I will buy yours for .10... I am going to assume you have nothing on Lock if you are saying this. If you do I will give you cash Tuesday. LOL

Well, since the grand trade post there's been zip as far as reported value trades of Lock - think anyone has any reason to post what they are selling/buying it at now? So much for the idea Lock liked the vig report...seems to me they're doing a pretty good job of making Lock disappear from it.

For those of you who are still in the "Maybe those two pros just need quick money" camp, let me burst that bubble right now.

Taking a 3-to-1 loss on your money is HUGE. Payday loan companies, for example, which are notoriously bad for basically loansharking, don't hit you with anywhere NEAR this kind of vig.

Basically you only accept a 3-to-1 loss on a fairly large sum of money if you think that there's a realistic chance you end up with zero otherwise.

So let's take Greg "HokieGreg" Tiller, for example.

He wants to sell $10,000 on Lock for $3300, taking a $6700 loss.

Greg is not some newb to the poker scene. He has lots of friends in poker, and lots of other people who otherwise like him.

$3300 is NOT a lot of money in the poker community. People loan and stake $3300 all the time.

Sure, you can't just walk into a poker room as an unknown and get someone to loan you $3300, but if you're as well-known and established as Greg, you can easily get a loan or stake for $3300.

Now let's say Greg asked friends for a $3300 loan and promised to pay $1000 on top of it. He'd have people lining up to loan him the money.

Let's say Greg wanted to play some WSOP events with the $3300. He could easily find people to stake him if he took a nonstandard staking arrangement (i.e. a smaller percentage of himself than usual), and again people would be lining up to do this.

So given the above (and they ARE givens, if you know anything about the poker world), why in the world would someone like Greg Tiller accept a $6700 (67%) loss on his Lock money if he believes Lock to be legitimate?

Because he doesn't.

Because he realizes that Lock is in huge trouble, and he'd rather get $3300 now than $0 later.

I don't think Greg has any inside information. I think he just realizes what all of us do -- that Lock is a sinking ship, and like the rats on the Titanic, he's jumping off. Of course, like a true rat, he is also promoting the site for others to still jump on, as he is getting ready to jump off.

It simply defies any sort of logic that Greg (and now Jared Hubbard), both well known and well connected within poker, would be selling their Lock $ at 33% if they really believed they could get it off.

Why is Lock allowing this?

I imagine that they are not happy about it, but they don't want to refuse to allow the pros to do this, or otherwise they might make a stink about Lock's financial situation, and cause even greater harm.

Why doesn't Lock just pay them and shut them up?

They are probably afraid this will start a precedent where other Lock pros immediately want their money, and Lock can't afford that.

So basically Lock has no choice but to let this happen, make excuses, and hope this blows over.

Exactly, I really belive this too.

+1

@Killowatt I agree with you on everything. Do you think that this is these two players way of cutting ties with Lock? They must have some contractual agreement that includes that they can't make disparaging remarks about Lock while under the agreement.

I think everyone should ramp up the pressure against the pros who were somewhat vocal about Lock's possible turnaround. What do they think now? What happened to Melanie Weisner, Matt Stout and Bryan Pellegrino? They were so adamant about the fact that Lock would be better today then they were in May.

I would love to see another softball interview done by G911 with Jen Larson. The last one was full of so much suck that this latest Lock fiasco might prove to have some much better entertainment value.

At the time of this post there are 25+ pros promoting Lock Poker and 280+ players playing cash games on 80+ skins on the entire Revolution Network. That's pretty horrible numbers no wonder the pros aren't getting paid. Why they stay is beyond me.

They aren't cutting ties. They are just trying to squeeze whatever little value they can out of their money.

The contract doesn't mean anything. It is not enforceable for several reasons.

If I signed a contract with the neighborhood drug dealer to promote his services to the neighborhood, it would have about the same degree of validity as the Lock contract. Simply put, a contract to promote or provide material support for illegal services is not valid in any of the 50 states.

