PokerStars Celebrates 100 Millionth Player
On Monday, January 25th at 7:57am ET, a player by the screen name of “ArtiB73” created an account on PokerStars’ French ring-fenced site, PokerStars.fr, becoming the 100 millionth player to register on the PokerStars family of sites, which includes all of the national sites and Full Tilt. As such, PokerStars is launching a 100 Million Celebration, set to run through the entirety of February (including Leap Day!).
VIP Steps Challenge
The first half of the promotion, February 1st through February 14th, will feature VIP Steps Challenges in which players can win their share of over 100 million StarsCoin. StarsCoin, you will remember, is PokerStars’ new loyalty currency which replaced Frequent Player Points (FPP) at the start of the year.
It’s a pretty straightforward challenge. VIP Steps Challenge 1 requires a player to complete three VIP Steps for a chance to win up to 1 million StarsCoin. VIP Steps Challenge 2 increases the requirement to 10 VIP Steps for up to 2 million StarsCoin.
VIP Steps are simply a new way for players to see their progression from one VIP tier to the next. For example, to move from BronzeStar to ChromeStar, a player needs to earn 100 VIP Player Points (VPPs). With Steps, those 100 VPPs are broken into 20 five-VPP chunks, or Steps. Players can see how they are doing via a progress bar in the PokerStars client. As each Step is completed, players receive StarsCoin and, of course, get closer to the next VIP tier. Thus, for someone starting out at BronzeStar, they would need to earn 15 VPP to complete three Steps and the first VIP Steps Challenge.
Of course, with the completion of the challenges, there is just a “chance” at a huge prize. Most of the time, the rewards will be fairly minimal. For VIP Steps Challenge 1, there is a 97.2 percent chance, according to the table on the Stars website, that the reward will be 100 StarsCoin or fewer for someone at the BronzeStar level. The higher the tier, the better the chances for more StarsCoin. Supernovas will win at least 100 StarsCoin (about half the time) and will win 1,000 StarsCoin 40 percent of the time.
The odds of winning 1 million StarsCoin are almost nil: .005 percent for BronzeStar up to .15 percent for Supernova.
We won’t get into all the probabilities for VIP Steps Challenge 2, but suffice to say that the prizes increase and the odds are shifted around a bit, but nothing overly significant.
Players must open their Challenges window to start the VIP Steps Challenge.
Milestone Challenges
From February 15th through February 29th, PokerStars is offering challenges that represent different milestones in the poker room’s history. Each milestone comes with a silver and a gold challenge and players have 24 hours from when they choose to start each challenge to complete it. Most of the time, the prizes will be $10,000 or $20,000 All-In Shootout Seats (depending on whether it’s a silver or gold challenge), but cash prizes ranging from $2 to $100,000 are also available and are awarded randomly based on another probability table.
PokerStars has not revealed what the actual challenges will be, but here are the PokerStars milestones associated with each:
2001 – Launch of Real Money Poker Games
2002 – First World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) Main Event
2003 – Chris Moneymaker wins the World Series of Poker
2004 – Launch of the European Poker Tour
2006 – The Sunday Million is Born
2007 – Daniel Negreanu joins Team PokerStars Pro
2008 – PokerStars hosts World Record Online Poker Tournament
2012 – Launch of the Mobile App
2013 – Launch of Zoom Poker
2013 – 100 Billionth Hand
2014 – $10 Million Guaranteed in PCA Main Event
2015 – Football Stars join PokerStars
2015 – 13 Millionaires Made in Spin & Go’s
2015 – 253,692 Players in an Online Poker Tournament
2016 – PokerStars obtains license in New Jersey, USA
Cheapie Tourney
And finally, on Saturday, February 27 at 17:15 ET, PokerStars is hosting a $100,000 Added VIP Club Tournament for a buy-in of 50 StarsCoin. Not much else to say about it. 50 StarsCoin, a tournament with a $100,000 prize pool.
Hi, Little Brother
In addition to everything going on over on PokerStars. Full Tilt is offering a little something on the poker room’s blog. And it’s definitely a “little” something. For attempting to answer five trivia questions about Full Tilt, players are entered into a drawing to win $100. The drawing will be held on February 9th and it sounds like there will be just one winner. Players don’t even have to answer all the questions correctly to win.
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