PokerStars Stars Rewards: Can You Really Get 65% Rakeback?

PokerStars Rakeback: Monthly Challenges

Players who reach Silver tier or higher can participate in monthly challenges. PokerStars claim these offer "up to 40% additional rewards", but they actually offer either 10% or 40% (but it's virtually impossible to achieve these every month, so 0% will be your most common reward). Despite their claims of transparency, it's not entirely clear what triggers whether you get a 10% or a 40% challenge. It would seem that winning players are typically offered the 10% challenge (although PokerStars claim this is only the case for 6.5% of the player base).

The monthly challenges are an "all or nothing" reward. You will be given a target number of reward points you must earn in order to receive a cash reward. You earn 5 redemption points for every $1 you pay in rake and tournament fees. If you achieve 99% of the required number of reward points, you get nothing. You can however get the reward twice. Although, your target is typically set anywhere between 1.2 to 1.5 times your normal volume, so even though PokerStars imply that this is a monthly reward, it's basically impossible to collect it every month unless you are steadily increasing your volume of play by 20-50% each month. To put that in perspective, if you started off generating $10/month in rake and completed your monthly challenge every month, by the end of the year, you would have to generate $75/month in rake (a 650% increase in volume), and that's assuming just a 20% increase in your target each month. But it's unclear over what time period PokerStars assesses and adjusts your volume of play. So much for transparency!

If you are a winning player (either consistently, or just for the previous month), then things are much worse than just getting 1/4 of the normal rakeback from your Monthly Challenge. Not only is your reward much less, but it's often much harder to achieve. Players who were receiving the 2,500 points ($500 in rake) for $200 (40%) monthly challenge frequently have their next month's challenge bumped to 3,750 points ($750 rake) for $75 (10%). That's a 50% volume increase for 1/4 the rakeback!

It's unclear why PokerStars would adopt such an annoyingly difficult system. They are probably trying to encourage players to constantly increase their volume even though that's obviously not sustainable. It would appear that the best way to earn rakeback at PokerStars is to play at least half of your volume on another site, and just play enough to maintain Silver tier with PokerStars ($28.50 in rake each month). If you are offered an achievalbe 40% Monthly Challenge, you can then play primarily on PokerStars. When you consider that the purpose of a rewards program is to encourage you to play on their site, it seems monumentally stupid to create a system that encourages you to play at least half of your poker elsewhere!

Stars Rewards Rakeback Example Continued:

Since you achieved Silver tier in your second month, you would have been given a Monthly Challenge in your third month. However, since you've been consistently raking $50/month up to this point, your Monthly Challenge will likely be something like $24 for 300 redemption points. This would require $60 in rake (20% more than your normal volume). Let's assume you were lucky enough to get a 40% Monthly Challenge, and raked a total of $65 the next month (6,500 reward points, and 130 redemption points). You would receive:

2 Silver chests worth $10 ($5 each) for 5,700 reward points
You could exchange your remaining 800 reward points for a Bronze chest worth $1.50
You would earn your $24 Monthly Challenge reward

This is a total of $35.50 in rewards from $65 in rake, for a whopping 54.6% rakeback! This is great...but it's not sustainable! In the next month, your Monthly Challenge reward target would likely increase again!

However, if you've been winning, your Monthly Challenge would more likely be something like $7.50 for 375 redemption points ($75 in rake, for a 50% volume increase). Since you're unlikely to put in 50% more volume for an additional 10% rakeback, you'd be back to earning just 13.5% rakeback from the PokerStars Stars Rewards chests.

PokerStars Calculated Actual Rakeback

Tier	Depositors	Withdrawers
Blue	0%
Blue	12.2%
Bronze	14.6%
Silver	35.8%	22.5%
Gold	35.5%	22.7%
Diamond	37.2%	24.9%
Black	40.7%	29.4%

Despite their claims of increased transparency, it is actually much harder to calculate your rakeback with the new PokerStars Stars Rewards rakeback program! This is because it is unclear:

what formula they use to determine your Monthly Challenges target
what time period is used to calculate your volume of play
when or why you will receive a 10% challenge versus a 40% challenge

Since the objective of this website is to calculate your "net cost" to play on various poker sites, we have been forced to make the following assumptions for playing on PokerStars:

"Net depositors" will complete the 40% Monthly Challenge 1/3 of the time (and will never be offered the 10% Monthly Challenge)
"Net withdrawers" (i.e. winning poker players) will complete the 40% Challenge just once/year (because it will rarely be offered), and the 10% Challenge twice/year (because it will almost always require a 50% increase in volume)

PokerStars Rakeback vs Stars Rewards

Tier	Net Depositors		Net Withdrawers
Tier	Old	New	Old	New
Blue	18.9%	12.2%	2.5%	12.2%
Bronze	23.5%	14.6%	2.1%	14.6%
Silver	21.1%	35.8%	2.1%	22.5%
Gold	21.3%	35.5%	2.1%	22.7%
Diamond	17.4%	37.2%	2.1%	24.9%
Black	29.9%	40.7%	2.1%	29.4%

If you experienced the previous PokerStars Stars Rewards program, then you probably already know that the PokerStars rakeback rewards system is much better, especially if you are a winning/break-even player, a tournament player, or both. But just how much better is the PokerStars rakeback system?

As we can see from the table to the right, the new Stars Rewards rakeback program is significantly better for all players except low volume Net Depositors. But of course, PokerStars isn't competing against PokerStars. There are plenty of other online poker sites for you to choose from, so how does the revamped PokerStars Stars Reward program compare to those?

Better Rakeback Options

Other online poker sites do not separate players into the exact same tiers. However, we have completed detailed analyses on the rewards programs for multiple sites which allows us to make an apples to apples comparison (by comparing rewards for similar volume of play). For the sake of comparison, we will use PokerStars' tiers, but for the other sites will present the average rakeback rewards across a variety of volumes within that tier. We will highlight in green any rewards programs that significantly out-perform the PokerStars rakeback program. You can click the site name to see that site's full review.

Net Depositors

Tier	PokerStars	Americas Cardroom	GG Poker	BWIN	PartyPoker	888 Poker	Boyle	William Hill
Blue	0.0%	27.0%	15.0%	0.0%	0.0%	21.0%	1.6%	10.0%
Blue	12.2%	27.0%	16.3%	0.0%	0.0%	16.8%	28.0%	10.0%
Bronze	14.6%	27.0%	21.7%	14.7%	0.0%	12.8%	30.5%	13.2%
Silver	35.8%	27.0%	30.0%	16.6%	16.7%	11.2%	19.8%	17.0%
Gold	35.5%	28.1%	48.0%	25.1%	18.0%	10.4%	18.9%	21.7%
Diamond	37.2%	64.4%	74.8%	27.3%	25.5%	10.1%	25.7%	25.2%
Black	40.7%	103.2%	75.0%	26.8%	40.0%	10.1%	20.7%	26.8%

The majority of poker players do not make a profit playing the game. With the exception of Silver tier players, these players are better served playing online at either Americas Cardroom or GG Poker.

If you only play poker, then we recommend you join Americas Cardroom. Although the Winning Poker Network doesn't have nearly as much volume of play as PokerStars, they are still one of the biggest networks. Unless you plan to play 10+ tables simultaneously, Americas Cardroom has more than enough tables to choose from, and plenty of tournaments.