They don't want to disparage Lock because they don't give a crap about people getting ripped off by Lock, as evidenced by Greg's continued promotion of the site as he tries to sell off his money for 33%. They just want their own money off, even at a 3-to-1 loss.

It's textbook selfishness and cavalier disregard for the fate of everyone else.

I see what you mean. They don't deserve any praise at all. This is such a horrible situation for anyone who has money on this site.

By the way, I just read an article that CardPlayer is considering taking any site that caters to Americans down from their site. It was on PokerScout.

fwiw its 7am est for a US driven site when you wrote this, of course traffic is gonna be low at this time, look at it again in 12 hours.

Yes, or 4am on a weekend if you're in California. I suppose you might report back what the figures are 12 hours later if you want. Anyway you look at it if the traffic is lower than 1,000 and the Lock Poker Pro promoters performance that is spread among lots of affiliate sites, dozens of pros and 80+ skins is crappy.

The pros are worthless and they know it. They're even more worthless to Lock when they sell of their bank rolls at 33 cents on the dollar. It's a horrible message. Let's give Lock a pat on the back, they have double the traffic Merge has right now.

I saw a Lock trade completed at .25 in the transfer thread.

Pokerscout also lists seats taken, not players. (If that's where you got the #'s from)

So if you play ten tables, you count as ten players.

When you consider that, there's far less people on the site. Everybody plays at least 4 tables I would imagine.

As someone who is extremely frustrated with Lock at the moment, I even think you guys are reading a little too much into the Hokiegreg selloff. He's a very successful player with a likely very large amount of money stuck on the site. That money would obviously take a very very long time to get off through the normal processes, so he sold 10k off at about the market rate? Whats the big deal here?

As for him still endorsing the site, that was equally questionable before and after this selloff. Nothing's changed.

Yea I agree with this completely and if anything, all the attention we have given this is responsible for driving the market value down. I can't even sell on the thread anymore because of how worthless it has become.

I have compassion for you if you have a lot of money on the site, so I'm not trying to be argumentative in a nasty way.

The big deal is that the pro represents the site and Lock is too stupid to pay them before they go and sell it off in the market or they are unable to pay. It sends a bad message.

Who's next to stop getting paid, the security team or the people who are processing payments, or customer service?

Can you really not see that's entirely different? This is a POKER site, the customer service, security team etc. aren't even allowed to play on the site. The Pro's are playing POKER with their OWN FUNDS. This has really nothing to do with them being paid out as an employee or not, if they receive seperate paychecks for being a Pro, then THOSE paychecks arriving late is another thing.

As said before by Shane, Pro's playing on the site with their funds are subject to the same cashout times as others are, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

@mccormick give me a break. I can see the difference.

It isn't entirely different. Some of their contracts are set up as independent contractors for marketing or affiliate contracts. The difference is they are required to represent the brand and receive more perks than a regular Joe. They sign NDAs and all types of things.

They may have the same payout times as players, but they are required to promote the brand in a good light. Going onto 2+2 to sell of funds shows they have little confidence that they will get paid.

You can argue all you want, but it looks very bad for the company that they can't pay even the pros in a timely manner considering they are the closest thing to an employee.

I understand why some may be annoyed at Lock Pros who sell their money at first, but the Lock pros have nothing to do with the mess that is Lock Poker (other than being an unneeded expense). This Shane being does not matter either, it is clear he has no real decision making capability, and is an amusing mouthpiece at best.

Lock Poker offered completely unsustainable benefits, and I am amazed at some of the people who are still there a year later despite the constant decline over a long period of time.

Shane outright lies when he says Lock is up to date on their settlement payments. They owe Cake a ton, and Cake owes other skins a lot and Cake simply stopped paying them after a while.

Those other skins (adameve, zetpoker etc) either died or struggled, but they were relatively small in the scheme of things and one can debate whether skins like that are even good for a network (look at ipoker and Ongame and even Party Poker for how they handled similar skins).

