How to Spend Your Pokerstars FPP's

Spending your Pokerstars FPPs

Please note that as of January 1, 2016 FPPs no longer exist on Pokerstars. The new player points are called StarsCoin and I have written a followup article for that here:

How to Spend Your Pokerstars StarsCoins

I will leave the old FPP article up below for historical purposes.

This article explains the best way to spend your Pokerstars FPPs if you are not Supernova.

Supernova players should just buy the cash bonuses in the VIP store of $600 for 40k FPP or $1600 for 100k FPP. These equate to 1.5c and 1.6c per FPP respectively.

However, the vast majority of the readers of this blog likely aren't Supernova or even close to it. So how do you get the best value for your FPPs?

The best way to spend them in my opinion is to play the 235 FPP hyper turbo satellites (You will find these at Sit & Go > Satellite > FPP in the Pokerstars lobby). These 6max sit n go's award an entry into the Sunday Storm (an $11 value) if you finish in the top 2 spots. 3rd place is awarded a largely meaningless 10 FPP and everybody else gets nothing.

A completely average player (cashing 1/3 times) would get 1.6c per FPP playing these things which is already equal to the best Supernova rate so the value here is fantastic. That said, there is a time component that must be factored in as well (you have to play them!).

Generally I will wait until I have at least 10k FPP sitting around in my account. I should be able to blow through this by 4 tabling these satellites for a couple hours.

Since you only start with 10 big blinds and blinds increase every 9 hands, at a first glance these will look like one big stupid shove fest to you. Truthfully they are pretty ridiculous (channel that inner degen!). However there is definitely still some skill involved in them by following a few strategy guidelines.


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235 FPP Hyper Turbo Strategy


During the first level (25/50 with a 10 ante) only play 88+ and AQ+ (always shove of course)


Don't get caught up with all the random idiots shoving any two cards. Stay alive and just be patient. Usually 1 or 2 people will be eliminated during this stage.

During the second level (50/100) shove any Ace, pair, broadway or reasonable King

You have to start moving the chips around a little more now although I might still fold the very bottom end of this range in early position (i.e. hands like A2/22/QT/K9). Stealing the blinds is very important. But again, stay patient, don't worry if you only have like 3 big blinds. It's ok.

End Game

Again stay patient. Do not shove any two. But you will need to add most Queens and suited connectors to the range above now. Stealing the blinds is of critical importance. But you also don't want to finish 3rd.

I have played a lot of these things over the years. I have been able to maintain a 1.8c or 1.9c per FPP win rate by following the above strategy. This is a higher rate of rakeback than even the top cash bonus for Supernova.

It kind of goes without saying that there is heavy variance in these satellites though. Expect to see some crazy, crazy stuff. I am sure I have gone like 20 in a row before without even cashing.

You can definitely improve your chances though by studying some advanced poker strategy.


What To Do When You Win


I should mention just in case anyone wasn't aware. I don't actually play in the Sunday Storm all that often if I finish in the top 2 spots in the satellite (although you can if you want).

I un-register and have $11 in T$ (tournament money) credited to my account. I then go to the 2+2 marketplace thread and trade it for real money at a rate of 99.5%.

Example: I have T$100. I make a post on there offering it for $99.50. Somebody pm's me (usually very quickly) and we do the trade through the Pokerstars software. There is no scamming or BS possible. Both parties must agree to the trade price and then Pokerstars (usually within minutes) approves it. Easy as that.

One last thing, you might be able to achieve the best results in these satellites by playing them on the morning of the actual target tournament which is a Sunday. People may be more desperate to get a spot and play even worse than normal.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them below.


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41 comments:

  1. Sorry Chris I accidentally deleted your comment lol

    "Thanks for the tips Nathan. Too bad us US players can't play on pokerstars any more :( :( ..."

