Party Poker to Remove Palladium Elite VIP Tier

Party Poker to Remove Palladium Elite VIP Tier

Party Poker announced that they would be dropping its Palladium Elite level from their VIP program. Palladium Elite pays Party Poker’s highest volume players up to 50% of their rake back in the form of bonuses and cash. This tier will not be replaced.

Palladium is currently the second highest tier in Party Poker’s VIP program and pays players as much as 30% rakeback. It will become the highest tier in the VIP program after Palladium Elite is removed on March 31, 2013. The loss of Palladium Elite will mean the loss of benefits including the $20,000 poker bonus, $50,000 cash bonus and $75,000 poker bonus. The $3,500 cash and $15,000 cash (30% rakeback equivalent) will still be available. This move affects all Party Network skins including WPT Poker.

This move has drawn a lot of criticism from players but affects very few of them. A Palladium Elite player must average $8,333 a month to maintain Palladium Elite.

This move does not come as a major surprise. The Party Network recently added bwin to the network’s player pool after its merger. This resulted in the sale of the Ongame Network where bwin was once the largest skin. Management of bwin created the Ongame Essence formula in 2010. This was a first of its kind rake formula that awards more points to losing players than to winners. A similar model was later adopted by Bodog Poker when several Ongame executives moved there.

Content Updates Needed

PAS will be editing the default content to reflect this change. A note will be added notifying players of this change on the Party Poker and WPT Poker review pages stating that Palladium Elite will no longer be available after March 31, 2013. We will also publish a story about this immediately in the news feed. We will then remind players to cash in their points near the end of March. Once the change is made we will remove all mention of Palladium Elite from the default PAS content.

If you have customized your Party Poker, bwin or WPT Poker content we advise editing the content as soon as possible in the same ways that PAS will. This means mentioning that the tier will be dropped on March 31st and removing the information after that date. If you do not use the PAS news feed then we suggest notifying your players immediately in that feed about the change and publishing a story at the end of March as well.