Play at Your Own Risk

The Absolute Poker cheating allegations are the hot topic. I can’t help but laugh at all the people writing about this topic – despite all the bitching, everyone will keep playing. And really, what are you, as a player, going to do about it?

My thoughts from a different angle. Imagine these scenarios and tell me what you would do:

-- You log onto your on-line account one evening and the cashier window says your account is $0. You send some e-mails. The response is “our records reflect that your account is $0.” You send more e-mails, make phone calls and repeatedly receive the same response – our records say that your account is $0.

-- You play in a cash game and its obvious that two or more players at your table are colluding. Several people lose money, including you. You send e-mails, and the response is “we have reviewed the history and our records indicate that there was no cheating.”

-- You try to log on to play and the site is no longer running. The company just closed up shop and ran with the money in all player accounts.

Seriously, what would you do? Send messages, make phone calls, post loud rants on chat boards, scream in your personal blog. What would this accomplish when someone else is holding your money? In the U.S., possession is 9/10 of the law. With off-shore internet poker sites, its probably 10/10 of the law (whatever the law may be that governs the situation).

Would you try to sue? Would you actually seek out an attorney and pay him/her money out of your own pocket to file a lawsuit? Who would you sue? How does US law apply in the jurisdiction in which the on-line company operates? The jurisdictional problems alone might be an insurmountable hurdle to anyone that does not have lots of money to pay attorneys. And what attorney would take this case on a contingency basis?

The point is, if any scenario happened where your money just disappears from an on-line poker account, there’s probably not a damn thing you could do about it. For this reason, I am amazing that people rely upon on-line poker as their primary (or only?) source of income. For anyone that actually relies upon this to feed their children -- absolutely irresponsible. I am not indicting poker as a profession, just the unreliable nature of on-line poker.

Play at your own risk.