Not banned. I never deposited. I cashed in a freeroll for $1 and ran it up enough and made 1 withdrawal. Obviously I was playing micros to start and never played higher than 100.

Although Kahn says players on skins other than Pokerhost have been banned, it seems from those posting here that most are from Pokerhost. As already mentioned the "shark tax" is likely a factor. It also seems that higher stakes is also a factor. As I know nothing this is obviously conjecture. I just hope that with all the sharks being kicked off my winrate doesn't increase to the point of me being a shark.

I have $ on 6 sites so this has lowered Equity on my play list.

I am the opposite of a bum hunter. I never game selected at all. I played regs heads up to start games etc.

you guys think its worth to try and build a roll on this site or is this site gonna collapse in a couple of months

Requested $2200 cheque from Full Flush on 16th April.

Thought i'd redeposit 2k on neteller for

$600+$200+$200+$100 bonus and grind it out for 30 days.

took them till 25th April to take funds from my account and now I assume they are on the way in check form ($75 fee yikes).

This is my case money so looks like ill miss out on this huge bonus because they took a whole week off for Easter. Really .. would it be smart to Redeposit 2k before the check clears?? Such a new site.

Anyone got any news on similar bonus for next month?

To keep up with Open Waters 50% rakeback they should offer this every month don't u think?

Smart option might be to close this account and open an Open waters account in 60 days time. Anyone done this yet .. people are posting u need to close for six months I don't think this is correct.

If this is true, they really should articulate that fact, as it would obviously make what they are doing seem much more tolerable to some of their customers.

Hi SantaCruz,
As you know I don't work for EPN or PokerHost.

Thus, I have no information on this situation and the banning of players by either one of the above. All I can say is that no player has been banned from IntegerPoker for being "to aggressive" or for being a winning player.

It would be for PH, FFP or EPN to release a statement in this matter.

You may have also noticed that I'm barely active in this thread any more. The reason being that it is not Integer's job to provide public support or answer questions on a network level. Thus management has decided that I will only reply to questions specifically directed at IntegerPoker.

Kindly note that IntegerPoker is neither owned nor operated by EPN.

Came across this interview with Clive Archer searching for info on "Shark Tax".

http://calvinayre.com/2013/03/20/pok...poker-network/

Thought it gives some insight on why a player would be banned (not saying the bannings are right or wrong), especially this answer:

There's an article on this but it seems like this thread is their only source.

http://pokerfuse.com/news/poker-room...players-28-04/

After doing a bit of research into the EPN business model I think I've got a pretty clear idea what's going on in regards to switching skins and players getting banned.

First, I think that EPN has absolutely nothing to do with winning players getting banned. They have absolutely zero financial incentive to do so. EPN is paid a flat $10k/month by each skin and do not share in the revenue generated by the rake.

The skin you sign up with retains your rake forever. This makes for a huge disincentive on skins to cannibalize players from one another and makes it clear that the 6 month "time out" players would have to endure is what the skins themselves came up with to deal with this problem. I'm guessing that this policy was not in place from inception because the "6 month" time frame was stated by Sandy fairly recently. It makes sense that a skin would not want to pay rakeback (which is what the POP system essentially is) to a player for which another skin is collecting rake on.

This brings up an interesting conundrum. When a site joins the network (PokerHost) and a player on that site also had an account on an existing skin on the network, who gets that player's rake. IF this is something that the skins had to vote on recently it would make financial sense for all the existing skins to vote together in favor of the existing skin getting that player's rake going forward, rather than PokerHost. I suppose the fairest thing to do would be for the skin on which the player registered first to retain that players rake, and that would probably favor PokerHost. This is all speculation on my part and I doubt we'll ever know. If a winning PokerHost player was banned, this might explain it. Not getting that players's rake, having to pay that player incentives (POP/VIP points, etc.) and the contribution of that player to the "shark tax" would make that player extremely unprofitable for the site.

From what I've been able to determine, EPN's "shark tax" is a revenue sharing mechanism meant to provide incentive for a skin to continue to sign up new players. This puts a huge burden on a site (PokerHost) that joins which has a high ratio of sharks/fish. From Bazuko's email it seems like PokerHost's short term solution to plug this leak in their revenue was to get rid of the sharks to lessen the effect of the shark tax.

Any site that does not allow you to play how you want to play is definitely looking out for their own best interests and not yours ....They are essentially saying "We don't care about you , we care about us"

I have been playing poker a long time and this is one of the most disgusting things I've ever read about a poker company.

Another thing it says is that "We can't allow winning players to discourage the losing players from losing their rake money to us ... we need them around as long as possible because we aren't financially stable and definitely not stable enough to issue payouts to too many winning players"

But most of all this is unethical and just a big sign of greed from a company that is just flat out ignorant . Did you guys at EPN happen to ask Cake how player segregation went when they tried it? lol

Bad move EPN - I hope this business fails and I'm 99.9999% sure it will.

