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There is a lot of good at Poker Stars. This online Poker Room is huge! The Poker Stars tournaments are the best in the poker room industry. The Poker Stars tournament schedule is comprehensive, huge multi table tournaments, a great deal on rebuy tournaments*, huge guaranteed prize pools including a weekly tournament at Poker Stars that is guaranteed at 1 million dollars. A wide variety of sit n go tournaments are offered. Poker Stars have head up, 4 player head up freeze outs, single table and multi table sit and go poker tournaments in all games with a wide variety of limits.

Poker Stars cash games are offered in a wide variety of limits. There is a wide variety of choices around the clock. Limits vary from penny limits to no limit games with blinds as high as 10/20 and limit games as high as 100/200.

The software at Poker Stars is straight forward, simple and intuitive to use with all the typical bell and whistles online poker players have come to expect in the way of player notes, good stats and avatars. The Poker Stars games move along at a good pace. Time is limited in tournaments and there is no all in protection in any of their games. Multi tabling is simple. The Poker Stars lobby is well laid out making your tournament or game of choice easy to find.

Poker Stars offer all the expected method of getting money to and from your account. Withdrawals are fast and easy as are deposits.

Poker Stars tech support is responsive and straight forward with no BS rhetorical Reponses.

Poker Stars seem to be on top of things with encryption and collusion protection.

Poker Stars have a good points program for merchandise and free roll tournament entries.

*The rebuy tournament juice (fee) is 10% of the buy in. The rebuys and add on go directly to the prize pool without any juice being taken. With the average player taking over 4 buy ins and rebuys, this effectively brings the Poker Stars tournament fee down to around 3%; possibly the best tournament deal in the industry.

You really need to play a lot of live poker to get in on the Poker Stars promotions with the VIP club.

The Poker Stars security page describing how they protect us, seems to have had as much input from marketing as it did from the technical department that is responsible for protecting us. There really is not enough information for an expert to determine if the Poker Stars site is truly secure or not. There is enough for the typical player if they choose to take the stuff written at face value to feel safe, and it is likely that the Poker Stars site is as secure as they say.Read why this is bad

Poker stars does offer bonuses to players in the way of first time deposit bonuses and reload bonuses on an intermittent base. Every couple of months they promote a 20% or 25% reload bonus. They will also occasionally offer a 100% first time deposit bonus. As an example the current bonuses are:
The Reload Bonus: A 20% deposit bonus (up to $120) when you add money to your PokerStars account. To earn this bonus, you will need to collect the number of Base FPPs equal to seven times the bonus amount.
The First time depositor bonus: 100% bonus up to $50. To earn this bonus, you will simply need to play on PokerStars and collect the number of Base FPPs equal to 10 times the bonus amount.

Fpp’s are frequent player points. They can be earned on the following schedule. One (1) Frequent Player Point (FPP) is awarded for playing a hand in which the rake reaches:

$0.50 for fixed limit poker games with stakes $0.50/$1.00 and lower
$0.75 for fixed limit poker games with stakes $1/$2
$1.00 for
pot limit poker games
no limit poker games
fixed limit poker games with stakes $2/$4 and higher
Five (5) FPPs are awarded for each $1 in tournament fees paid.

The affiliate program at Poker Stars over all does not rate very well. To join the Poker Stars program you need to email them from their website and answer a serious of questions. You will need an existing player account. If they approve you, conversion rates are low and Poker Stars pay a rather uncompetitive bounty for each player that qualifies. While it is certainly worthwhile to have Poker Stars someplace, it is not worthwhile to use up much space on your site for them. Poker Stars stats are checked from the lobby of their poker room and they consist of number of players signed up and number of players qualified. The more players that qualify in a month the more the bounty is. The main problem with the affiliate program at Poker Stars is that Poker Stars already have a large player base and good word of mouth. Hard to compete with that on a website.

On the plus side Poker Stars serve their own banners and keep them up to date with the latest promotions. Poker Stars also pay as stated, on time. I have made more playing there parlaying my commissions then I have made in commissions. I would rate it at a 2 on a 1-5 scale, 5 being best.