    I agree :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous10 September

    This is very useful. Thanks a lot. Very impressed with your last session!:). Talk about 'crushing the micros' lol.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Glad its helpful. Been meaning to write this guide for quite sometime. Ya, slaying some friday night donks, standard stuff haha.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi RainingBlack ,
    From my experience for building a bankroll the 70 fpp 10max sng sattelites are quite good.Iv managed to get 0.023 out of my fpps playng only these type of donkments.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Supernova+ players should just buy the cash bonuses of $1500 for 100k FPP or $4000 for 250k FPP. These equate to 15c and 16c per FPP respectively." I'm confused,how did you get 15c and 16c? isn't it 1.5c and 1.6 per FPP?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Dzift,

    Yes I forgot to mention those. And I used to play a bunch of the 20 man 210 FPP satellites as well. And I had a winrate up in the 2c per FPP range as well, due to there being more skill involved than the hyper turbos.

    I'm not sure about the 70fpp sats but the main problem with the 210's was the time factor. They would take upwards of 45 minutes to complete.

    The beauty of the hyper turbos is that they are over in 5 minutes on average. If you have to spend hours upon hours playing these donkaments all of the sudden your rakeback doesn't look so good anymore.

    Solncev,

    Oops lol...you are right. Thanks for pointing that out. Fixed!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Great tip! Heard of this before but never tried it. Think I'll have a go at these sometime soon.

    I noticed that they also run 70 FPP hyper-turbo 6-max sats for the $10k gtd. The $/FPP for the average player for these would be 3.3/210 = 0.0157, i.e. the exact same as for the Sunday Storm sats.

    I guess for the micro stakes player (with few FPPs) this would also be a good alternative since you spread the risk more and hence reduce the variance. The downside is that you have to play about 3 times as many of these donkaments to spend your FPPs...

    ReplyDelete
  8. Thanks for comment Nathan. Yea rough month, as soon as i build up my bankroll more i would love to pay for some coaching from you . Or at least have you look at my opening hands and bet sizes. How do you accept payments?? If i built up some money on Merge could i transfer it to your Merge account??? Thanks Chris

    ReplyDelete
  9. Hey Chris,

    Unfortunately I am only able to accept payment on Pokerstars and through Paypal right now. I hope to add Merge again in the future though.

    I will have more on all of this coaching business in a post this week though with some free options as well. And I will put you at the front of the list for that.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Use to buy VIP cash rewards (lame), read this yesterday and got 20 out of 40 of this tournmanets (heater obv). I'll follow this blog from now on, thank you blackrain good luck at the tables.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Glad it helped. Keep heatering :)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hi Nate, I've now play a lot of this tournaments, I wanted to know if there is a way to keep track of how you doing in it, I use PT4 and I can't seen to figure out how to see how much I've want in this. Can you help me?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Hey David,

    To be honest I have never really bothered tracking these things in PT4. I probably should. I just normally run a tally in a notepad doc or something. But I am sure that you can probably import them in PT4.

    Try clicking on the T tab for tournaments after you have imported them, select STT under type and then freeroll under flag. Let me know if this works. I haven't played them in awhile and I normally just delete the hand histories.

    ReplyDelete
  14. There isn't freeroll flag, but there is satelite. I also selected hyper-turbo under speed and $0,00 under buy-in.

    It doesn't show your net won, but I pressed the places tab and multiplied the #1 finishes by the amount you get for it. (It's weird I also have one #2 finish, bug maybe.

    So, I have to divide my net won by the numbers of played tournaments, right? the result is 0,016. Does this mean I'm getting 1,6 cents a fpp?

    Let me know if you can do yours.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Thanks for writing this. Never knew about these satellites before. This is a big help.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous20 January

    hallo,,i have collected 47000 fpps till now...how much time do you think it take me to play them all in there..is it possible if following your technik to have worse results than if cashing them in PS store with platinum star vip?..also when is your book coming,,im looking forward to it..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi,

      I can't say for sure how long it will take to go through that many FPPs but probably several hours at least if 4 tabling. I still think that playing these satellites is a significantly better value than opting for the cash bonuses at any level below Supernova.

      My new book is a continuous work in progress that has proven to be much harder to write than I thought. All I can say is that I hope to release it in the near future.

      Delete
  17. Blackrain,
    Now it's impossible to unregister for the Sunday Storm. How we can spend our FPP's, now?
    Thank you for all of your articles.
    Martin.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Martin,

      This is the first that I have heard of this so I will have to go look into it.

      Delete
    2. Hi Black!! Did you see it?
      What do you think about this?

