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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 .................

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