seems like people are voting with their feet - the DYM lobby is completely dead.
  • CammykazeCammykaze Member Posts: 1,397
    If I understand right - this is a continuous points promo for 4 weeks.

    Cut and short question the winner of the package is the good player who plays the most that week?
  • DozzaDozza Member Posts: 286
    The promo appears to reward losing players at higher stakes more than winning players at lower stakes - I think that is why OP is not happy. Streak week gives a good opportunity for players to win a decent cash prize at 3.30, 5.50 and 11 stakes. Now these players have no chance in the current promo as anyone who merely plays a 33 or 55 game will earn far more points (e.g. a losing game at 33 earns 50% more points than a win at 11).

    Obviously the winner of the package will be a good player, but otherwise it seems to me that the promo will mostly reward the bigger bankrolls. Understandable that sky poker needs to recoup money for the Vegas package, but I would hope the streak week could run in parallel to this promo and will be announced soon.


  • kapowblamzkapowblamz Member Posts: 1,526
    You are spoilt brats. These promos all offer INSANE value and right now they are probably some of the highest value promos in online poker history, yet you still manage to moan about it, going as far as starting a thread.

    Unbelievable.
  • DozzaDozza Member Posts: 286
    No points for 28p games - the punishment continues for the micro players.
  • CammykazeCammykaze Member Posts: 1,397
    edited May 2022

    You are spoilt brats. These promos all offer INSANE value and right now they are probably some of the highest value promos in online poker history, yet you still manage to moan about it, going as far as starting a thread.

    Unbelievable.

    Hopefully am not one of those spoilt brats ;) as was merely clarifying the state of play as I may partake in that particular promo. :smile:

    Sky do a great job of promos and you wouldn't hear a moan here. Understand the company need to claw back after putting out a lot in other promos. Sky is a business after all.
  • EssexphilEssexphil Member Posts: 7,958
    Cammykaze said:

    You are spoilt brats. These promos all offer INSANE value and right now they are probably some of the highest value promos in online poker history, yet you still manage to moan about it, going as far as starting a thread.

    Unbelievable.

    Hopefully am not one of those spoilt brats ;) as was merely clarifying the state of play as I may partake in that particular promo. :smile:

    Sky do a great job of promos and you wouldn't hear a moan here. Understand the company need to claw back after putting out a lot in other promos. Sky is a business after all.
    There is actually quite a lot of sense on both sides.

    Firstly, Sky seems to get an unfair amount of criticism in relation to its promotions. They do not suit everybody precisely because Sky try so hard to vary them so as to cater for all sorts of player. Sky does this better than pretty much every other site-it is what (IMHO) Sky does best.

    On the other hand, on this particular occasion, the DYM community seem to be sold a little short. Although it is important to bear in mind that it is Sky choosing how to give money away to incentivise people.

    In future promotions of this sort, would it be possible to have (say) 3 weeks for the volume, and 1 week for the longest streak at, say, £5.50 and above?

    I think it would generate a lot of interest.
  • kapowblamzkapowblamz Member Posts: 1,526
    Not you Cammy. I don't know why I'm getting stressed about it. If I remember rightly Greg moans every year.
  • Tikay10Tikay10 Member, Administrator, Moderator Posts: 158,810
    Dozza said:

    It seems like people are voting with their feet - the DYM lobby is completely dead.

    @Dozza

    At 8am in the morning, yes, it was pretty quiet, but there's plenty of games running now (10am).
  • stokefcstokefc Member Posts: 7,615
    It's a Vegas promo not a £1000 for the winner promo so it's gonna be aimed for the serious players , it's for one month of the year Sky aint just gonna give 4k seats out willy nilly
  • ITSQUADSYITSQUADSY Member Posts: 55
    edited May 2022
    Dozza said:

    It seems like people are voting with their feet - the DYM lobby is completely dead.

    This is silly, it was 8am when you posted this.

    Between midnight and 2am there were more games going than ever.
  • CammykazeCammykaze Member Posts: 1,397
    edited May 2022
    This is excellent discussion.

    I hear both sides and like the idea of some streak week and some point chasing, that's utopian thinking perhaps. :wink:

    That would be a good mix and do understand the frustration of players like Dozza and gregkdy82 at the current DYM promo. Essentially they have little to no chance of winning the package to Vegas.

    I would also not have a shot either as life stuff is taking over my time as well as my finances and my goals are not poker related right now.

    Personally grinding for endless hours on TDYMs/DYMs is not something I would even attempt now and had my day of it. Even with time and space I have never had that elusive top prize as there is always one or two that put more into it to secure the package.

