I go an email the other day from PKR saying they had sped up their tables and introduced 2D poker so I deposited £2000 to give it a try.

I didnt play any tables but i observed for a couple of hours and then decided I didnt want to play there after all and tried to cash out (no more than 3 hours after my deposit).

PKR converted my deposit to USD, and when I tried to cash out the total balance PKR tells me that after conversion back to GBP I will be getting £1877.99.

So PKR with their exchange rate system charged me 6% of my deposit over a 3 hour period.

I contacted them in live chat

So they are telling me it is nothing to do with them that I lost £122 for having my money on their site for 3 hours.

This is the type of thing that really annoys me and I intend to contact the gambling commission about it. They should not be able to get away with this.

Have you ever played on 888poker? If so, this scenario would be all too familiar and hence why it is always recommended to have the same currency on your poker account and the method used to deposit and withdraw.

1) You can't expect to dep then withdraw for free without play. Payment fees are the single biggest operating costs for online rooms. They usually require turnover, interesting that they let you w/d without any hassle. Do not dep without the intent to play.

2) Ask about conversion before you let your funds get converted. Or alternatively, never convert funds outside of trusted converters (like trade with other players, use online cheap services like currencyfair, or do it on Stars).

3) They won't do anything once things are done. You're out of luck now.

but the only currency in which PKR operates is USD, so i would have to have a USD bank account to be able to do that.

I havent actually withdrawn the money yet. That is the amount i was offered. So are you saying they might refuse to let me withdraw this money at all? My intention when i deposited was to play, but i changed my mind.
I did expect to pay some small % fee, just not >6%

This is incorrect, as many ewallet solutions offer the opportunity to operate in USD. You would still lose some money on their exchange rate when funding the ewallet account, but most likely far less than any such transaction with poker sites.

I'm pretty sure that majority if not ALL poker sites require some play before you are allowed to withdraw. That's pretty standard.

You've been posting here since 2006. I'm surprised you didn't know that.

Do you need to deposit before you are able to observe tables? I would first observe the tables and then decide whether I want to deposit/play or not.

3% each way would be pretty standard for a financial institution with such a small amount of funds

If you went to your bank with 2K STER, changed it into USD, and immediately handed it back to them to get STER, I would figure you would get about the same amount (1878 STER)

If that's true then I guess I don't have anything to complain about. I had no idea

Def feel your annoyance but as others said deposit with no play and then withdraw is often not even allowed
as for the %s it's pretty high but getting a slightly bad rate both ways is std and maybe you even ran bad slightly with the rate changing. 2.5% worse rate to deposit, 0.5-1% change during this hour then 2.5 or more bad rate again?

I brought this up on their forum when I used to play there saying that basically I've lost before I even play a single hand. I asked them if they could have a system similar to Ipoker where you don't lose money converting on and off the tables but the die hard PKR forumites basically said if I didn't like it play elsewhere. Not surprising that PKR is virtually dead now.

or, for that matter, just deposit 50 dollars or something rather than two grand