Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Shopping spree!

I got an email from PokerStars today:

Dear Rakewell1,

Congratulations! You have achieved SilverStar VIP status.

Your VIP level lasts for the rest of this month and all of next
month.

This entitles you to the following rewards:

Naturally, at this point in reading the letter, I just assume that they're about to tell me that I've earned myself a new Porsche, like Dario Miniero did. After all, I've had a $0.50/$1 or $1/$2 razz game on in the background for, like, a couple of hours a day, on average, for a couple of months now. It can't take much more than that, can it? And "Silver Star VIP"--that's got to be super-duper high in their rankings, right?

No such luck. It's actually their second-lowest rewards level. And they're just giving me some lame stuff.

No Porsche.

Damn.

But I took the occasion to check my Frequent Player Points status, which I've actually never done before. I had absolutely no idea how many I had accumulated, or what I could get with them. Turns out I had about 5200 of them little suckers in my account. So I went on a little PokerStars shopping spree.

I ordered Daniel Negreanu's new book about small-ball strategy, a black hoodie PokerStars sweatshirt, and a tan PokerStars hat. (Now I'll fit right in at the Palms, about this time next year.) All for FREE! (Well, sort of.) Still have about 200 points left, so maybe I'll enter one or two of the freeroll tournaments mentioned in the email.

As I looked around the FAQ section of the PokerStars site, trying to figure out what I had earned and what I could do with the point, I learned a couple of things:

The good news is that I only have to earn about another 995,000 points by the end of the year to attain "Supernova Elite" status, their highest rewards level.

The bad news is that even that would only be about a third of what it takes to get me that new Porsche.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats! With the amount of rake they earn it's good players are able to get something back.

They should just send all players a hoodie, shirt and hat for the heck of it though. It'll be free advertising for them.

I recall reading that Daniel Negreanu was going to attempt to reach the Supernova status. I haven't checked up to see how he's doing on that, if he's still trying.

Anonymous said...

Grump - you might want to use those 5,000 points to play in the tourney on the last Sunday of the month - freeroll with a million dollar prize pool, as I recall.

Anonymous said...

My suggestion on points is to enjoy the weekly tourneys IF they don't conflict with anything else - they're basically free. And the monthy if you get to Goldstar.

I like to save up for bigger-ticket items though, like WCOOP tourney entry(s).

It's pretty easy to decide what you want if you look at the amount of money you're getting per FPP. Take the $50 bonus cash (5000 FPP cost) as a base, and that's probably the worst deal. Compare say the average price of a book with its cost ($20ish for 2000 FPP) - about the same. Or a tourney entry to a WCOOP event 12500 FPP for a $200 (+15 but I don't count rake for this) entry fee. The WCOOP entry fee is a much better deal. Also, gives you the chance of a big score. Some of the merchandise probably comes to about the same too.