ChecknRaise Responds (Peril List)

[SANDSSTORM]

From the discussion on this thread:
http://www.internettexasholdem.com/phpbb2/4-vt40117.html?postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=45

I heard from ChecknRaise today - while it wasn't a resolution it made me the slightest bit more confident that the doors are not closing.

I will post the email that was sent to the affected players - as she "pasted" it for my view - so I think it is reasonable to post it here. If anyone disagrees, we can take it down.
Second email:

We would like to thank you all for your responses to our original email. A number of very good points were raised and we will be considering these further. For those of you who have already made travel arrangements, and especially those of you who have incurred expenses above and beyond the expense allowance that was awarded to you when you won your seat – we regret the inconvenience that we have caused you. We do hope you enjoy the WSOP in any case.

Since there has been so much talk and doubt about whether CnR will even make the first payment, and to demonstrate our commitment, we have decided to make the 1st payment today. (The second payment will be made on July 31st.) This payment should be in your account by the time you see this email.

We realize that a payout schedule that extends to 20 months is a long one. The reason that we made a commitment to 5% was that this was a commitment that we felt certain that we could keep. We would like to pay you for your WSOP seat as quickly as possible and therefore we left it open to pay more if cash flows allow.

We would also like to reassure everyone that their player deposits are safe. We are a member of the Ongame Network and player deposits are held by and fully secured by the Network.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or comments.

Best Regards,

The ChecknRaisePoker Team

Okay - where this leaves the affected players & other opinions, I don't know - but I think its a start.

We have elected not to continue promoting them at ITH for now. I am still in discussions with my contact to find out more to give her some grief, find out her thoughts (her first email was very "corporate") and see if I can get more done for our ITHers that are affected.

I'll update again when I can.
Albert

[SANDSSTORM]

Well - the good news is that our contact is now being responsive and seems confident they will pull out of this -
The bad news is CnR doesn't seem to be backing off of their decision & we (ITH) are not going to get any "special" treatment. It was a fairly short response.

One thing she said that I did not know (assuming its true) and this is NOT to excuse or make excuses, is that these were not "satelites" in the traditional sense, but Freerolls - I understand there was no specific "player money" involved - it was strictly promotions.
This doesn't make much of a difference to those players who spent the time and effort or had the mentality of "going to the main event" or maybe spent money already to go on a trip that is now cancelled - but....
I don't put this in the same league as Poker Spot or Poker Cosmo...yet (where I lost hundreds of my own dollars) -

Nonetheless, it is agregious and we will stick to our policy for now of not promoting them on the site.

I am sincerely sorry to those who are affected -
Albert

[RiverCascade]

Albert, thanks so much for all your efforts, that's all anyone can ask. I love it, too, that when there's not adequate solutions offered, you're willing to take a stand. Love it.

Huge, sincere thanks for ith ponying up the buy-in in the ITH People's Choice tourney for these players. Above and beyond... unbelievably wonderful. Thank you.

Last, ~mini jack~

[RobDoral]

I can confirm that they deposited $500 in my account. And while the tickets were won through freerolls, they were player point freerolls, so there was actually a little value involved.

[the_hawk]

[RobDoral]

I actually got a reply of sorts from BetAndWin. It's not much but at least they didn't just delete my letter (that's towards the bottom). It sort of bugs me that I mispelled reneged. Oh well.

---------------------------------------------------
Dear Mr. RobDoral [I gave them my real name of course, which they mispelled a little],

Thank you very much for your e-mail. We have forwarded it to our colleagues from the competence centre in Stockholm who will take care of this matter.

Yours sincerely,

Heike Mayer
Corporate Communications
Web http://www.betandwin.com*
WAP http://wap.betandwin.com*
Office +43-1-585 6044-2232
Fax +43-1-585 6044-16
E-mail h.mayer@betandwin.com
S-mail Börsegasse 11/Top floor,
1010 Vienna, Austria

Is it just me or does competence centre sound sort of creepy?

-----Original Message-----
From: robdoral@hotmail.com [mailto:robdoral@hotmail.com]
Sent: Donnerstag, 15. Juni 2006 00:16
To: investorrelations_ag
Subject: ongame network

Hello. My name is [RobDoral] and I understand that BetandWin now owns the Ongame network. I wanted to say that I really enjoy playing poker on the Ongame network but recent events have occurred that I believe you should be aware of.

