For the past two weeks online poker message boards like Winneronline,
2 + 2 and Poker Room's own message board facility have been clouded
by growing condemnation of an online poker tournament that appears
to have gone horribly wrong.
The issue centers on a $20 + 2 buy-in Christmas tournament that took
place on December 16 and promised a guaranteed prize pool of $19 000.
An Australian player using the handle Mvzander subsequently won the
tournament and was paid out $3 829.06 and a HD television worth $2
000.
Things seemed to go downhill from there, as Mvzander's wide postings
on major fora indicate:
"[The morning of Dec. 18] I received an email from Pokerroom
informing me that they had overpaid me for the tournament and were
taking $3 400 out of my account," the player said.
"I logged in to find out that, while I slept, a major online
poker site had indeed simply swiped several thousand dollars from
my account."
"There is no way that the winner of a 265 player, $20+2 tournament
receives only $400," the angry player argued.
Unfortunately, Poker Room.com, which is owned by the Ongame Network,
a subsidiary of Austrian public company Bwin, has remained apparently
indifferent to the mounting volume of condemnation. The company has
remained silent, exacerbating an already difficult situation on the
fora and angering players who perceive the issue as wrongdoing or
inefficiency on the part of the poker room.
Update: PokerRoom founder Oskar Hornell posted on the Pokah forums today he has decided to honor the original payouts for the tourney, even though he claims the amounts were displayed incorrectly due to a software glitch. Hopefully the software doesn't come with more glitches!!
Here's Hornell's full statement:
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.com