PokerRoom.com Resolves Christmas Tournament Dispute

It took two weeks and countless message board posts from furious customers, but online poker room, PokerRoom.com has finally come to its senses and paid the winners in its “Big Christmas Tourney.”

As previously reported here at Poker Source, PokerRoom.com held the first of a series of special Christmas tournaments on December 16. It was a $20 + $2 buy-in tourney, meant to have a non-cash prize pool. First prize was to be a $2,000 high-definition television, second prize was to be a PokerRoom home poker kit worth $489, and third through tenth prizes were to be travel poker kits worth $149. The tournament lobby, however, stated that there was a $19,000 guaranteed prize pool in addition to the extra prizes.

Over two hundred players signed up and the tournament proceeded as scheduled. When all was said and done, everybody was paid according to the payout schedule, with $3,829.81 and the television going to the winner, player “mvzander.” Two days later, everyone who had won money had it removed from their account by PokerRoom because cash prizes were not supposed to be awarded. The big problem was that for most of the players, it was the guaranteed prize pool, not the television and poker kits, that attracted them to play in the first place.

Over the next few days, did little to satisfy its upset customers. In fact, some of the steps the company took were almost insulting. Multitudes of players cried foul, threatening to withdraw their funds if proper steps were not taken to fix things. Until today, it seemed as if all the complaints were falling on deaf ears.

Announcing a resolution on PokerRoom.com’s message board, site founder Oskar Hornell, said that all players will be paid in full. Before stating this, he attempted to explain the situation, saying that PokerRoom.com would not deliberately deceive customers. There is little doubt that this is the truth, despite all those that overreacted to the controversy, screaming, “SCAM!” at every opportunity. What Hornell does not seem to realize, however, is that the time it took to do the right thing was way too long. He also comes off as overly-defiant, placing the blame on the players, but just giving in because he had no choice.

It is a relief that PokerRoom.com finally paid its players what they were due. It is just unfortunate that so many feathers had to be ruffled.

Below is a copy of the message posted by Oskar Hornell:

******************

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

******************

Originally published January 3, 2007