      Delete
    3. Hi Martin,

      I haven't played these Sats still since you mentioned it but if what you say is true then I guess you just have to play in the Sunday Storm then. I assume every other entry that you win after your initial seat gets turned into T$ still.

      Delete
  18. it´s possible to unresgister if the sunday storm it´s not running .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I haven't played these 235's in awhile. Somebody mentioned that Stars changed something recently where you can't unregister now. I would email them about it.

      Delete
  19. it changed last week . now u can´t unregister , have to qualify more than once to get tournament $ .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for this. I will make an edit to the blog post above.

      Delete
  20. Pokerstars have changed their policy back from today re unregistering from FPP satellies:- "Over the last two months PokerStars has gradually introduced a requirement that FPP satellite winners must play the first seat won to a given target. We are now reversing this change. By Monday, 21 July, winners of FPP satellites will be able to unregister from the target once again. Before that time, you will be unregistered upon request if you write to support at pokerstars [dot] com and request it.

    Please note that this reverting of recent policy change does not include satellites which finish after the target begins, or "Mega-Path" satellites, which will continue to lock winners into the target in the same way that they always have.

    There are two reasons for reverting this change at this time:

    1) We’ve encountered a software bug on mobile devices that causes the warning message not to appear.

    2) The goal of this change is to ensure that satellites are achieving their intended purpose, to help players qualify for tournaments that they might not otherwise play. However, the change had an additional substantial, but unintended, negative impact on the value of VIP rewards for a subset of players.

    We plan to revisit this initiative in the future at a point when we feel comfortable we can achieve the desired goal without negative impact. More directly, this means that within the next year it is likely that satellite winners will be required to play in the target (or similar) event, but we will implement this in such a way that FPP redemption value will not be as significantly impacted, and we will fix the mobile bug prior to making the change."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for posting this Michael. I will make an edit to this blog post again.

      Delete
  21. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Is this still up to date ? I mean, is it still worth it nowdays ? If not, could you write an article what is best ? THANKS !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes it is. I update this article frequently when anything changes.

      Delete
    2. You are the man !

      Delete
  23. Hey BlackRain . I read this and since i cant convert fpps before new year i chose to do this .BUT it looks like pokerstars removed these .Cant find them . Just found some PCA sat hypers at sng where you said they should be . Can you still see them?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They still exist. You might have a filter set that hides them. So turn off filters and look again for description: "Sunday Storm Sat: 235 FPP Hyper-Turbo [2 Seats]"
      Location: "Sit & Go" tab

      If you can't find them still use these filters:
      Filter for Game: "No Limit Hold'em", Buy-in: "FPP", Size: "Single Table", Speed: "Hyper-Turbo"

      When you find the game open the lobby for it & favorite it - makes it easy to find in future in your favorites tab

      Delete
    2. Thank you for that Michael, You have been a big help every time Pokerstars decides to make a change to these FPP satellites. It looks like I don't need to edit this article for the 4th time just yet! :)

      Delete
    3. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
  24. Hey Blackrain, i guess now the time has come to edit the article. the 235 FPP satellites no longer exist :( damn...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, I put a note at the top. It looks like there is a new 367 Starscoin satellite but I will need to spend some time looking into these first.

      Delete
  25. This whole post is now defunct - no advantage to converting T$ to cash any more. T$ don't exist now.

    FPP are dead, he new currency is StarsCoin [SC] & any FPP you had last year have been converted into SC automatically by PS

    In the VIP Shop you can buy either tourney entry tickets, physical items such as PS brand items & security keys OR you can convert to cash

    The smallest cash conversion you can get is to receive $25 into your account for 2,500 SC - this is the rate if you're Bronze Star right up to Supernova, no difference any more
    The SC are are at a fixed rate of $0.01 per coin for all tiers

    ReplyDelete
  26. I should add the conversion from FPP to StarsCoin occurred at the last moment EST on 31st December 2015
    The rate was 1.0 FPP = 1.2 SC for all tiers I believe

    ReplyDelete
  27. In case you thought I was being rude that was not my intent:
    I meant this blog post by Nathan is now defunct - I wasn't dissing your comment

    ReplyDelete