PokerStars made some amendments in the European Poker Tour (EPT) Barcelona payouts after some players made some pretty negative responses on this matter. In August 2016 the brand officially announced its intentions to revise the payout structure of the events of its European Poker Tour.
The Chief of Live Poker Operations at PokerStars Neil Johnson revealed that the entire team of the online poker brand was fully devoted to the idea of providing the players with the best poker experience ever and improve their already existing events in order to bring maximum satisfaction to the users. Mr. Johnson shared that making such changes was never easy, and so did finding the balance, but PokerStars had always greeting new ideas.
According to the information that PokerStars revealed last month, the new payouts would be paying out 20% of the field. It also shared that the minimum cashes are expected to amount to 1x-1.2x the original buy-in paid by the players. The largest web-based poker cardroom’s decision to do that provoked a wave of bitter reactions in some members of the poker community, and especially in some high-rollers.
As mentioned above, it was the high-rollers who raised their voices against the eventual changes, as the latter seem to be tightly interconnected with the poker economy.
Now, PokerStars has announced the new revisions of the payouts, which would be enacted for the stops of the European Poker Tour in Malta and Prague. The announced buy-ins of the events amounted to at least €10,000 and will bring the old payout structure back. According to the old rules, the percentage paid amounted to 12 to 15, and lower buy-ins would have a maximum of 20%.
This decision raised some concerns primarily due to the fact that percentages of the field paid amounted to around 10% for years as an industry standards. However, this trend has been changing lately, as a large number of online poker tournaments have increased this percentage to 20.
Of course, PokerStars revealed that it intended to make the above mentioned changes after “a solid run” of testing before the payout structure changes are implemented in any of the upcoming events of the 2016 edition of the European Poker Tour of the brand, including the ones in Barcelona, Malta and Prague. The Chief of Live Poker Operations Mr. Johnson also confirmed that the brand would welcome such changes if everything is going according to plan.
- Author
Harry Evans
