There’s been plenty of news on some poker room scandals as of late. Thousands of players were furious after being ripped off by Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker which had certain players who could see other players’ hole cards. And plenty of poker sites and blogs were quick to report on this injustice so I don’t want to harp on it anymore.
But now there is a new problem arising in the poker room world where players are having checks bounce as they try to cash them in. The problem seems to stem from rooms that use a payment processor called Zip Payments. There are quite a few sites that offer Zip Payments as an option so a lot of people have been affected by this.
The rooms that sent these checks out are now trying to rectify the situation by sending new checks to the affected players and, in a lot of cases, covering the bank fees and penalties that arose from the situation. But this is just a band aid being put over a growing problem and a lot of people are looking for someone to blame.
And most of the blame for poker rooms being forced to use questionable payment processors like Zip Payments can be pinned on the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act that was implemented in 2006. Ever since the UIGEA act, poker rooms have been using these processors as a crutch and it doesn’t appear as if all of them are reliable.
There’s already been enough problems with UB and AB rocking the poker world and this is the last thing that players need. Hopefully poker rooms can find a 100% reliable method of getting money to players but this is probably something that will take a while to fix.
For sure, the poker community doesn’t need any more trouble right now. If it is rocked with any more scandals or problems, it’s going to hurt big time. The UIGEA has caused a lot of pain as well. What happens in the next year could be a turing point for poker – either up or down.
Yeah, hopefully this Zip Payments processor problem is the only one that surfaces for a while. I definitely agree with you that poker is at a crossroads and it could again approach the popularity it had from 2003 – 2005 while more scandals will scar certain players from wanting to participate in the game anymore.