Last Sunday i deposited $215 on party after a long time not playing there at all. With those $215 i wanted to play the Sunday million or whatever it's called. Somehow my party account is in Euros and the money automatically got converted to Euros and with the exchange rate they offer i instantly lost $7 and had to deposit again. Support didn't care that I deposited $215 and couldn't play a $215 tournament

I've said this from the start, but the points expiring is nothing more than a money grab from PartyPoker; why do they expire instead of being automatically converted into money?

Players are distracted by a shiny new rakeback system to take away from the fact that all of the points from dormant accounts/people like OP who were unaware will add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of rakeback that has suddenly expired and goes straight into Party's pocket.

A greedy, greedy money grab from Party. Nothing more, nothing less.

Only 5 reasons?

That's pretty good then.

If they went back to this software, I'd be back in a flash.

Another money grab: you have to opt-in EVERY WEEK for the new rakeback system. Each week when you forget to do that, you don't get rakeback. Obviously everyone's going to forget to do that from time to time. Why anyone would ever want to NOT receive rakeback is beyond me, so clearly this is another money grab since they'll be making money from people forgetting. So greedy and a terrible look on the site.

You have to be intentionally trying your best not to opt in for the rakeback with how they implemented it having a big shiny button at the top of your lobby saying if you opted in or not + how much rakeback you are getting this week. They even said if say you play mon->fri then opt in on friday, all your points will be counted/collected for that week from mon-> fri.

How do you know this?

Have you contacted them about this?

Had sort-of a similar beginner experience - when first starting out with poker, didn't realize that after not playing for a certain amount of time, some sites like Party charge 'fees' for dormant accounts. Guess at the time, was expecting them to be like a bank and just be happy to make interesting on peoples' deposits, or something?

After noticing my account had been 'raided' (), contacted Party and they said they'd sent me an email to let me know they were going to start charging me - but it may have gone to my spam folder, because there didn't seem to be one in my inbox folder? Maybe something similar happened to o/p?

Was happy to play on Stars after that, because they had a poker school, and a beginner's league, and stuff like that. Didn't give Party another try for several years, but times change - even Stars takes coins from dormant accounts after 6 months, don't they?


Have to admit, Party's sent me several free tickets that have more than made up for the 'stolen funds' - but am still wary of 'hidden' fees ... still play there every once in a while though ...

was in a satellite where top 20 qualify. Instead of ending the tournament once the 21st player is knocked out the tournament played down to the winner (by which time target tournament had been playing for 45mins) after which the tickets were then released.

very strange.

Hi everyone,

Patrick Leonard - Ambassador for Party Poker here. Will address all points from the thread. Just to be clear, we don't work like other companies, I don't have to send this through PR part of the company, to us, quick feedback and response is important.

Firstly, let me say that whilst the changes have been huge in the last 12 months since I joined the company, not one person in the company thinks we are close to the finished product. Everybody is on the same page, we have done really well increasing numbers, but as a site we are far from perfect yet, but every day we work very hard to make sure we can improve from yesterday, we are a proactive site that wants to improve and become the biggest poker site in the world again, but we are aware of how we perform at the moment.

First of all, let me describe the 10 key missions of the companies:

- Invest in software development to deliver an industry leading player experience
- Improve customer services and strive to resolve player issues in the same day
- Reward the loyalty of players who start games and keep the action going
- Look after smaller bankroll players with value added promotions
- Fight against the use of third party software that gives an unfair advantage
- Invest marketing budgets within the poker community
- Develop partypoker Live to become the largest live poker tour in the world
- Support partners and have their backs
- Only appoint management who get poker, who are trusted, and who actually care
- Hold hands up to the poker community when mistakes are made



I will now go into points raised in the thread, if I miss something, let me know and I'll address it, have nothing to hide or anything I want to dodge.


