GG 11k. Hopefully there are some good news for our funds otherwise Microgaming and the commission who regulates them lose a lot of credibility regardless of ToS bs.

Good point. FYI Microgaming whilst licenced is not liable for player funds - that is the site.

When the player fund "protection" proposals were fist put together I strongly lobbied for the network and the site to be jointly and severally liable for the player funds, after all some of the time Microgaming could have some of the cash that moves betwen players on different sites winning and losing against each other.

I argued that the sites were the weakest, smallest and most vulnerable compared to the larger, richer networks so placing sole responsibility with the riskiest part was wrong.

I also argued that such an event would also be a PR disaster for the UKGC because HM Treaasury had already made clear that they regarded the networks and the sites as jointly and severally liable for the point of consumption tax.

So as the players lose their money, don't worry the taxman gets all of his.

Thanks OP for posting the news.
Sad times. As a former player there, it's interesting to read everyones posts too.

Totally agree.
Played there years ago, as a 'depositing player'.
One day their software developed various glitches meaning i couldn't see the cards or hand history properly (made it hard to play). Emailed them, it took them days to answer: that they basically didn't care to fix it. Very slow and bad support: Great way to lose players and have them never come back.
You are right though, it was nice to play there, good social interaction & fun environment, their site had huge potential and a unique nice feel to it. Which they wasted by not listening to people.

With the very sad news that PKR has had a financial meltdown, I have been really down in the dumps about this, I have played PKR for 11-12 years of my life, so more than a quarter of my life has had PKR involved with playing on PKR on a regular basis.

So I wanted to create a thread where myself and other ("ex ") PKR players/staff could post to reminisce on the many good times we had on PKR.

My friends and family, don't really understand as none of them play poker let alone PKR and to equate it, it's like I've just told them my pet rock has died, "??WTF?? oh you look a bit sad??", but no comprehension as to why I should/could be sad.

Before I started playing poker I had a bit of a habit for fruit machines and roulette machines in the bookies, ovb knew the house always had an edge but liked the buzz of winning. One evening I watched "late night poker" on Channel 4 and the commentators were discussing skill. I had heard of online poker and the thing that clicked for me was that the house had no interest in who won the hand and if I got good at poker, I could become a burzillionair (not quite there yet). Poker cured me of (some of my) stupidity.

When I first started playing poker, it was for free on paradise poker, then BetFred and I moved up to depositing actual cash, which I blew in the first hour. /oops. Can't remember where I first saw the ad for PKR but it was 3D and looked epic, when I first loaded PKR it had really cool lobby music, kind of hip hop, dance music, and I was hooked.

For an old timer gamer like me, PKR was the perfect match as it had both poker and 3D game play. PKR was never going to be the site for serious players that want to grind 24 tables, hand rates were slow, the software was very heavy, multi-tabling was quite difficult etc.

What it did have was an array of items to choose for my avatar, do I want to be fat or thin, a girl or a boy, hot or fugly. Cool chip tricks, emotes galore.... like dancing, flirting, lol, lmao, chuckle (my faves were /iyf /rude, which then voiced "up yours" and "in your face"). You had to look at your cards to see them, which could be a tell from some players if they looked during the hand, but also a fake tell against other. There was the choice to show just one card. On an all in you could stand up, and all the animation emotes worked from the standing up, so for example you could dance whilst standing up. When you won an MTT your avi would stand up and dance and dollarzzzz would rain down on you in proportion with how much money you had actually won. I play poker for both fun and profit, which is why PKR was my site.

The PKR forum was an amazing place and I learnt so much about poker from so many players (Destacker, INeedURchips, DiscoMonkey, ScottyStarburst, TheSqueeze, ForFoxSake to name just a few PKR forum old timers) (zabeen, Nebbi, Royals, FuzzyBlueStrings, IvorGoodun Mugg85, AntManB to name just a few of the players that were still posting up until the end). The PKR Forum, kinda died due to trolls and flamers, but still held on until the end despite them, just in a smaller way.

