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Poker News Round-up: Week #32After a long troubled period in which poor financial results have been the norm and the WPT poker client has ceased operation, finally WPT Enterprises has had two back to back quarters in which it has made a profit. Now that a corner seems to have been turned, it would appear that the owners have decided that this might well be a good time to sell up and move on. A deal has been struck with Gamynia Ltd who will acquire the tour plus most other WPT assets such as its television library for $9,075,000. It is thought that Gamynia will also be looking to enter the online gaming market – a venture which has previously proved unsuccessful for WPTE, but one the new owners obviously still see potential in as they are in talks with Hardway Investments about providing a gaming platform. The sale still needs to be approved by current shareholders but that looks to be progressing without problem so the transaction should be complete by the end of the year. In the meantime the itinerary and structure of the tour is scheduled to continue as normal, although interim chief financial officer Thomas Flahie has hinted that the tour needs to focus beyond American shores in future. “The buyer has expressed an interest in expanding the tour in Europe” he said, so we may be seeing a WPT London event before too long. A few months ago many poker players found that the payouts they had been expecting were not being processed as a result of various banks having funds frozen for their involvement in the gambling sector. Now one man is facing up to some pretty serious charges for his involvement in the payment processing after incurring the wrath of the US attorney for southern New York and the FBI. It is alleged that Douglas Rennick opened numerous bank accounts in different corporate names claiming that they would be used to deal with affiliate payments and sponsorship money, when in fact they were used to accept money from gambling websites and subsequently pay out customers. Now he stands accused of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to engage in money laundering and conspiracy to operate an illegal gambling business. Many players have commented that they received cheques from Rennick’s companies after cashing out from poker sites so his lawyers are going to be hard pressed to conjure up a not guilty verdict on this one. Maybe all he can hope for is a sympathetic judge who shows some clemency as the worst case scenario is 30 years in prison and fines approaching $2 million. For many players inconvenienced by these problems with payment processors, a new service launched this week may be an excellent alternative for moving money around online. It has become common in recent years to see requests on forums for money trades if someone has a positive balance on one site but is unwilling or unable to deposit on another site. Whilst numerous people have benefitted from these trades, they have unfortunately attracted unscrupulous operators in the past and now many players steer well clear of them for fear of being scammed. Now a service available at sendmychips.com allows a player to transfer funds from one site to another via their company, using a recognised source rather than an unknown contact from an internet forum. By keeping a balance available solely for transfers on various sites sendmychips.com will facilitate easy site to site transfers, and has been approved by several of the larger sites including Full Tilt. The only problem is that the people who probably need this sort of service the most i.e. Americans are not permitted to use it. This week there will have been plenty of people trying to get their money off Pokerstars in a rush after a glitch in their software was exposed and subsequently exploited for a great deal of money. Anyone playing a heads up sit n go was able to accept a rematch even if they had insufficient funds in their account, so it didn’t take long before people were recruiting accomplices to deliberately lose and allow the other player to run up a massive winning streak risk free (or at least that’s how it seemed at the time.) Such a situation couldn’t last long though and soon enough Pokerstars had identified those who had been clearly taking advantage and denied the winners access to the money. Players who accepted rematches without sufficient funds have been assigned a negative balance on their cashier page and asked to make a deposit in order to clear the deficit (an optimistic move which hasn’t exactly been too effective so far.) Where it gets messy though is that during this time there were plenty of regular players in their normal games who would have been matched against people who were freerolling. There is no reason to suggest that they could have had any way of knowing that their opponent did not have money in their account to accept a rematch, yet the results of these games have also been cancelled and players who thought they had won games as part of their daily grind have also had money deducted from their accounts. There have been rumours that this was no mistake but an inside job by programmers working on the latest software update, but it seems unlikely that anyone in that position would choose such an unsubtle way to exploit the system which was available to everyone. It looks much more like a simple yet costly oversight, but either way there are a lot of unhappy customers finding out that they haven’t won as much as they thought they had. After several smaller buy in versions during the WSOP, the GUKPT returns to full scale action this week with the Luton £1,000 main event. Early indications are that the attendance is likely to be down on last year but we’ll take a look at how things pan out there in next week’s newsround.
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