I received the following email from one of our readers, and thought I'd reprint is here as he described the alleged events fairly well: Subject: Pokerroom withdraws funds from winning players accounts
Just stumbled onto this today, it's pretty crazy. Pokerroom held a $20 buy-in Christmas tourney, w/ "extra" prizes, but advertised 19K guaranteed on the tourney listing. The tourney listing even showed 19K in payouts...and to top it off, they paid out (a prize pool of) 19K to the winners. Later they just went in and took the money back from the winners, claiming they'd made a mistake. The matter hasn't been resolved yet. After days of crazy action in the pokerroom forums, they reluctantly offered $100 to the final table finishers, and a $10 buy-in ticket to any entrants. Literally, the winner logged in to see over $3000 missing in his account. He even took some of that money to the tables after the tournament. It was paid out, it was his, as advertised. And now they are giving him $100 and a $10 token. Shameful.
After reading the PokerRoom.com forum thread on this subject (which can be found here) it seems that the 4th place finisher, as well as the tournament winner have both weighed in on the subject. PokerRoom seems to be denying that the tournament was ever advertised as a $19k guarantee, stating that the total prize pool was supposedly just merchandise for those that finished 1-10th.
I haven't read the entire forum thread (there are currently 87 pages on the subject) but I'll keep an eye on this and see how (and if) they resolve the matter. If anyone else has any insight on the subject, please let us know.
(Thanks, Scott!)
1. Mine isnt exactly the same, but Pokerroom have taken $540 from my account for no apparent reason, and to add injury to insult, i had taken a weeks holiday off to play i little bit of poker, and as they took all my bankroll, i had absolutely nothing to play with for over half of my holiday period, therefore i missed out twice, (poker playing and wages)
It has now just gone over the 24 hour mark, without a slice of response, no e-mail, nothing !!
As you can imagine, I am P&^$$$d.
Posted at 11:06AM on Jan 5th 2007 by Mark Gittins