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Hi, I just thought everyone here should be aware of what is happening at Pokerroom.com. There was a Christmas tournament which promised a guaranteed prize pool of $19,000 as well as a big screen TV for the winner, and ‘prize packages’ for the final table. I actually played in it myself because the overlay was HUGE. Anyway, it turns out Poker Room screwed up and the $19,000 guarantee was a mistake. They took the money back out of the players accounts several days later, and basically screwed everyone who played in it. As yet there is not a satisfactory resolution, even though PR has admitted they screwed up. More details can be found in the following threads.
http://www.pocketfives.com/6B80BD86-CACA-4010-924A-7232CE8EFFD7.aspx
http://www.pokersourceonline.com/news.asp?poker=542
I have withdrawn my personal funds from there, and I will be changing my sites to stop promoting them in the near future. This is not the kind of behaviour that should be expected from a certified program.
Thanks.
wow not cool at all, thanks for the warning on this!
PR has fixed their error here. I love how they seem to blame players for assuming a tournament listed as a $19,000 guarantee and paid as one was misunderstood because it was not advertised.
Quote:Ladies and gentlemen, please put down your pitchforks and torches for a moment and hear me out.Looking back at the response we have had since running the Christmas Tournament, we felt it was necessary to provide our players with a resolution and an explanation to the situation we have encountered.
On December 16th, PokerRoom.com held a tournament advertising a flat screen HDTV valued at $2,000 and other prizes including PokerRoom.com merchandise. All promotional information given out to players stated the above information; players were able to view this in the promo section, through e-mails, and on the registration page.
Surely we would have mentioned it in our marketing if we had planned for the tourney to have a $19,000 added cash bonus? If we deliberately wanted to “lure” people in with that cash, as some posters have suggested, shouldn’t we at least have mentioned that sum in our ads?
The fact is that on the day of the tournament, a software glitch caused the information in our game client to change to read that this tournament was a $19,000 guaranteed tournament, though all other promotional and tournament info pages still stated that the tournament’s first prize was a flat screen HDTV valued at $2,000.
After the tournament, our staff discovered the error and attempted to correct it by removing the sum that wasn’t supposed to be there. At the time it must have seemed like the natural thing to do, just like they would have added the same sum if it instead had been missing from the prize pool.
We do realize that there are downsides to this solution, and have since reconsidered. We have paid these players in full as of today January 3 and have taken the necessary steps to prevent a situation like this from happening in the future. We would like to sincerely apologize to our affected players for the inconvenience this has caused them.
Personally speaking, however, I must say that I’m a little disappointed to see so many being eager to jump on the bandwagon of hate, without first investigating the facts or background of the situation. It seems that some people just want to read the things that support their already formed picture of “the big, bad corporation ripping off the little guy”. But things aren’t always that black and white in reality.
Over the almost 8 years that we have run PokerRoom.com we have made mistakes, a lot of mistakes even. But I can honestly say that we have never deliberately ripped off any of our customers.
Sincerely,
Oskar Hornell
Founder of PokerRoom.comGuess that 19k was costing them a lot more or they would never have paid it .
They should have just eaten the mistake , would have saved a lot of hatred and comments about them ,
I mean really , how long does it take pokerroom to make 19k in rake?
the27offsuit wrote:They should have just eaten the mistake , would have saved a lot of hatred and comments about them ,I mean really , how long does it take pokerroom to make 19k in rake?
Not only that but I know there are several affiliates that dropped them because of this. I never did much with them anyway, so for me this was the straw that broke the camels back. This blunder will cost them a couple hundred K plus in revenue from lost affiliates over the course of time. Not real smart.
I think that their excuse does hold some water …
If it was meant to be a 19K guaranteed tourney they might have advertised it as such a bit harder ….
However …
I agree that I was amazed to see how hard they resisted to do “the right thing” and payout the prizes …
:crazy:Was it due to :
(a) Stubborness amoung company officials who did not want to be pushed around by forum posters
or
(b) the fact that since the closure to American players times have reputedly got a lot harder for a lot of poker rooms …
Perhaps a profit of 19K takes longer to accumulate than we think eh?
:whoa:Hi,
I agree that action should have been taken to fix this much sooner, and I do hope that we can now move on from this. To sum it up,
*Yes, PokerRoom.com messed up a tournament and handled the result of it poorly. (Improvements are to be made in that area.)
*No, we didn’t do it on purpose or to cheat anyone.
*All prizes have been paid out in full, including the accidentally added cash.
Kind regards,
CarlyGood to see, although the half assed apology from the founder is pretty lame.
