Dateline: March 18th, 2012 AP Wire Services, France

Lock Poker indicated today that they have gone ahead with the Tim West signing and that West is now a confirmed LockPRO ELITE professional.

West, also known as Tmay420, was the focal point of an infamous 2p2 marketplace scandal which seems to have finally blown over, and to Lock Poker's great relief.

Eric Lynch, the Poker Room Manager at Lock and better known online as Rizen, made the announcement today from Lock Castle Headquaters in Frauduleuse, France.

We want to welcome Timmy West to the Lock team. It is clear that Timmy shares a special view of the poker community that coincides well with the Lock philosophy of ignoring important issues for as long as possible. Timmy has even expressed an interest in the business side of Lock, and this has gotten us all very excited since we admire Timmy's unique and innovative ways of luring investors.

Lynch took a moment to answer some of our pressing questions...

Can you comment more on what business roles West might have at Lock in addition to his ELITE pro status?

Well we're still kicking that one around. Of course, there's always the attracting investors thing. Whenever you're running a poker site where player funds are not being held in segregated accounts, then constantly finding investors--so we can keep the ship afloat and all get paid--is always a huge problem... I mean, look what happened to all of those geniuses at effn full tilt!

And any other possibilities for West?

Well yeah, there have also been some suggestions that Timmy could fill an integral role in the revamping of Lock's customer service department. While we sincerely cherish our player base here at Lock, I have to admit that our email support hasn't always been of the highest quality. To be sure, our canned email responses--to players with deposit and cashout issues--need to be entirely rewritten. Timmy has offered to author the rewrites on our behalf and it looks like we'll be taking him up on this since he has shown strong communication skills and an admirable sensitivity to the online poker community.

But hasn't Shane always headed Lock's customer service?

Well yeah Shane has, and he's been an enormous asset to us in that department. But sometimes you need to broaden your horizons, and Shane has recently been showing a keen interest in the software side of Lock. He's been taking night courses in QuickBASIC for about a month now and he'll be joining the development team in a couple of weeks. We've recently been having some minor security issues with plain-text passwords and we're confident that Shane will get to the bottom of it and figure out some sort of software patch.

But what about all the Tmay420 naysayers?

Look, I'm not going to hide from the fact that Lock has had its share of setbacks recently, what with MicroBob and the gang thinking that the casino bonus was for real money, where actually it was only ever meant to be a play money bonus, and then of course there was also that whole bluff-magazine-portuguese-chip-dumping-fiasco thing.

Now where Timmy is concerned, I went back and read that entire marketplace thread of his, which really pissed me off 'cause it was so effn long that I missed out on 3 whole plo sessions! Anyways, it's clear to me that Timmy handled the incident as gracefully as anyone could expect of him, and that this Purplegrape guy is an idiot for not wanting that 0.5% freeroll deal which Timmy so generously offered in lieu of a lousy 18k! I mean give me an effn break!!!

Anything else you'd like to add?

Actually, yes! Enough is enough already! These endless sneak-attack accusations by 2p2 forum posters is giving me a rash! Yeah we've made our share of unforgivable mistakes at Lock, but now we're working very hard to get ourselves the hella over it! And that goes for our player base too! Get the hella over it!, and let's go make some freakin money! Most of the complaints you see on the Lock forum are from a small handlful of degenerate poker addicts anyways! And most of them are just bitter Americans who can't play on Pokerstars anymore and have to settle for crappy sites like betonline and effn cake!!!

Well wouldn't you have to include Lock in all that?

WTF??? Are you serious??? C'mon now! Lock is way less crappy than those other guys!!!

Lol. The onion on pokernews

LOL less pros more investing on getting USA customers cashouts in less than a month

lol, great read

hahahaha

very well done

+1 Well done sir.

Ty for the laughs this morning.

Bwahaha this was well done.

<3 this

yup, what about NVG?

lol twest is a confirmed douche, well played OP

This is really good

With all the quality people available why Eric brings on one of his buddy's reminds me of the same stuff that went on at UB. When the scandal hits go silent and pretend it's not happening.

Eric I use to think you were one of the good guys of poker. Sadly that is proving not to be true.

excellent post