1. They allow cheating

That is simply not true. We have teams working on detecting bots and people using third party software and its strictly prohibited, if anything PP goes over the edge the other way to protect plays in games, restricting HUD's on cash game tables etc. There has been many serious cases that I have been personally involved and spent tens of hours on to help prevent any kind of cheating and we are committed to putting resources in to preventing this. I even posted it as one of my main company objectives:

Fight against the use of third party software that gives an unfair advantage

2. Changing the rake back system and expiring old points

We used every way of correspondence to ensure that people knew about this change. I was in at least 15 Skype groups that people were speaking about it and it seemed general consensus throughout the poker community. The idea behind the change was not to take from people but to GIVE TO PEOPLE. The shop had prices slashes dramatically, you could buy $1k tournament dollars for a little over 5k points etc, we slashed everything so that people would use points and play in out biggest ever series. I think last year it was roughly $5m gte? This year we had $20m guarantee in the series and after the push with the tickets we managed to amass over $27m in buy ins! I think the store change was a huge success and amazing offer to regular players to get crazy good deals whilst allowing recreational players to have a shot at huge buy ins. Moving forward, we have a lot more simplified system that benefits everybody.

3. Software bugs

You said that certain buttons make you call instead of fold or raise instead of call etc, I have never heard of this ever, nobody has ever brought this to my attention personally and myself and hundreds of players that I'm in contact with on a daily basis have never had this problem. I hate to sound negative, but I really suggest checking your system to see if there is some kind of software installed from some live trip like we saw previously at EPT stops, it sounds extremely strange to me.

4. No reimbursement for disconnects on their end

I know Colette personally does a great job digging into these cases and making sure players are well looked after but...

5. Support staff disconnects when they feel like it

I'm not saying this is true, but the support that we currently offer isn't at a higher enough standard or in line with our standard for other parts of our product. We want to be the best poker site in the world? Well its critical we have the best support team too. Days ago there were huge plans made and things sealed to ensure that in the short term this drastically improves. I think it will be a great improvement to the overall site.


Chuck Bass -

5) Their support is terrible. (see above)

6) Their attitude towards cheating.

Again, don't want to just say "see above" each time, but this really isn't true. I have sat on calls with "suspected" cheats personally, been involved in case reports, analysed statistics etc. Obviously we can't comment legally publicly, but it simply isn't true. You can ask limitless if you want, he sat in recently on a call with us as a translator for somebody when I was leading the call.

7) To a lesser extent, software.

Absolutely correct. Our software is not good enough. Overall, there are huge improvements to be made, they are being made. I was involved with the iPhone app, we saw this as a critical software implementation that needed to be implemented ASAP, but we wanted to make sure it was high quality. There was extensive feedback from my side and every suggestion was implemented to a higher standard than I could expect. Our iPhone app is now IMO the best in the business, and thats the standard that we need to set ourselves for everything else now.

Next software you can expect to improve is the lobby function. There are a dozen or so improvements that need to be made and are currently being beta tested and will be released in the short term. I'm confident that you will like them. We are also working on all other aspects, two days ago I got a screenshot of how the new table will look like during gameplay. HUGE improvement and its not the final product yet. But absolutely, the main two things we need to improve on in short and long term is support+software, but we know that and are working on daily basis to make sure that is done.

"But yeah these threads definitely serve a purpose because maybe Mike Sexton or someone will actually read them and finally do something. Their current ambassadors, managers et al don't give a **** about any of these actually serious issues and only focus on boasting about how there's a new $5200 highroller that zomg reached its guarantee."

Obviously very far from the truth and the work that goes on behind the scenes is actually really hard work and getting a $5200 high roller (I think you mean 25k?) to beat the equivalent of that running on stars does obviously still mean a lot and shows how the site has transformed in one year, but its also alongside recording breaking $11, $22, $55, $109 and $215 fields. Year on year we are the fastest growing poker site in the world, thats not because we have a $25k or a $5k tournament running.

