I've done analysis for them a couple of times, so I sent the guy who interviewed me a link to this thread and asked him if anything can be done about it. Doubt he has the pull to make something happen but we shall see, perhaps he can at least direct me to an e-mail address for one of the higher ups

Twitter campaign def seems like a good idea, doubt anything will be done until a ton of attention is brought to how absurd this is

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?f...&stream_ref=10

reposted because of too much typos.

anyway, as long they allow fb comments, it makes sense to post there. Gets the ball rolling.

Poker players will never organize because most are ideological libertarians and they see the word "union" as synonymous with "communism"

Not sure if any of the Big Three casinos in Detroit have CardPlayer in the rooms. I used to have a subscription to it back in 04-05. Around that time and into 2006 they used to have some pretty good web content. Lizzy Harrison's Poker News, Mike The Mouth weekly show, I want to say Sebok and Gavin Smith first did their show on Card Player before pokerroad.

It was really good content, now I look at the webpage and its just an ugly mess.

As an example, here's a post from August 2012.

So has anyone seen Lock ads in Cardplayer magazine in the past few months?

If they took forever to remove UB from their site then perhaps Cardplayer programmers are in a coma again and once they come out of it they will remove Lock as an advertiser.

Yes, I believe the Lock ads are still running in the actual magazine. Two-page ads, from what I've heard.

I was playing in my local 2/5 game the other day and one of the other guys was flipping through CP and was talking about the Lock ads to the guy sitting next to him.

Hmm, well Lock must have "locked" up a long term contract with cardplayer magazine a while back for a good deal otherwise I just can't see them spending much anymore if all they have is like 30-80 players along with a whole lot of debt owed to people.

Lock Poker will be gone in 6 to 8 months if I had to guess. They owe too much and don't have a lot of new deposits coming in which they need to survive month to month. Right now they are just prolonging the inevitable hoping for that one outer on the river which bails them out but it's not coming.

The Most Interesting Man in Poker
http://www.barryshulman.com/

I don't always promote fraudulent Poker Sites to my readers.
But when I do, I drink Dos Equis.

"Stay thirsty my friends"

In an interview around 6 months ago, Cardplayer advertising Lock was my answer to a question posed to me about what is wrong with the poker industry.

Everyone was late to criticizing the pros, who did nothing when things like the casino bonus scandal happened (nobody criticized them then bc they were getting paid and getting ridiculous rb deals), but they sure did once cashouts stopped coming.

But the real pipeline for most of 2013 has been sites like Cardplayer. It wouldn't surprise me if Lock still paid a place like Cardplayer or G911 for ads. There might be enough sheep to bring to the slaughter (aka, customer deposits) to make it worthwhile.

A lot of things enabled Lock to get far larger than it should've. Ignorant and greedy business partners, pros and even players. This wasn't Full Tilt, where just a small circle at the top was the problem. One scandal after another on this site yet people kept playing there, repping there, and taking their money.

They've been prolonging the inevitable since the spring of 2013. Don't discount the depths they will stoop to in order to keep the doors open as long as they can. If they go under in 2014, I'll be quite surprised, to be honest. People all throughout last year thought they were a month or two away - people thought when they left Revolution and went on their own, they'd last maybe to the end of 2013.

They seem to have the money to pay off CardPlayer, some Lock pros, their staff, operational costs, and the few shill websites they have left. It's easy to cut corners and save dough when you don't pay 99% of the players you owe.

Are you kidding ?!
It's the best Ponzi Scheme in the World !! Accept player deposits. Hope they lose chips on your site while playing. Refuse to payout if they win !

And get front page banner ads on the most well known Poker Magazine in the industry.

Industry needs to start cleaning itself up.

Shame on 67 year old Barry Shulman for not getting in front of this.

In related news, it seems that Gambling911 has taken down their Lock advertising. They don't have a review up for Lock either. You can still search "Lock Poker" on the site and see all their shill articles and such. But perhaps even Costigan figured Lock was too toxic to continue shilling for, no matter how much they paid him.

No, I think it's clear that Costigan will sell his soul to the highest bidder.

They probably stopped paying him.

Latest Isaac Haxton issue - double page ad, inside front cover. Just the most prominent position in the magazine.

FYP and QFT

It's interesting that the two-part "interview" that G911 did with Jennifer Larson last year doesn't come up in G911's own search tool using "Jennifer Larson" as a search term, which was part of the stories' title as well. A search on "Lock Poker" doesn't bring it up either. It's as if all the meta-tags / keywords for those two stories have been deleted. You can still find them via Google, however.

It helps that most of the poker players that deposit these days on Lock are probably losing players.

But considering no good players want to play on there, you have to wonder if Lock has an incentive to cheat the bad players that are probably most of their customer base, so that these new players do not have a need to cash out. One way to do this would be with bots, which they could possibly morally justify to themselves (and others, if need be, in future) as needing players and creating an atmosphere that people would want to play in.

Their main desire these days must be to hope that new players don't get enough money to want to cash out. If we agree on that, it's likely that they have considered "creative" ways to make this happen.

[To clarify; I'm saying that because good players are not playing on the site, some bad players will become the best players and those are who the company would have an incentive to cheat; the "new" good players.]

Lock is now down to the 53rd largest poker site, it has an average of 45 players and is only 3% of the size of Bodog. Apparently they no longer have any sponsored pros. It feels like the game is over which means they have probably stopped paying the phone bills let alone advertising media.

So, yeah, I agree with Kilowatt: Costigan (G911) probably stopped promoting the scam on his lolsite because Lock stopped paying him. I imagine the Cardplayer ads will stop soon too. Shame on both of them for helping Lock to facilitate the scam (at least over the last 12 months).

If the industry was regulated properly then the regulators would deal with black sheep like Lock but as it isn't, the industry needs to police itself. If poker media wants to be a respected part of the industry then it should take responsibility to help it prosper in an ethical way.

A site can have one million mega fish on it and you can be one of the few sharks but it don't mean a thing if your not ever getting paid.

I think they will not close as long as there is such a big company like Cardplayer promoting them. Look at the email I got, posted in the LOCK thread.
Every deposit is basicly 100 % free money for them.

It appears firing all the stuff that did cashouts about 1 year ago also helps to keep the ship afloat and save money.

So it was me who had got a response from Trey Aldridge, the Vice President of Sales for Card Player Media. I buried a comment on Lock into an email pretending to be starting a dealer school business for the MA market and wanting to do some marketing with Card Player. I added this "I would like to use CP to advertise our product, however I question your company's integrity at this point. I do not understand how you can allow Lock Poker to advertise here considering how damaged the site is. Please stop sending your customers to get scammed"
I got a prompt response from Trey:
Hi *,
I can offer you 100,000 geo-targeted banner impressions to New England and New York for $1800.
Attached is a pdf showing placement as well as a pdf showing the specs.
Regarding Lock, we have a contract with them. To us, integrity is honoring contracts.
Best regards,
Trey Aldridge
Card Player Media
Vice President of Sales
702-856-2277 office


I later emailed him blasting his response and have not heard back.

I found some email addresses for Cardplayer management:

Man, it has to be real tough to keep a straight face while using the word "integrity" in reference to accepting funds to advertise a ponzi scheme. I expected him to dodge the question, but integrity? Wow. I guess Skrill lacks integrity for cutting off Lock deposits lol.