Poker Articles

As cardroom manager for Cake Poker, I get a lot of emails from players. Suggestions, complaints, requests – they run the gamut. I reply to as many of them as I can – being accessible to Cake’s customers is one of my most important responsibilities.
 
Unfortunately, I can’t always give my correspondent what he wants, and that’s most common when money is involved.

Specifically, when the email is of the form “I lost <$X> from my account because I did <unwise or naïve thing Y>.” Almost always, I am forced to say “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do for you.” I always forward these emails onto our security people, and virtually 100% of the time, they have to send the same sad message to the player.

Here are a few things that you can do so you never have to send one of those awful “Help me get my money back” emails to an online poker site:

1.    Treat your online poker account like a bank account. This is, by far, the most important one; everything else derives from it. Look, after watching Patrik Antonius and Tom Dwan swap $250,000 pots, and hearing stories of the cash game stars making $3,000,000 in a year, I suppose we get a bit blasé about all the zeroes. So you have “only” $500 in your account – maybe it doesn’t seem like much. Wrong. $500 is a lot of money. Let’s suppose you have a job that pays you $15 per hour, and you work 40 hours per week. Well, that $500 represents what you would take home after over a week of work.

2.    Bad people want to take your money. When you swap money across poker sites, you probably won’t get ripped off. But there’s a pretty damn good chance that you will get ripped off. I know it’s hard to get money onto poker sites sometimes, but the solution is not to expose yourself to the cesspool that is the online money exchange free market. Make an effort and find somebody that you know – I mean, you and this person have some kind of relationship outside the Internet. Make an exchange that benefits both of you; perhaps you take some kind of discount because you’re the person who needs the money moved. But just because you’ve done a bunch of IMs with somebody doesn’t mean that he’s trustworthy. That’s exactly how con men work – they make you comfortable with them, perhaps do a few smaller exchanges, then they suddenly disappear when the amount is $2500 rather than $100.

3.    Good people may take your money anyway. The moral here: don’t give your friends access to your account. In some ways, it’s much harder to take when somebody that you know and respect (or thought you knew and thought you respected) makes off with some of your hard-earned money. Sometimes it will all begin innocently enough – your friend begins playing on your account (which, by the way, violates the terms and conditions of every poker site I know). Now he loses some money, and moves up in stakes to try to get it back. The next thing you know, your “friend” has emptied out your bankroll. In over six years in the online poker business, I have lost count of the terrible incidents in which a “friend” given access to somebody’s online account has lost or stolen the entire balance. In short: if you wouldn’t hand a person your ATM card and tell him the PIN, then don’t tell him the password to your online poker account.

4.    If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. This is an old cliché, but it’s an old cliché because it’s so darned accurate. If you are being offered some astonishing value for an online money swap, there’s a pretty darn good chance that it’s a scam. Believe me, there’s no reason in the world that somebody should be willing to trade $500 on site A to get $300 on site B.

I think perhaps we all suffer some loss of perception when it comes to online poker funds. We see hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars flying back and forth across the digital green felt – we lose a sense of how meaningful that money is. The next time you’re thinking about shipping a quantity of money to an online IM-friend, go get your hands on that same sum of money in real paper dollars (or pounds, euros, whatever your currency of choice is). Ask yourself if you’re willing to risk it all for whatever reason you’re doing this exchange.

Let’s keep the gambling to the poker games, okay?

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Lee Jones is the cardroom manager of Cake Poker and has been in the online poker business for over six years. He is also the author of Winning Low Limit Hold’em, which is in its 15th year of publication.

More Articles by Lee Jones

This, Too, Shall Pass Aug 27, 2009

The Arc of a Home Game Jul 14, 2009

Getting What You Want from an Online Poker Site Jun 21, 2009

Lee Jones Podcast - May 21, 2009

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