An Open Letter to PokerStars

If someone were to ask me in chat on your site right now, “U Mad Bro,” unfortunately the answer would be “Yes.”

I’d like to preface this by saying I’m clearly a huge fan of you— I dressed up as a Supernova for Halloween, and even made a PokerStars Jack-o’-lantern.

If I were a meme, I’d be that creepy girlfriend, and you’d be the one I was stalking.

Earlier today, I noticed this statement posted by you on TwoPlusTwo.com, which says, “The Sunday Million 9th Anniversary tournament has been moved to Sunday, 15 March. The reason for the change is to avoid conflict with International Women’s Day on 8 March.”

You may be thinking, how could I object to changing the date of a tournament due to a holiday whose goal is to celebrate women worldwide?

Before I can answer that question, I have to ask you a few of my own.

Of the 45,000+ anticipated players in the event, do you really think such a sizeable fraction actively celebrate International Women’s Day?

Doesn’t the new date,  which is Mother’s Day throughout the United Kingdom, potentially create even more conflicts?

Is it fair to those that had already made arrangements for this event to have to make expensive changes to their travel plans?

Because I’m an optimist, I want to believe that the reason for doing this doesn’t involve the concern of missing a massive guarantee and needing to find an excuse to push it back a week in order to run more satellites.

And I think I’ve found the reason: you’re going to use International Women’s Day as inspiration to put a renewed focus on women playing on your site—which is great because I’ve noticed some things that made me worry that you might have forgotten about us:

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• There are fewer women’s tournaments and satellites on PokerStars than there used to be;
• There is very limited participation by PokerStars Pros in the $55 Women’s Sunday, including many weeks with one or zero Red Spades playing, and the bounty on these players was removed;
• Perhaps consequently, the field size in the Women’s Sunday tournament has shrunk substantially;
• The PokerStars Women section of your site seems to be mostly defunct, and this is how it has appeared to me for months:

• The Women’s Sunday final table write-up no longer exists;
• The freelance articles for PokerStars Women, which offered up unique perspectives from many different angles, have been cut.

All of these aspects used to add up to a unique buzz one could only achieve by being part of the PokerStars Women community.

Of all the articles, I think many miss the Women’s Sunday write-ups the most. For a lot of the women, this was their first final table, and being worthy of your coverage made them really excited about playing on your site.

And the lack of participation by your pros in the flagship ladies tournament, well, that makes me mad too, bro.

The good news is that everyone loves PokerStars Women’s mission, tone, optimism, social media, and the immense amount of community it can inspire — we just need more of it to bring the spark back to remind women how much fun they have playing poker on your site.

You have the power to make the next great poker boom— through inspiring the 50% of the population that’s often overlooked in poker.

And that is a holiday we all want to celebrate.

GL us,

hotjenny314