    Streak week would give more chance to qualify for the masses as it were. The current DYM promo is a good one but not a great one while earning it's crust for the Sky books.

    Overall, and have said before, Sky do a fine job with promos on the whole and I for one am grateful for that. :blush:
  • Tikay10Tikay10 Member, Administrator, Moderator Posts: 158,810
    edited May 2022
    Don't forget Las Vegas Eliminator Freerolls have started today too.

    Las Vegas Eliminator Freerolls

  • gixxerk4gixxerk4 Member Posts: 212
    I must admit to being slightly excitable when I saw this promo then disappointed when I realised that I would have no chance.
    On reflection I earn between 300 and 500 points a week so fair enough I should not really be on par chance wise with the big rakers and it is a business remember.
    I will console myself with the eliminator freerolls excellent chance of winning a package for only raking 25 points a day.
    Oh and also the reward freerolls and sunday major freerolls.
    Some people are never happy mind you Greg is from Kirkcaldy so I can understand that he is constantly disappointed with his lot in life ;)
  • EvilPinguEvilPingu Member Posts: 3,462
    The way I see it is:

    1) Streak week is popular but would be unsuitable (for reasons detailed below in my reply to Essexphil)


    2) This promo only (realistically) allows Turbo DYM regs to win the Vegas package and the larger cash prizes. We've also just had a site-wide rake race (Las Vegas Leagues), which was inevitably dominated by spins regs.

    People are okay with rewarding regs' volume by giving them a better chance to win (e.g. extra tickets when you do the golden tickets promo), but I think any promo where the top prizes are unattainable for all but a handful of regs who can play 12-15+ tables for 14 hours a day for the entire week, in games where everyone will be losing before rakeback because of the absurd 10% Turbo DYM rake, is bound to annoy the rest of the player base.

    Outside of the handful of people able to attempt to win the package by committing financial self-harm and hoping that rakeback can patch the wounds, nobody's going to be excited about losing money playing in a bunch of reggy games and maybe nicking a tenner for 42nd place.

    For everyone else, the promo makes the games reggy, causing recs to burn through their money faster than ever. Maybe those recs decide their money is better spent elsewhere, and suddenly that tenner for 42nd place is nothing compared to the value you lose from the people who never come back.

    Both this promo and Las Vegas Leagues are blatantly designed to give Vegas packages to the handful of regulars who play the most in the highest-raked games on the site, without even bothering to make anyone else think they have a chance. It puts short-term gain over long-term health of the site, to everyone's detriment.

    Frankly, Sky may as well give a package to each of the four Turbo DYM regs that everyone knows are odds on to each win one of the four weeks, and save everyone having to bother playing Poker. Same thing applies for the other rake race promo last month.

    In five years' time, when all the recs have been put off playing here by the software and promos like this, and the regs have moved on to greener pastures where they can still make a living, we'll look back and realise the only people who benefitted from promos like these are the people who got a nice bonus when Q2 2022 revenues for Sky Poker were better than projected.
  • EvilPinguEvilPingu Member Posts: 3,462
    Dozza said:

    It seems like people are voting with their feet - the DYM lobby is completely dead.

    It's always dead at 8am, because it's 8am.
    Essexphil said:

    There is actually quite a lot of sense on both sides.

    Firstly, Sky seems to get an unfair amount of criticism in relation to its promotions. They do not suit everybody precisely because Sky try so hard to vary them so as to cater for all sorts of player. Sky does this better than pretty much every other site-it is what (IMHO) Sky does best.

    On the other hand, on this particular occasion, the DYM community seem to be sold a little short. Although it is important to bear in mind that it is Sky choosing how to give money away to incentivise people.

    I would usually agree, but on this occasion, it's absolutely justified.

    Even for the vast majority of regs, there's no chance - It's basically "Who can rake the most in the highest Turbo DYMs?" with the winner being a "Who ran slightly better and won a few games more than the other guy?" tie break if two regs both play an equally ridiculous amount of volume in the same week to try and win the package.

    The optimal promo strategy is clearly to play as many Turbo DYMs as you can at the highest stakes running, spend all day haemorrhaging money in reg-infested games, and flick in some regular speed £11+ games if you're really desperate for tables.

    On that note, congratulations to Johnmonty, Timmyrara, Bigfatfish and FeelGroggy for each winning a Vegas package.
    (No, that's not sarcasm. They'll still have to earn it, the grind will probably be miserable, nobody will be breaking even before RB in the games, and tbh it's criminal for Sky to be charging 10% rake on Turbo DYMs anyway.)

