Two weeks later, Pokerroom.com has stepped up and honored their contract with players in a $20+2 $19,000 guarantee tournament that they say was never supposed to be a guarantee. You can check out all the gory details in my article for Pokerworks from last week, but here’s the endgame.

Here is the response from the Pokerroom boss posted to 2+2 internet forums this week. It doesn’t really make me feel any better about them.

Subject: About the PokerRoom X-mas tourney

Ladies and gentlemen, please put down your pitchforks and torches for a
moment and hear me out.

Looking back at the response we have had since running the Christmas
Tournament, we felt it was necessary to provide our players with a
resolution and an explanation to the situation we have encountered.

On December 16th, PokerRoom.com held a tournament advertising a flat
screen HDTV valued at $2,000 and other prizes including PokerRoom.com
merchandise. All promotional information given out to players stated
the above information; players were able to view this in the promo
section, through e-mails, and on the registration page.

Surely we would have mentioned it in our marketing if we had _planned_
for the tourney to have a $19,000 added cash bonus? If we deliberately
wanted to “lure” people in with that cash, as some posters have
suggested, shouldn’t we at least have mentioned that sum in our ads?

The fact is that on the day of the tournament, a software glitch caused
the information in our game client to change to read that this
tournament was a $19,000 guaranteed tournament, though all other
promotional and tournament info pages still stated that the
tournament’s first prize was a flat screen HDTV valued at $2,000.

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.

Personally speaking, however, I must say that I’m a little disappointed
to see so many being eager to jump on the bandwagon of hate, without
first investigating the facts or background of the situation. It seems
that some people just want to read the things that support their
already formed picture of “the big, bad corporation ripping off the
little guy”. But things aren’t always that black and white in reality.

Over the almost 8 years that we have run PokerRoom.com we have made
mistakes, a lot of mistakes even. But I can honestly say that we have
never deliberately ripped off any of our customers.

Sincerely,
Oskar Hornell
Founder of PokerRoom.com

So let me get this straight - because you had a software glitch, you don’t feel you really HAD to honor your own TOS, but out of the goodness of your heart, you decided to honor your contract with players two weeks later, after your story had been all over every poker news site and message board in the interweb? Or maybe you decided that all those people who were sending you emails saying “Even if you come back into the US market, I’ll never give you any money” were serious?

GG, pokerroom, gg.

For the record, I play on Full Tilt and Stars, sites that I can trust.

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