blonde Board Meeting

[tikay]

It's no longer a secret that i-Poker have this most extraordinarry policy.

In brief, witrhdrawals must not exceed Deposits, give or take 1% I think, in any given month.

Actually, they can - & often do - but when they do, we get Fined!

We expect our Withdrawals to exceed our Deposits by a 6 figure sum in October

Click to see full-size image.

Lol, nice one boys, you got there.

It gets a bit murky here, but all that money will be withdrawn this week, good luck to them, & blonde will sort out it's own problems with Aqua.

[mondatoo]

It's no longer a secret that i-Poker have this most extraordinarry policy.

In brief, witrhdrawals must not exceed Deposits, give or take 1% I think, in any given month.

Actually, they can - & often do - but when they do, we get Fined!

We expect our Withdrawals to exceed our Deposits by a 6 figure sum in October

Click to see full-size image.

hahaha awesome.

We have to stop them.

+1,on form today bh

[TightEnd]

If you do no ins or outs are you still liable to fines that the other ipoker skins incur? did I read that bit right?

Not quite. IPoker is a massive network, run via several "cages" operated by companies that run groupings of skins

We are on one such cage, run by Aqua Poker. Our liability is confined to "rule breaking" by skins on this cage only

[tikay]

Hello. I am the only person on blonde who gets upset when one of you has a big win on blonde Poker's card-room.

F M L

Ignore him. He's as delighted as we all are. Ish.

Can you imagine a more peculiar & uncomfortable moral dilemma?

"Yay - a blonde won the Sunday Zillion! Ahh - wait a minute......!

[Dry em]

I was under the impression that a big tournament win would fall under "mitigating circumstances" under which you can appeal if you get hit with the fines, and most likely get them waived. It's not like you have recruited a big winning cash player by offering him illegal rakeback - one of your players has just won a tournament

[The Camel]

I can just about understand/accept their policy if it applied to cash games only.

But to be fined because someone has a score in a tournament is just a fucking joke.

[tikay]

I was under the impression that a big tournament win would fall under "mitigating circumstances" under which you can appeal if you get hit with the fines, and most likely get them waived. It's not like you have recruited a big winning cash player by offering him illegal rakeback - one of your players has just won a tournament

Thanks Karl.

I/we were not aware of that, if true.

We will check out that line. Are you reasonably confident of that?

Fancy that - mitigating circumstances being "he won a Tourney"!

In case anyone thought otherwise, this is not blonde only, or Aqua only - it's i-poker wide, if I understand it correctly.

[TightEnd]

The fines problem is something I've been grappling with for ages.

There are two potential fines. The deposit/withdrawal issue highlighted previously and a Win/loss fine too.

Frankly, we get stuffed on both from time to time as you good people withdraw more than you deposit and have been known to win more than you lose.

As The Baron intimated about a year ago the likes of Titan Poker (since muddied also by William Hill's purchase of IPoker) pushed for these fine ratios to be introduced because they were losing players to aggressive smaller skins such as NoIQ and Carlos Poker paying a lot of rakeback, cannibalising the player base from the bigger skins and seeing big withdrawal off the network, affecting liquidity so it is said

The new fines regime made it very difficult for the small aggressive skins to continue to operate on IPoker, and indeed they have since left

We however are in a different category

- We don't have a marketing budget as such, never had the £ to do so and frankly much of it is a waste of money anyway (except by direct added value to players on leagues for example). Our budget is in effect promotion via the forum.

- We don't cannibalise from other IPoker skins. We generally bring players in from other networks. This has been most notable since Flushy came on board with his players/friends giving us volume

- Our players win, generally, over time. It could be said that the mere act of joining via a website based news/forum skin indicates a desire to learn and a knowledge of poker over and above that of a player base for a skin based off, say, sportsbook clients from Greece!

- Our recreational players cannot be hoped to counteract the effect of a big win from our bigger players via matching deposits

- We don't pay incentives over that offered elsewhere on the netowrk


and yet still we get fined.

As it happens I make the points above every few weeks to IPoker and manage to hold some of the adverse financial consequences off.

I've also investigated moving, and indeed had a deal done to do so. Until new partner pulled out. However move and we lose access to Ipoker's liquidity and size and almost certainly go somewhere that our bigger players would regard as far less attractive to play.


So in effect we have a tough situation. Any skin wants a base of steadily winning players. Our network wants us to have a base of losing players, depositing a lot. Not such a long term growth strategy for us, that, or particularly viable.

[Colchester Kev]

On the positive side, tikay told the bunker story

[gatso]

In case anyone thought otherwise, this is not blonde only, or Aqua only - it's i-poker wide, if I understand it correctly.

how can it be ipoker wide? network wide withdrawals must be less than deposits otherwise there'd be a negative amount of money in play

[Colchester Kev]

In case anyone thought otherwise, this is not blonde only, or Aqua only - it's i-poker wide, if I understand it correctly.

how can it be ipoker wide? network wide withdrawals must be less than deposits otherwise there'd be a negative amount of money in play

Each skin has to have more in deposits than it has withdrawals in a calendar month.... or they get a fine.

[Dry em]

I was under the impression that a big tournament win would fall under "mitigating circumstances" under which you can appeal if you get hit with the fines, and most likely get them waived. It's not like you have recruited a big winning cash player by offering him illegal rakeback - one of your players has just won a tournament

Thanks Karl.

I/we were not aware of that, if true.

We will check out that line. Are you reasonably confident of that?

Fancy that - mitigating circumstances being "he won a Tourney"!

In case anyone thought otherwise, this is not blonde only, or Aqua only - it's i-poker wide, if I understand it correctly.

I've definitely been told it by someone in all the discussions I've been having over the past couple of months - it might have even been by Aqua but don't quote me on that. I also heard how difficult these people are to deal with, and so I would imagine it will take a bit of fighting, but I'm sure the principle is there somewhere where you get the chance to explain why your ratios are out in a certain month, and this is definitely one of the legitimate reasons to get the fines waived

gl

[tikay]

On the positive side, tikay told the bunker story

But I've forgotten it now.

[Claw75]

On the positive side, tikay told the bunker story

only positive if you share imo

[TightEnd]

Karl, thanks for that

I've certainly managed to get some fines waived to date on the basis of the points I made in my post above. Going to try the explicit point you make this time round!