    Maybe some of the other DYM regs will get a few quid extra for playing their regular games and ending up somewhere on the leaderboard, but that's hardly a positive when you consider the long-term health of the games - I'd gladly pay the £30 that I could probably get for 16-20th place if I tried, to instead have a single extra depositor in the player pool and playing once a month for the next five years.

    That said: What other options are there for a DYM promo?

    If you did streak week, you'd have a different set of problems:
    - Collusion is always a problem with streak week, even when the 1st place prize is 50-100 buy-ins at the level. This would become even more of a problem when the 1st prize is a Vegas package.
    - If you put a minimum stake on a streak week promo to win a Vegas package (let's say £11+), you're going to upset people who aren't rolled for those games (although I'd argue that's better than the promo we've been given)
    - If you don't put a minimum stake on a streak week promo to win a Vegas package, you're going to have people grinding micros for softer games to maximise their edge and their chances of winning the promo, instead of playing their regular games, which would actually reduce liquidity at higher stakes and cost Sky rake.
  • EvilPinguEvilPingu Member Posts: 3,462
    edited May 2022
    "What other options are there for a DYM promo?"

    I always feel like it's sh*tty to complain about something and not have some constructive feedback on what could be done differently, or suggest some kind of alternative.

    I think whatever happens, the site needs to move away from promos that give near-guaranteed prizes to the highest-raking spins regs and Turbo DYM regs.

    Personally I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of prize wheel, where you take the points system from this promo and those points are instead used to spin a wheel (if you can't do this in the Poker client because of software limitations, you could do it in the promo page, similar to the Sky Vegas prize machine).

    This would mean you're still rewarding the high-raking Turbo DYM regs by giving them far more opportunities to win, but you're not completely excluding recs who have zero chance of winning while they're also losing their money faster in reggier games.

    To ensure low volume players can take part and the regs aren't having to spin a wheel a couple of thousand times to use up their points, you could have micro/low/medium/high wheels (to use maybe 10/100/1k/10k promo points at a time) and tweak probabilities and prizes accordingly.


    Prizes could be:
    1) Entry into a nightly all-in MTT, which awards maybe 1 final seat, 3 semi seats and 4-12 quarter seats in the Vegas sats for that night/week/month. This is somewhere in the region of £25k of seats being given out over the course of a month (I can't be bothered to work out the exact number, but it's in the ballpark of what Sky would give out during a regular promo each month, which is good enough for this post, to illustrate the concept).

    This would have a variable starting stack with no upper limit, and future wheel spins can add to your stack - think of it like a golden ticket draw that you can rail.

    Set it up to run like an FA cup style knockout, and ensure that after the first round there are always 2^n players remaining by simply waiting until every table has one person remaining before anyone moves table. This means you avoid issues with things like "who cashes if 80% of the field are knocked out every hand but one table finishes the hand a few milliseconds after the other table?", or people starting with one chip and having a disproportionately high chance of winning a seat by winning pots and having the big stacks knock everyone else out by winning side pots, which would happen in a 6-max all in game.

    (This is also why the cumulative number of prizes are powers of two, i.e. 4 people get at least a Vegas semi seat and 8/16 people win at least a Vegas quarter seat).

    Maybe one of the micro players wins 9 all ins in a row to knock out a reg and progress to the next round with a huge stack - or perhaps they get lucky draws against other micro players until they've suddenly got a quarter final seat and a chance to get lucky a few times in a row against a reg with a stack? It'd definitely be fun for people to rail. Yeah, recs' starting stacks would still be slightly more valuable per chip because of ICM, but that's not a bad thing IMO.

    Aside from the obvious benefits of giving more than a handful of players a chance to win, this would be good from Sky's POV because:
    - If you have this at around 6pm every night, you get people playing night before, then logging on the following day to see if they win a prize. Perhaps they then decide "I'll play a couple of games while I'm here" or "I've won a satellite seat, so I'll play something else while I wait for the satellite to start".
    - It helps to stretch the promo budget further if you're giving away £20.60 / £94 / £430 seats, but only adding £18.80 / £86 / £400 to the prize pool.
    - It helps you to ensure you meet guarantees on the Vegas satellites (maybe you could even increase the number of semi seats guaranteed in the quarter final each night?)
    - The variable starting stack means you can just have people win this instead of having the disappointment of a nothing prize, but it's also completely free for Sky to give away extra tournament chips once you've committed to a freeroll with a prize pool of £x.

    Will most of the prizes go to winning regs? Yeah, probably. But enough of them go to recs too. More importantly, the guys playing £1 DYMs *could* win and find themselves one satellite away from winning the trip of a lifetime. Sell the dream to the recs.


