On Thursday, Intertops Poker, a poker room on the Revolution Gaming Network, announced that will now be taking the extreme measure of reviewing most player winnings before crediting funds to accounts in order to combat chip dumping at the tables.
An Intertops Poker representative posted the following message on the Two Plus Two message board on July 25th:
To counter the recently dramatically increasing number of chip dumping incidents, we have implemented a new security procedure. All winnings are being reviewed by the network security before they are authorized and credited to the player’s account. This causes a delay between cashing out of a table / winning a tourney and the accounting process.
We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we have to take some kind of action to ensure we can still offer our service to our true customers in the future.
Upon questioning, he later clarified that multi-table tournaments will not be included in this policy, though it is not clear if that adjustment has filtered all the way through the support staff, as there have been reports of multi-table tournament winnings being delayed because of review.
Reactions to the policy have been mixed. Some people, understandably, are concerned that reviewing every cash game and Sit-and-Go win is going to be a very labor-intensive, inefficient process and, of course, nobody likes having the crediting of their money being delayed. As one poster on Two Plus Two wrote, “Why not just review user to user transfers prior to being approved and processed? Surely spending time reviewing cashouts and p2p transfers has to be less time consuming then reviewing all winnings as they come off the table.”
Others support the change, even if it’s reluctantly. “Lol just when u think you’ve seen everything some new small irritation comes along,” one player said. “I get why tops is doing this, its [sic] just funny how much of a trainwreck the whole network has become.”
In response to that, another player chimed in, “I don’t see this as much of an irritation. I think it’s just Intertops being proactive. At least they announced this – other skins on Revolution wouldn’t have done that (and you know who I mean). Yeah, it sucks to wait a bit. But Tops seems to have been all about doing this cautiously and not balls to the wall like other companies who only cared about making the most money as possible before their eventual (or coming) collapses.”
What that person is hinting at is the problems with other poker rooms on the Revolution Gaming Network, which is also why the person who would prefer player-to-player transfers be reviewed instead is missing the point of Intertops’ policy. The Revolution Gaming Network is plagued by poor poker operators. According to the latest “US Online Poker Payment Processing Report” on PokerAffiliateSolutions.com, two of the more prominent rooms on the network, Lock Poker and Juicy Stakes Poker, are graded “D-“ and “F,” respectively, for cashout speed. On the other hand, Intertops is one of the best in the industry, receiving a grade of “A-.” As a result, many players on the lesser quality sites have found partners to whom they sell their poker funds at a steep discount. And it is a really steep discount. According to statistics posted on Two Plus Two, Lock poker funds are being traded at less than 29 cents on the dollar, while Juicy Stakes funds are going for just over 40 cents on the dollar. For comparison, Intertops funds are commanding almost 93 cents on the dollar.
And that’s where Intertops’ big problem comes in. Trading funds is one thing; chip dumping is another. Because of the cashout problems at various Revolution Skins, there has been an increase in chip dumping on Intertops, where players at a lesser skin dump to an Intertops friend who then cashes out for them. It appears that Intertops would rather deal with the hassle of reviewing wins immediately as opposed to the potentially bigger hassle of reviewing cashouts and then figuring out what to do with ill-gotten funds.
I stopped playing on The Revolution Network months ago