Wow , I'm just going back through this thread , what they are saying here is..."You must lose immediately! The slightest inclination that you can potentially win money from us will result in you being banned."

I think their margins are pretty healthy and I don't see any financial reason for a collapse.

You can't do this. 6 months of inactivity, minimum. Even then, 5D might not get your business if your original account was Full Flush (this last sentence is my own speculation based on behavior I've seen/heard outside of the forum fun).

Well, I stopped reading here, because everything you just said isn't necessarily true, or is flat out incorrect.


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Kahn

Was your response intentionally vague?

For others who were banned from pokerhost... make sure that your balance is correct. Mine was short by about $3,000. I called up and they told me that I was simply incorrect. After I pressed them to look into a bit they told me that I had transfered the $3,000 in question to the network where I had subsequently lost it. I did not in fact lose that money. They are now contacting the network to see where the money is. I can't check on it since I can't log into the account. I am supposed to call them back about it, but they can't give me a time frame in which to do so...

Basically if you had money in the poker client when you got banned rather than in your pokerhost account it appears that they didn't automatically transfer it back to pokerhost. So if you don't inquire about it you won't get it.

They banned several players inside a week of opening accounts. They won a reasonable amount and did play alot. The "researched" is totally bs. 1 player never played online ever. Talk about being soured on the online poker experience.

I've said this before in a different thread, but banning winning players is a flawed strategy for many reasons. The object of poker is to WIN. You can't punish players for doing something they are SUPPOSED to be doing. Even fish have the HOPE that they will be winners and if word gets out that that's how you treat your customer, who would play on such a site? Furthermore, let's pretend you DID get rid of all the winners, what would happen? Some of the players that were losing would THEN become winners. You now have to get rid of all those players and so on and so forth until you get rid of everyone except the fishiest player on the site. What does that accomplish?

Not to mention that traffic on all the US serving sites is less than optimal. The last thing you should be doing is turning away business. There's a reason live casinos have prop players because a site NEEDS regulars and can't survive on just recreational players.

Sure, there is room to tweak the system. Instead of 24 tabling, reduce it to 10 or something reasonable. Get rid of waiting lists. Get rid of player searching. Outlaw seating scripts. There's a lot of "common sense" legwork that can be done to eliminate obviously bad, predatory behavior, but don't stoop to nonsense like banning winning players or segregating players or anything obviously shortsighted like that.

B&M poker rooms have prop players?

Had the same thing happen to me just now. I had $1500ish left on the network and sucks cause I cant even log in, it used to say account disabled, now it says invalid user name, which scares me a bit that they may erase all my transaction history.

Im glad i asked to see if I had any points i could redeem, and then they realized my actual balance...

If Integer hasn't been pressured into banning players then this probably isn't the Network purge that PokerHost is implying. It's always possible that this was part of an agreement that PokerHost made with Equity as a condition of them joining the Network but that doesn't seem likely to me especially considering that PokerHost also used to ban winning players on the Merge Network.

If PokerHost is misrepresenting Equity's policies then Equity needs to cut them from the network as soon as possible. The addition of PokerHost was supposed to lift the network, instead it's dragging them down.

I'm just running theories here, but that last post makes me think that perhaps pokerhost didn't leave merge. Perhaps pokerhost was effectively booted from merge, due to the amount of winning players on there, and realized that they just can't cater to regs anymore if they want to be on any network but winning, so they moved to equity with the understanding that they'd have to ban winners and try to change their strat.

Just some good ole speculation.

+1

It's a very slippery slope and there are better ways to deal with the problem.


Yes, always and forever.



I don't think PokerHost catered to regs so much as attracted regs. PokerHost was the only alternative to the Jazette Cashier for half a year and PH has a far superior cashier in terms of speed and available cashout options. It attracted winning players who naturally wanted their winnings as fast as they could get them.


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Kahn

So how exactly does that work at B&M rooms?

Tonight i noticed that its possible to log on to both fullflush.com, and pokerhost.com at the same time. Not only can you do this, but you can also sit at THE SAME TABLE WITH 2 DIFFERENT SCREEN NAMES while doing this. I can't tell you guys enough what a ridiculous advantage this is in a game like plo, where knowing four cards before the flop is absolutely massive....

They called today. They want a physical copy of the check (had already emailed them a copy but that wasn't enough). So I had to fedex to Costa Rica and it cost me nearly 90 dollars. They better put that back in my account since I have no way to know since I can't log in since I'm banned. They also better waive the $85 fee for the new check they have to send. So frustrating.

wouldn't you know 8 cards before the flop if you were playing on 2 accounts?