Each month Lock owed more and more, and eventually something has to give.

Enter "Fair Play" and its dozen iterations.

The last thing Fair Play was about was protecting donks. Not a single Lock account was ever put into the advanced tier, but a 10 NL player on Intertops I back certainly was after he won about $8 in a week. Advanced indeed...

Obviously they looked at whether the various iterations of Fair Play stabilized the situation for Lock, and while some may have helped a little it clearly in the end did not do enough to stop the bleeding.

Now we have Lock essentially segregated from all games except baby stakes cash and MTTs (which combine represent a pretty small portion of player losses - ie: what drives the monthly reconciliation payments).

Did Lock do this or did Cake? Seems logical that Cake is basically separating Lock at this point to stop the bleeding, and if Lock manages to survive somehow that is great. If it fails - at least the damage gets limited and in the meantime the reconciliation debt Lock has grown finally calms down.

Lock money at 25-30 cents? The only reason it was not there sooner was because some people were systemically buying Lock at .50 or so and chip dumping to players they were backing on other skins. Not too hard to make money (even paying healthy rake) when your dollars almost double in value by switching which account they are in.

Intertops correctly started cracking down on that behavior, closed a few accounts etc, and somehow all of those .50 buyers vanished from the marketplace even though nothing had structurally changed with the network.

The current .25-.3 is a proper price for a company on the verge of death but not facing certain death. If it ever hits .15 -.2 then that's a good sign that the market thinks it is a goner for sure , but some people will gamble on when it will happen. People were buying UB for about that even near it's end.

Those that have continued to stick with Lock over the past months/years and continue to ask Shane questions hoping he can help - no idea what to even suggest at this point - maybe you have nothing to lose, but everything that is happening is because Lock is running their business into the ground, and whether they take Cake with them remains to be seen.

Why Lock Poker owe Cake Poker a ton and how much is it?

I noticed the other day that Cake Poker has a wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cake_Network

I think it might be worthwhile to create a Lock Poker wikipedia page documenting all the bull**** they've done over the years.

Wikipedia entries tend to rank high on google searches, and maybe more people might be made aware of this ******ed site

You are doing a great job with the report. The only problem is that these are not "efficient" markets. They are subject to wide swings due to the limited pool of buyers and sellers who are panicking. And Lock just made a bad situation worse by failing to restore any confidence in their company.

No one is accusing Lock pros of being responsible for the current state of Lock. However, they are responsible for continuing to encourage people to deposit and play, even though they know that Lock is in trouble. The fact that Lock pros are selling their own money just removes any remote chance that those particular pros were simply naive or had some positive inside information about the future of Lock.

The same goes for Shane. No matter who is ultimately responsible, Cake doesn't make Shane come here and tell lie after lie to players in the hopes of salvaging a few deposits that might not happen otherwise. That is his own decision, and he has decided that whatever it is that he gets paid is worth more to him than his integrity.

Or maybe they know this isn't so and they know it's really payment processing issues, and then everything else is just filling in gaps by disgruntled players.

I'm not stating either one is true, I don't know. But I am saying that none of these events make either more clear, what we see here is a fine case of people tunnelvisioning their thought on things and seeing connections that may well not at all be there.

Again, though, Lock may well infact be in financial trouble, I don't know, I just don't think a Pro selling Lock $ (just like loads of other high volume players are) means anything much.

It is very strange that both Hubbard and Tiller made the posts at about the same time demanding the same vig when neither one had not been active at all on the transfer forums for at least a couple of months. I would love to hear their explanations; that might actually set everything straight, and then we wouldn't have to speculate.

I wonder if Greg Hokie going to talk up the tournaments tomorrow, I don't follow twitter. Those who do, should tell him he is being a hypocrite, "the tournies are so great" while on the other hand basically giving away his lock funds.

Can someone explain this to me please.Why would Lock have fallen behind on settlement payments if players funds are separate from the companies?