Hopefully someone will describe the forum cash games at "The Croft" lol.

The staff were awesome too, PKR-Jabba & PKR-Danski and PKR-Darragh. if you were a PKR baller, u got to go out with the VIP Mgr PKR-Jake and were often forced to do Jager Bombs and watch live football matches.

I only attended a couple of PKR Live's (won some cash at one /yay me) and a couple of player organised unofficial PKR meet ups, so again hopefully others can describe their best meet up moments. PKR sure knew how to throw a party, just ask any one who was lucky enough to attend PKR in Vegas pool party.

Anyways, I hope my OP isn't tl;dr for you but I look forward to reading and being cheered up by other ex PKRs players happy times at our once amazing poker site.

potraiser, pokermambo to name 2

Ordered sutdowns/takeovers are very different to insolency. This more like the Purple Lounge debale with Microgaming and the listed firm that owned it running away from their responsibilities despite both being listed firms.

PKR was dead to a lot of us way back when they made all the Fronks leave.

Anybody have any idea how long this is likely to take to get resolved? I had a decent chunk of my bankroll on PKR and could really do with a resolution soon!

It could be quite a few months (or longer) for the liquidation process if that's what's going to happen. There's usually paperwork you'll need to file to make a claim to the liquidators then you'll get back a percentage of what you're owed. Awful situation if you have a significant sum in there.

They could theoretically exit administration and continue operating but that seems very unlikely for a poker site - would need to find investors willing to put in money knowing it'll be immediately withdrawn by players on the way out.

Mine too - to be fair, it wasn't *all* because of bad decisions.. I was on PKR within the first couple years of operation. And I remember when France pulled out, that hit them really hard. Then other countries followed suit. They never recovered from that.

They never had a huge player base to begin with, but in my honest opinion - for all their ****ty decisions, I think they also simply entered a downward spiral in a positive feedback-loop of ever diminishing player pool.

I remember talk early on of them joining microgaming, or another network. Maybe they should have done it earlier? They also pissed off MANY people by continually releasing updates with superficial changes (new costumes, emotes, etc) without addressing actual poker-related issues and problems (like synchronised MTT breaks - it took SO many years of us begging before that happened).

Back in their old VIP system, I was Diamond - had been for years before they changed over to the monthly rating system (from the old, never down system). And the VIP benefits used to be soooo much better.

I think really- they were a small room and when the boom was in effect, even without the USA - there was just enough players to allow a novelty room like PKR to exist.

But then the boom died off, plus countries segregated their markets.. And they just never recovered.

Also worth mentioning; when they were originally about to launch, they were counting on a USA real-money player pool. Their timing couldn't have been worse. Also - they never allowed US players because they gambled on doing the 'right thing' and being allowed into a legal USA market, which never eventuated for them.

Anyway - RIP - the good ol' days will be remembered

Spot on.

its not like this is the first time that things like this happen on microgaming but in their defense pkr only joined the network recently.

microgaming has never been a network with a good rep and reading the manager defending their operations on his blog is laughable.

I guess its easier to live under false premise than accepting youre the villain of the story.

Sad to see this happen, I also was on PKR from the beginning (not a beta tester but had an account as soon as it went properly live). Not played on there for years but it was always fun and made some good $$$ there back in the day.

Humans post hits the nail on the head imo, they launched late in the poker boom but before Italy/France got segregated which is what started the decline. Nevertheless they did create their own niche and it was a good site for years before the inevitable rot set in. I am surprised it lasted this long in the modern climate to be honest.