First, the Ongame network seems to have made some poor decisions about who they allow to use their software. In particular, the poker "skins" operated by the Futurebet group have become notorious for holding up players financial transactions. Second, the Checknraise poker site recently renegged on a promotional offer where they were to send 10 players to the 2006 World Series of Poker in the U.S.

I happened to be one of those 10, thus my letter, but I wanted to make sure that you were aware of these incidents.

The online poker community is large and we communicate a great deal with one another. So far two major sites that I know of have "blacklisted" CheckNRaise over this matter and others have already warned against playing at skins associated with FutureBet.

Given the competitive nature of the gaming market, reputation is very important and frankly these sites are giving the Ongame network and by extension BetandWin a bad name that I don't believe it deserves.

I've included the links below to two recent discussions on the busiest poker forum on the web as examples of what I'm talking about.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=6177556&an=0&page=0#Post6177556

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=5908014&an=0&page=0#Post5908014

In addition, the two sites that I'm aware of that have blacklisted CheckNRaise are internettexasholdem.com and PokerRoomReview.com

Casinomeister.com has previously blacklisted futurebet sites

My hope is that this email won't simply be deleted and that someone at BetandWin will explore this issue further (there are more incidents than I've described, I've only provided links to the two most recent cases) and pass along my message to all appropriate parties, particularly the Ongame network. I will be writing a similar letter to them.

Thank you for your time.

[SANDSSTORM]

[the_hawk]

Albert,

Please don't think I was implying you were defending CnR since you clearly weren't and I never meant to imply thus.

To my mind it's clear. The value concerned is $10k. If I enter a $200+15 MTT satellite for a WSOP seat and end up winning one, and the site somehow doesn't come up with the goods, as far as I'm concerned it's obvious they've taken $10k from me, not $215.

Put it another way - if I enter such a satellite and bust out first, and later find out the site has reneged on the seat winners, do I have any right to feel personally aggrieved and should I expect any recourse? Of course not, because the real value is not in the entry fee but in the prize pool.

To suggest the situation is somehow different if player points were used to enter (or even if it was a complete freeroll) is simply flat wrong in my view. We shall have to agree to disagree.

H

[Patch]

I was going to post this to the original thread, but that's been locked so I figured I'd add it here. Someone in that thread suggested one of the other, larger PokerNetwork sites might step in to make good on this. It reminded me of something I read about maybe a year ago.

The details are a bit fuzzy, but the gist of it was that some player, over the course of a year or so, had worked a small amount of money into a very large (by my standards) bankroll at one particular site. Then he got into a game with somebody who was apparently playing with money from a stolen credit card number. The culprit was at a high stakes table and playing like a total donkey. The hero gets into a hand with him while holding the nuts. Chips fly into the pot and the hero takes a nice chunk of change off the culprit. It was a fraction of what he had in his account, but a lot of money all the same.

The poker site discovered the fraudulant credit card use, accused our hero of colluding with the thief, and despite considerable pressure from many different sources steadfastly refused to be remotely reasonable. They basically stole a year's worth of winnings from this guy simply because he had the bad luck to win a big hand from somebody committing credit card fraud.

The issue was discussed extensively on the affiliate's site, with the affiliate going to bat for the innocent player with the poker site. Nothing would make these guys budge. They insisted on keeping everything the guy had made over the course of a year. The affiliate disassociated themselves from the site as a result. Dozens of players from the affiliate site stopped playing there.

And now we come to the point of this whole story. The affiliate wanted to get another perspective on the whole thing so he told the story to the poker room manager at another of the sites he was an affiliate of. Just like eveyrone but the first site, this poker room manager thought the first site was being unreasonable. A while later the poker room manager called the affiliate back and offered to fund an account for the player at his site for the full amount that was taken from him. The good will generated from this action was priceless. There were endless replies to the thread from players saying they'd just opened an account at the second poker site.

Perhaps there are some very smart poker room managers reading this.

[RiverCascade]

What an amazing story, patch. Thanks for posting it. A point could almost be made that the poker site was the one colluding. Unbelievable... as well as the ending to the story. Too bad you don't know the names of the sites involved. I'd love to know both of them for obvious reasons.

[Spartan73]

Huge news, just saw this on BW.

www.poker.com/blog

This entire incident continues to be bad PR for the entire OnGame Network. The fact that a site like Poker.com is willing and able to do this is a major embarrassment for Ongame.

[MXRider]

[Spoonie]

Thats a great gesture by poker.com.

[Primitive]

[Bullajami]