Our live tournaments which DTD and their super hard working team deserve huge credit for, starts to give people confidence in the brand again, starts to allow red-regs (players who like to deposit and play on the weekend or at night and enjoy the competition but don't necessarily play to win or for a living) to trust the brand again, to trust that they will receive good tournaments and to trust that they will have a great playing experience. However, its our job as a company to make sure that its not only good prize pools, structures and schedules that attracts them, there needs to be good software, good support and many other small things that were previously neglected to HELP keep them coming back every week and wanting to play on the site.

If you ask any employee at Party Poker are they happy at how good the site is at the moment the answer is no. If its not no then management wouldn't accept that. The site is improved, the site is good relative to where it was, but relative to our expectations of ourselves and our pride about our product its not there yet. However, we will work each day (and usually night!) to ensure that one day, in the not so distant future we deliver the very best site possible for poker players... by poker players.

Keep the faith!

i've made my concerns public few days ago, but this is something that may illustrate what mixgrill is trying to say.





it took them one ****ing week to answer to a claim i made about cheating at a finale table. obv, ive not seen a single dollar since then. but hey, at least i can complain and curse in german to them, good thing!

yeah there are no alternatives, but seriously, i much rather get fkd by stars, lose 4-5bb/100 in winrate, or rb; but at least im not getting cheated. i mean srsly, there are no ****ing options right now. if i'd believe in god i'd pray day and night that phil galfond's site crushes them all.

edit:

are you ****ing kidding? this ****ing bug exists more than 10 years on party. has existed on the old version and does exist on the new one. and this is no exaggeration at all. srsly, put out a 1k bounty for people to record this bug happening while playing, you get a hundred recordings a week.

Only if tuff_fish was at every table.

It's good that Party are stepping up to the plate. There are concerns I would have though. When they banned huds, players can still can get hands illegally from screen scrapers which from what I understand can't be prevented at the moment. Players playing by the rules would be at a disadvantage.

Interesting post Patrick, could you please address this?

The crux of it is if this was nothing more than a money grab from Party, why do points expire and not get changed automatically into money? It's a genuine question, and if there's a reason for it I'd be happy to hear it

+ 1 about stealing players points!

I am considering depositing on Party tomorrow and was going to stop playing Stars altogether however not so sure if I'm going to be playing against russian bot farms..

The rakeback looks interesting however why would you not just give a flat % rakeback deal once a certain points level has been reached ??? from my understanding of it, you need a minimum of $25 paid in rake to earn $5 back, but if in that same week you rake $48 you still only get $5 ? Seems a bit weird to me..

I miss pre BF Full Tilt : ( So yeah if you want to be the biggest poker site just model yourselves on pre black friday full tilt but without using all the player funds for hookers blow and Gus Hansens atempt to play PLO..

Wow my points expired and this feels a tad shady.

I'm sure that this was communicated to me at some point prior. I don't really care.

I am a casual player on PP. They spam my email every week with tournament nonsense. I have learned to generally ignore items from PP. But I miss one (or a couple?) e-mails about rewards changes and they confiscate hundreds of dollars of my player points.

Would have been easy for them to auto-convert but they chose to be underhanded towards casuals and rec players.

Bravo.

#3 has happened to me as well but hasn't happened recently. I think last time maybe more than 6 months ago but Mixgrill is not making that **** up.

One time I played a sit and go hero (party's version of a spin and go), and I span a prize pool of 0 dollars, yes you read that right, 0 dollars. I busted first and contacted support, they assured me it was a visual glitch but honestly I'm not even sure I believe that.

Needs new style sleek software to compete with stars...

Rsa token a must for any amount of decent $ on the site.

Quicker response times from relevant departments.

All of this is needed if party want to compete with pokerstars

Patrick, the new loyalty scheme is TAKING rakeback away from the majority of people who rake < $25/week.