I hope all players get paid. My absolute speculation (and I mean complete speculation) as to what will happen would be that it is going to be similar to the TUSK affair. Administrators are appointed and eventually players get some X penny per pound they had on the site after all secured creditors are paid with what money is left over. This can take years to play out (but might be quicker). As always it reflects badly on the owners, management and regulators when player deposits are allowed to be used so easily and blatantly as working capital.

some PKR trivia for those old enough to know the reference. Jez San who designed the enhanced Star Fox chip for that SNES cartridge was one of the founders of PKR - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jez_San

Anyone else like to degen on DEAL OR NO DEAL back in the day?

They should've joined MPN earlier? That makes NO sense, that would've just killed them earlier. They should've gotten rid of eastern european bumhunter and kept the friendly enviroment and they would still be operating at a smaller but decent size right now.

I don't want to be the one to bring the bad news, maybe our situation is very different, but I was one of the victims of similar happening - Microgaming skin called 50/50 poker - it was a Swedish parent company with a daughter regulated in Malta so it might differ in all the regulations and other stuff. I thought my money was completely safe there back then, but that was my naivety. I had about 8k there when Microgaming announced one day they were restricting number of tables available to play on that site as a penalty for breaching contract, and that was the moment they stopped communicating at all. Next day the site was shut, my balance said $0 and I was sensing that for a long time it would be haunting me. I had to do some serious repressing of the fact that they scammed everyone and probably ran away with the money, without any communication. I was asked to fill some paperwork with the regulatory body (some maltese company). I didn't expect anything by that time at all, so it felt like a gift or a new money when I received a notification that my bank account was bumped by 300 EUR after some 2 years.

I really hope this will be different, but my advice after experiencing the most gruesome period of waiting in vain, would be don't have any expectations and you can only be pleasantly surprised then.

Yeah, I didn't have a huge sum but £1.6k is meaningful! Looking at last month's rake race, the guy who came top of the microgaming one raked upwards of $10K - could be terrible for some people!!

I feel sorry for you all getting done this way. Dont count on Microgaming to lift a finger at all. They didn't when TUSK went down, and they wont now. If you're lucky, you will wait 5 years for a liquidation to occur, then you'll get 13-16% of your money back.

Loved that site!!! Brought something different and new compared to the other sites. Was really fun how you could interact with other players. Would occasionally spam the laughing action for the lols.

not really news, but Alderney Gambling Control Commission (AGCC) pulled the licence (last week)

Source: https://www.gamblingcontrol.org/pkr-limited/


FYI: UK Gambling Commission (UKGC) licence is still active
--> https://secure.gamblingcommission.go...h/Detail/39279

Oh god - Yes!

This is embarrassing; but I had to self-ban from Deal - I used to get super drunk and degen off half my roll, getting increasingly angry at the guy hosting it, I'd start (drunkenly) imitating his stupid voice and .. oh.. was not pretty.

Gibbles here, I don't know what to do with myself. In the evening around 7 -8pm I think quick the league game has started then I remember
Other sites ain't the same . Gunna miss everyone from the league especially fuzzy /booo, zabeen, all the females and she males, PrettyBullet, bubbleQQ, T1GS, cozican and even the pumpkin /of course.

Be nice to hear from anyone I played with, I found a couple (ex)players on twitter.

I had a couple of hundred on there which ain't as bad as some people's potential loss but still could do with it back.
Pkr closing made me realise how boring my evenings are, maybe I'll get a hobby or something lol

Zabeen here

Good read T1GGY, there are so many memorys over the ten years I played there, no time to talk about them now, but hope to take a bit of a walk down memory lane with you.

Gibs !!!! I will send Fuzzy a Boooo for you. I will try and PM you or something with details, it would be such a shame to loose touch !

A story from reddit speculating about how pkr treated players money

https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comme...s_to_be_busto/

Was originally linked from https://www.casino.org/blog/pkr-player-money-not-safe/

These PKR package trips sound like they were pretty awesome.

Hi zab not sure how to pm on here but you can find me on Twitter if u #pkr

^

Is this legit? I have just under £3k in my account

Has anyone actually heard anything from PKR/Microgaming?