Full Tilt Wants to Sponsor You! (And You Can Have Your Black Card Back)
The latest announcement from Full Tilt’s headquarters brings some real improvements to their VIP benefits. The Black Card scheme is back, albeit in revised form, and a VIP Amnesty will see FT recognize your VIP status from other sites. The big innovation will be a scheme where the best Black Card players will get six months sponsorship; “best” being criteria to be determined by a player consultation starting now.
The new Black Card scheme allows members to convert all their Full Tilt Points to a cash bonus at full value, at any time. There are no additional conditions to earn the bonus and no play-through requirements. The cash is paid immediately into your account and can be withdrawn without further restrictions.
The VIP Amnesty program gives high volume players on other sites the chance for immediate entry to the Black Card VIP level. To transfer your status to Full Tilt, simply take a screenshot with your screen name and VIP status visible and send it to [email protected].
If you are not at Black Card level, the VIP Amnesty works for all levels of the Edge Rewards program. At the Black Card level the benefits are worth circa 40% in cash rakeback with the amount reducing to a minimum of circa 12% at the lowest VIP level.
Sarne Lightman, Head of Marketing at Full Tilt Poker, explains: ““We understand that players have put many hours, weeks and sometimes months into earning their VIP status on other sites while unable to play on Full Tilt Poker…. The amnesty will allow them to trial our Edge Rewards and Black Card programs at the equivalent level and see for themselves the superior benefits their play level offers at Full Tilt Poker.”
Potentially the biggest benefit to Black Card holders comes in the form of a lucrative six month sponsorship deal. Contracts will be offered to the best players across all poker disciplines. What constitutes “best” performance will be the subject of a consultation between players and Full Tilt.
“Over the next few weeks we will be reaching out to the poker community to help us design these performance metrics”. The rationale for the consultation is that, “We want the players who will be competing for sponsorship to design the measurement systems for their performance, and we will then reward the best players.”
When Full Tilt rose from the ashes, it returned with a much reduced VIP program. No more 37% rakeback and no top VIP level Black Card. This didn’t seem to reduce player numbers as the site immediately took the number two spot. Since then, traffic has fallen by over 50% and competitors PartyPoker and iPoker have both edged ahead.
The focus on recreational players differentiated Full Tilt from its parent PokerStars. That strategy doesn’t seem to have paid off and these latest promotions are obviously designed to get some of the high volume grinders back to the site. It just might work.
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