Online Poker has been ruffed yet again by the lack of integrity shown by one of the oldest online poker sites.  Pokerroom.com, an online poker site since 2001, may have made a drastic error in customer service as what some players are calling "stealing" from their player accounts.

Recently Pokerroom.com had put on a holiday tournament where they were to give away extra prizes to the winners, including a flat-screen HDTV to the winner.  The tournament was announced in their tournament lobby as a $19,000 guarantee tournament with extras prizes for the winners. The tournament played out and the winners were in fact paid.  First place received approximately $3,800 and a TV.  While other places in the top 10 also received a nice prize along with their tournament winnings. Apparently Pokerrom.com says this was a mistake.

Shortly after this Pokerrom.com retracted the money out of ALL the player accounts that placed in the money and claimed this was error that all they were giving away were the prizes, not the cash and prizes.  With little doubt this has brought a ton of complaints to pokerroom.com and their own poker forum has had over 60 pages in 2 days relating to this subject as the 2nd place winner went to the forum to complain.  As it stands Pokerroom.com is yet to pay these players back their winnings and have stated that this was just an error and they do not deserve the money.  This has angered many online poker players, not just the players involved in this tournament.  Pokerroom.com has made almost insulting efforts at trying to keep this quite such as offering the winners $100 each.  As you may already guess $100 from a $3,800 win is not going to keep many people quite.

Straighflop.com has never promoted Pokerroom.com nor have we ever mentioned any negative feedback from them until now.  In the early days of online poker, PokerRoom struggled to gain market share and still does.  After pulling from the US market in November of 06' and a recent buyout, they have lost players left and right.  Apparently PokerRoom has not figured out that customer service is an important aspect of an online poker room.

This is truly bad news for the online poker industry that is desperate need of good publicity.  This just fuels the fire of those trying to ban online gambling.  For a mere $13-$19 thousand they have put their reputation on the line.  PokerRoom has decided that not being the stand up company here and paying out their winners they would rather loose players.  This is sure to cost PokerRoom.com millions of dollars in the long run.

The good news is all of this is that the negative publicity this will bring from a sorry business decision will no doubt help players move to the trustworthy poker sites.  Here at Straightflop.com we take great pride in offering only the most trustworthy poker rooms online.  Maybe just one reason we have never promoted Pokerroom.com...

You can follow the original forum threads from Pokerroom.com here

UPDATE: - January, 4th 2006

Finally PokerRoom.com have made good on their mistake.  This is from the founder of PokerRoom.com

"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."

It took 3 weeks for them to fix this but all the bad publicity they have gotten has finally got to them.