    2) Entry to a freeroll which awards Vegas package(s?) to the winner at the end of the week/month (this would be separate from the regular Vegas satellite tree) and maybe some cash prizes.

    This could have a variable starting stack, starting from 500 or 1k, and going up to maybe 10k? Obviously you have to cap the max starting stack on this to avoid people having ridiculous amounts of big blinds in the early levels.

    Again, the variable stack keeps people coming back to the promo to maximise their chances at the end of the week/month, and it'd be pretty cool to see some of the recs or the lower stakes regs spin up a chip and a chair and have a deep run in the tournament.

    Will it be won by a winning reg who started with 20x as many chips as half the field? More than likely. But everyone who gets into that tournament believes they have a chance, even if it's only for five minutes.


    3) Instant Vegas tournament tokens
    4) Sunday Major seats
    5) Main & mini entry package for the following night (excl. Sunday)

    - Anyone can win (but it still rewards regs who will get more seats from the promo)
    - Gives people a shot in your biggest games of the week
    - Helps you to reach the guarantee (especially in months when they are usually reduced), and gets people to come back on Sunday to play on the site if they win a Major seat
    - Having a fixed chance of winning one of these prizes means it's not costing anything out of a promotion budget - instead it acts more like rakeback, where the amount you pay back to players is proportional to how much people pay in rake during the promo.

    Maybe add a Vegas package to the FT jackpot and/or the Sunday Major win for anyone qualifying through the promo, too? Now you can sell people a once-in-a-lifetime holiday plus the 'spending money' from winning the tournament(s).

    Same principle throughout - No matter how unlikely, sell the dream to the recs. Doesn't matter if it's about as likely as winning the lottery for the guy who plays a handful of £1 DYMs every week to end up winning a Vegas package this way, because that's not what most people's brains immediately jump to when they see the promo.


    6) Instant cash prizes


    7) Free bets/spins on Sky Bet/Vegas
    - Cross-promotion obvs. But might annoy people who are self-excluded from either of the products and/or don't want to use them, so maybe allowing people to choose between "£x free bet, y * £x/y free spins, or £x/2 cash" would be better?


    8) Gadgets/Sky Poker merchandise?
    This has nothing to do with my Sky Poker hoodie being 8 years old and me being too much of a life nit to replace my phone with a cracked screen, I promise.

    Joking aside, you could easily take out Vegas prizes and add UKOPS prizes, Christmas prizes etc. - Play around with the concept.

    Doesn't necessarily have to be limited to DYMs, either - You could apply it to any selection of games you choose, and just award some amount of promo points per Poker point earned.
  • DoublemeDoubleme Member Posts: 1,432
    I expressed concern over this promo to but was basically told no one cared.

    Okay there is a general attitude among some proportion of people here that is not a healthy attitude. The attitude seems to be one of well if you dont like it then go somewhere else.

    If someone says they are not happy with the software crashing and gets upset in the forums they are told well if you dont like it go somewhere else. same for people mentioning promotions.

    It is impossible for the vast majority of business or governments or gambling sites to satisfy every customer/individual because very often many will have completely contradictory preferences/desires.

    The issue in this promotion as I have seen on other sites is usually promotions like this result in anyone who wants to compete for the leaderboard in any tangible way will likely be losing or just break even throughout the promo and then profitable once you factor in rakeback/leaderboards.

    few people have either the bankroll or the time to ever make going for such a prize realistic. I doubt though that high stake turbo dons full of mostly regs will have anyone significantly beating the rake if there is anyone beating the rake at all. I do not think most people in the position to potentially lose thousands of pounds within an hour. Something more then realistic for even the strongest regs when playing turbo dons at £100 plus.

    I have time constraints due to exams coming up but I doubt many of people on here are Open UNI students combined with working whilst also playing on here. Clearly this promo would only really work for seasoned pros who do not have another day job and do are not studying for a degree etc. Who only have online poker as a commitment.

    the Eliminator freerolls and the raffle promo I guess were more aimed at the casual player.

    I guess the don regs complaining are the middle ground semi regs who have a day job who have a limited bankroll <£20000 who were hoping to be able to grind to compete for a realistic chance of a prize.

    Sky cannot satisfy everyone and also be profitable I get that. I just think maybe we should not hate on people who express what they dont like or what doesnt work for them.

    I guess really I am glad no promo offers me the chance to grind for a prize. The eliminator free roll works perfectly as a casual shot I cannot afford the time to play 50/60 hours a week on poker.
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