Most of partypoker's registered accounts will lose since they don't pay >= $25 rake in most weeks. The GTO for these recreational players is to only play at partypoker IF they are 100% sure that they have the time and the bankroll to rake >= $25 by the end of the week; otherwise, they are better off playing at PokerStars or any other site where their rakeback is > 0 no matter how little they play during the week.

At the very least, the $25 minimum has to be decreased by a lot so that the majority of recreational players will get some rakeback and won't have to cash out to play at other sites.

All valid points and i don't agree with the player points expiring. The points for all intents and purposes are currency. When fiat currency notes are changed the old ones are phased out over a year or 2 and are still accepted at the central bank at face value essentially forever.

I have been vocal about how crap the software is but something Patrick said recently did make sense to me. The primary goal has been to build the party brand and get alot of new depositors then work on getting the software up to scratch. All well and good getting the software perfect while neglecting marketing and you have no recreational players to play on the shiny new software.

Will still be giving party every chance as we all know stars is well down the path to destroy itself and i do believe when party eventually works out all the kinks and bugs it will be the place to play in 1-2 years.

I haven't played on Party for a few years now but have been considering going back there to try it out given the rake increases on Stars. It seems to me like Party are doing their best to step up to the plate, but this one major thing still puts me off.......

From my experience it seems common knowledge that Party is infested with bots. I have heard countless stories of people discovering obvious bots, reporting them to support and hearing nothing more of it. Whenever I talk to anyone about Party, the one thing that invariably comes up is the bot issue (along with other cheating issues such as collusion). Everyone knows that the games are filled with bots, and everyone knows that Party are doing very little, if anything, about it.

I'd like to believe that the staff at Party aren't totally corrupt and just allowing this to happen, so I have to assume that the security are either completely incompetent or massively underfunded. Either way, I can't see how anyone can justify depositing thousands of dollars on a site that allows such rampant cheating.

just a fast response to Patrick

Expired points is simply money grab whatever you want to tell us about it. It's pretty clear that Party can see how many inactive accounts are there and with how many points. And don't forget someone like OP who just unaware of the changes. Those ppl didn't need shiny discounts, they needed the normal, promised value of their points.

Software bugs happened to me a few times as well, costing me few hundred bucks at the very least. Claiming that you haven't heard of it therefore it should not exist is pretty funny. 15 skype groups obv cover every single party regs lol...

Not to mention that banning HUD and not being able to enforce it just again... pretty bad to say the least. Cheating is almost required if you don't want to lose to cheaters.

Restricting HUDs on cash tables does not reduce cheating, it very obviously increases it for two reasons.

1) Because HUDs have been ubiquitous for pros for so long, many people will find a workaround (a much greater number than would normally "cheat" with prohibited 3rd party software). The playing field is now more unequal than ever.

2) The playing community, which in the past has been at the forefront of detection, is now hamstrung in its ability to spot bot-rings, collusion and other kinds of cheating.

Of course strictly speaking I'm sure Party does not "allow" cheating but what good is that if you enact policies that inherently increase the amount of cheating?

with the new bonus system Party is the worst choice for low volume/low stakes players and they (pp) want to increase the player pool. seems contradictory to me.

it's like straight up stealing 5-10$ rakeback from everyone raking sub 50$, i believe that's multiple thousands of dollars cumulated on a weekly basis.

This is all good to hear and I hope will happen in practice. I've noticed Party has been stepping up recently in tournaments with good guarantees and range, especially high buyins (eg Powerfest SHR had excellent guarantee and numbers). Software is better than it was and the new rakeback scheme looks great for players doing decent volume. There's definitely further to go though after the group neglected poker for several years. More repair work needs to be done in customer service (apparently) and software.

This is the most important part:
We need a site to compete with Stars and stop them using their monopoly to abuse players at every turn (rake, rakeback, currency exchange, promotions, rake-trap formats, ....). Party is showing the determination and investment to do that and deserves our support along the way. If they succeed in taking significant market share from Stars then it is the players who will be the big winners. Remember the days when party, stars and tilt used to compete for our custom?