As indicated in a previous post, I withdrew majority of my bankroll from Full Tilt due to the Black Friday brouhaha. I requested for a check and the first one arrived yesterday.
To my surprise, the check was from a Philippine bank and it was already in pesos. I have already done previous withdrawals from FTP and it was always a foreign check that arrived. But this time for some reason that could be related to Black Friday, it was already a local check.
Conversion was not too bad. Our current exchange rate is hovering at around 43 and I got around 40 : 1 for the dollars that I withdrew. This is certainly better than the rates being offered in Pokermanila forums if you're selling FTP $.
So for anyone reading this post. Withdrawal by check from FTP is actually now a valid alternative. It took about 2 week for the check to arrive in the mail from the time I made the transaction. So the wait was not too bad.
In another bit of poker news, Pokerstars recently changed their rake and blinds structure. This has caused an uproar especially among SNG and MTT grinders. It seems that the rake for the lower buy ins have increased and this has led to a lot of complaints. Marginally profitable players are thinking that the increased rake will totally wipe out their profits.
In my personal opinion, the rake is actually not too bad unless you play the micros which had a really big increase. But if you analyze it, it takes the same amount of server resources to process a micro tournament and a mid level tournament and obviously Pokerstars gets a lot more rake from the higher buyin tourneys. So raking micros higher makes sense from a strictly financial point of view.
For the 5 to 20 dollar tourneys that I sometimes join, the effect is not that big. There was one big change though The 15+1 9man turbos are gone. This is actually one of the most cost efficient SNGs that you can play in the online poker scene. The rake for this tourney is only 6.6% considering that the Industry average is about 10%. So obviously, Pokerstars had to get rid of this one to fuck over all of its loyal SNG grinders.
Anyway, for casual players, the increase in rake is not that noticeable. For grinders, it depends on what games you play. But at the end of the day, its all about making profit and due to Black Friday and the withdrawal of US players. Pokerstars' profits were significantly reduced and all the talk about being customer centric flies out the window if you're not making money.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
When there's smoke....
there's fire.
This is an often used quote to describe a situation where if a person sees signs of something unusual, then there is something bad going on and one must be alert and suspicious.
Right now, this is happening for Cake Poker. It appears like the site is having financial difficulties based on the length of withdrawal time and the flimsy excuses thrown at you by their customer support. Before, a withdrawal usually takes a few days. Now, I have a withdrawal pending for a month and its still sitting there.
Their customer support is claiming technical issues but that is a load of crap as my previous withdrawal took 3 weeks and they used the same excuse. How can you have a technical problem with your software for more than 3 months and you still haven't fixed it.
With black friday, one would think that Cake would experience some relief as US players would probably flock to their site as they are one of the few remaining still accepting US players. But I don't know, 1 month is a long time to process a small amount of money.
It was the same thing that happened to Banco Filipino which closed down recently. A few weeks before the actual close. I heard some rumblings about their financial state. It piqued my interest because my wife had some of our funds invested in their time accounts. So I did some research and discovered that they were actually not doing so well for quite some time now. So I asked my wife how much we had invested there and what was the interest rate. My suspicion became full blown paranoia when she told me that they were offering almost double what the other banks were giving out and this has been going on for the past year or so.
HUH? I may not be the brightest guy in this world. But I know one thing from player poker for this long. Nothing in this world is free and of course, when there's smoke, there must be fire. Why would a bank offer you a much much higher rate than the 2 biggest banks ? Did they have some genius fund manager who knew something most of us didn't ?
This led me to the decision to pull out all of our funds there. My wife was a little skeptical since she knew the manager and she reassured her that nothing was going on. She also felt that the interest was "sayang". But I was adamant and she finally agreed. She also told one of her aunts who had money there. The aunt withdrew most of her funds but left some money behind as she was also thinking of the wasted interest.
Exactly one week after our withdrawal, the bank closed. It was open Monday and then suddenly with no warning. It did not open anymore. A lot of my wife's friends and acquaintances got stuck with significant money in the bank. Yes, there is PDIC, but that's only for 500k. The rest is pretty much up to the whims of bankruptcy procedures.
My wife now thinks I have some kind of ESP or something. But it wasn't that or anything supernatural at all. Sometimes we are blinded when there is a chance to earn good money. We do not read the signs for what they are. Greed acts like a blinder. But if you just step back a little. You will see the real picture and you should act accordingly.
This is my last withdrawal from Cake as I have been slowly pulling out my funds and the amount I have left is insignificant. Sharkscope tells me that I am actually a shark in that site with an average ROI of more than 100%. But who cares about ROI and the fishes there if your funds get stuck. If a bank that is tightly regulated can close, what more a poker site with dubious regulations.
Repeat after me. Where there's smoke .................
This is an often used quote to describe a situation where if a person sees signs of something unusual, then there is something bad going on and one must be alert and suspicious.
Right now, this is happening for Cake Poker. It appears like the site is having financial difficulties based on the length of withdrawal time and the flimsy excuses thrown at you by their customer support. Before, a withdrawal usually takes a few days. Now, I have a withdrawal pending for a month and its still sitting there.
Their customer support is claiming technical issues but that is a load of crap as my previous withdrawal took 3 weeks and they used the same excuse. How can you have a technical problem with your software for more than 3 months and you still haven't fixed it.
With black friday, one would think that Cake would experience some relief as US players would probably flock to their site as they are one of the few remaining still accepting US players. But I don't know, 1 month is a long time to process a small amount of money.
It was the same thing that happened to Banco Filipino which closed down recently. A few weeks before the actual close. I heard some rumblings about their financial state. It piqued my interest because my wife had some of our funds invested in their time accounts. So I did some research and discovered that they were actually not doing so well for quite some time now. So I asked my wife how much we had invested there and what was the interest rate. My suspicion became full blown paranoia when she told me that they were offering almost double what the other banks were giving out and this has been going on for the past year or so.
HUH? I may not be the brightest guy in this world. But I know one thing from player poker for this long. Nothing in this world is free and of course, when there's smoke, there must be fire. Why would a bank offer you a much much higher rate than the 2 biggest banks ? Did they have some genius fund manager who knew something most of us didn't ?
This led me to the decision to pull out all of our funds there. My wife was a little skeptical since she knew the manager and she reassured her that nothing was going on. She also felt that the interest was "sayang". But I was adamant and she finally agreed. She also told one of her aunts who had money there. The aunt withdrew most of her funds but left some money behind as she was also thinking of the wasted interest.
Exactly one week after our withdrawal, the bank closed. It was open Monday and then suddenly with no warning. It did not open anymore. A lot of my wife's friends and acquaintances got stuck with significant money in the bank. Yes, there is PDIC, but that's only for 500k. The rest is pretty much up to the whims of bankruptcy procedures.
My wife now thinks I have some kind of ESP or something. But it wasn't that or anything supernatural at all. Sometimes we are blinded when there is a chance to earn good money. We do not read the signs for what they are. Greed acts like a blinder. But if you just step back a little. You will see the real picture and you should act accordingly.
This is my last withdrawal from Cake as I have been slowly pulling out my funds and the amount I have left is insignificant. Sharkscope tells me that I am actually a shark in that site with an average ROI of more than 100%. But who cares about ROI and the fishes there if your funds get stuck. If a bank that is tightly regulated can close, what more a poker site with dubious regulations.
Repeat after me. Where there's smoke .................
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