February 2010 US Poker
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February 24
9:31pm – I was speaking via email to someone who has stake in the online casino side of things and has been in the business for longer than me and this is what he had to say about recent depositing situations. It’s not confidential information or anything but since I haven’t asked permission to quote him I won’t mention his name or casino. “Everyone is working like crazy for fixes (Mastercard), etc and just so you know, there’s major rumblings that Visa could join the party in some form or another. My contacts on the Ecommerce side of things are keeping me up to date and I’m not going to lie to you, it’s tough right now.”
February 21
8:32am – According to the CEO of Poker Nordica, a poker site that runs off the Merge Network. He said that Merge has been actively working on the problem and should expect the backlog of payouts to commence in coming days. All withdraw times of sites that use the Merge network are said to be back to normal according to the CEO of Merge.
February 17
10:42pm – Senator Kyl has finally given up his hissyfit in appointing key people to the Treasury in what was said to be punishment to the Treasury for delaying the UIGEA. Basically it sounds like Obama was going to start appointing nominees that were awaiting Senate’s approval, and to “save face” Senator Kyl just went ahead and caved.
When I get back from Puerto Rico tomorrow I will see if Mr. Rose can do a “State of the Industry Part II” for us.
February 11
12:34am – There has been a payment group called the UC Group which has launched a new office in the United States that sees the US online gaming opening up in the near future so they are setting up shop to move forward instantly the day it becomes legalized. One of the guys part of the company used to work for as an executive of Mastercard. Source: Egaming Review.
February 8
1:43pm – Pokerstars issued a statement earlier today saying they don’t recode credit card transactions. The code, 7995, which is coded as “gambling” is said to never be recoded by the company. If the card goes through, it’s the credit card companies fault they pretty much said. If it doesn’t they’ll continue to offer alternative methods. They will be hurting if VISA or Mastercard decide to really clamp down on credit card processing with them, as most of the major gaming sites (obviously most common with sportsbooks but hell they don’t care because they are already breaking the law per previous laws) recode CC’s until they go through. You take away CC’s and Echecks in the event that the UIGEA eventually provokes this and Pokerstars is cruising for a bruising.
February 6
10:09pm – The marketing director of Carbon Poker has said the Mastercard issue will be cleared up by early next week for the Merge platform, saying “there are solutions already in place”.
February 6
7:37am – A couple news sites are reporting that VISA has initiated a crackdown on credit card deposits. I have found NO evidence of this and the sources I’ve talked to say VISA is working fine, it is only Mastercard they are currently having issues with (at this point in time). One website that usually has good information posted that because they tried to deposit with a VISA card and were declined, that all players were getting declined. I was pretty shocked that the article was even written on such absurd “evidence”. It seems others have run the same story based on that bad article. I think everyone knows by now that any credit card deposit be it VISA, MC or Amex is hit or miss on any given day.
Anyways, Full Tilt Poker declined to respond about the Mastercard issue but as I said, they still have MC listed in their lobby and I didn’t read any reports on their forum of MC transactions not working. While I have a theory on how MC is blocking transactions I’m kind of curious to see if it’s correct so I may contact someone I know who works on the deposit/fraud site at a major poker site who would know the answer but just in case “unfriendly” visitors are reading my posts I’ll keep it to myself if anything comes out of it. Wouldn’t want other CC’s to follow the same footsteps. 
February 4
12:47am – Pokerstars has confirmed that Mastercard is still working for their players. Also, while Full tilt has not yet replied, they still have Mastercard available in their cashier lobby.
Also, Playersonly, Sportsbook Poker, and Superbook will be moving from the Cake Network over to the Merge Network. They will do so by April 2010.
February 3
3:05pm – After a little more investigating I found the Credit Card declines are currently isolated to Mastercard. Apparently Mastercard has been known to be more proactive in shutting down processing, but as we know, gambling sites are persistent and look for ways to get things back up and running. In all I contacted Doylesroom, Absolutepoker, Bodog, and a variety of Casinos. They all said that Mastercard was down. The only site to say Mastercard was still working was Sportsbook.com but that was likely an uninformed support personnel. All other deposit methods are unaffected at this point in time, including Visa.
One tid bit of information given was this about pre-paid cards from an Absolute Poker rep. We do not have an approximately time frame on when is it going to be up and running. You can try getting a Visa pre-paid card/giftcard for international transactions as we are overseas. You can get them from $10 and up in stores like 7Eleven , Walgreen’s, Walmart, K-mart , Liquor Stores , Gas-Stations, etc. Please be sure that the card doesn’t say : “valid only in USA”.
3:05pm – I just heard some troubling news that hasn’t really hit mainstream news sites yet. Apparently credit card processors, mainly Mastercard have figured out how online gambling sites were processing transactions and getting around the coding issues. According to Jeremy, the owner of Pokeraffiliatelistings, Mastercard has been the main credit card monitoring how poker sites and their customers were able to deposit, and they’ve finally figured it out. We could possibly lose all credit card deposit methods for casinos, poker, and sportsbooks in coming days/weeks. This would be a huge blow to the industry considering a ton of people deposit via credit cards from the US. It’s still early but yes, Mastercard deposits are down.
If this really is true, and you deposit via credit card your best option is going to be to open up an ewalletxpress account at Absolutepoker or UB since Stars and Tilt for some reason don’t have it. I wouldn’t suspect that echecks will be affected at all the poker sites because as far as I’ve heard this is credit card related only (for now at least, this option could burst anytime). Also there has been no word about American Express. Most gambling sites have yet to release statements as not not cause pandemonium.
February 3
2:20am – This guy, Doug Rennick has gotten himself into a real crap storm. He was the person behind the company awhile back that was busted for doing payment processing for Stars and Tilt, $350 mill to be exact. Looks like he’s going to get “up to” 30 years. To this day, I still have no clue what happened to the Neteller founders that were busted. The NY DOJ always refuses my request for any questions because they say it’s still “ongoing”.
