Well, one of my poker sites has bitten the dust.

I mentioned in my post on selecting a poker site that small sites can be a bit risky. I also mentioned in the freeroll strategy that small sites often offer more freerolls. The site that went down was a small site where I had my first real money bankroll way back from some small freeroll winnings. Eventually I built it up to $150 which I cashed out last summer because I was a little concerned about the owner going AWOL. He had been in email contact with someone I knew but then for a time she couldn’t get a response from him so I cashed out just to be safe and made a first deposit at another big site.

I still had player points at the small site and won some more freeroll money so I started up again. Built it up to $100, and now the site has been shut down by some gaming authority who apparently is going to send me the money that was in my account.

I’ve been pretty anonymous about things in this blog and want to continue to do so, so I’m not going to give the site by name. In six months the name will be irrelevant anyways, but the experience won’t be irrelevant for general internet information purposes.

I had heard that the site had been up for sale earlier but had not been sold. It didn’t go bankrupt, but what happened recently is that the owner promoted an unethical poker-related site and was shut down by his ISP. The story was that he was trying to find another ISP but what must have happened is this regulatory body convinced the ISP to shut down. This organisation is the one that I have been in contact with and is now supposedly going to refund the balance in my account. I am assuming that this organisation is legit as they have taken over the domain of the poker site and emailed me the information that I previously gave to the poker site to cash out to see if this is still correct.

This site was what is called a “skin”. This means that it joined an existing network of casino sites, built it’s own website and customer base, and the customers played on the network rather than on the site’s own poker software. The other players may have joined any of a dozen or more sites but play each other as if they were all on the same site. I thought perhaps one of the other sites might pick up the accounts in order to keep the player base up, but apparently not.

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So, a lesson for myself and for anyone who reads this blog. From my perspective it may not end up costing me much other than the bank transfer charges (hopefully) but it is worthwhile noting that

1. a mis-managed small site goes down, that
2. a regulatory body shuts it down, and that
3. this same body is arranging to refund account balances.

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Edit: The cash did come in, just under a week later for the wire transfer, less a $15 bank charge by my bank. Pretty much the same as last time I cashed out in the summer.

I don’t have anywhere that I want to make a deposit right now, so by my calculations I’m now ahead some $47 taking cashouts, less bank charges, less total poker deposits, and still have money still in two big sites.

Or, from the site itself, I started with freerolls, cashed out, started again with freerolls and now forced to cash out again for a total of $250 in cash outs over a period of about a year and a half, without ever making a deposit at the site. I think that’s fine, especially as it never was my primary site.

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