Originally Posted by duddi7
My name is Tobias - AKA dudd1 on Pokerstars, moneybyebye on America's Cardroom, and Ben ABC on GG-Poker. I want to share a recent experience that I had with GG-Poker.
I'm a high-stakes player from Germany, currently living in Austria, and have been around the mid/high-stakes scene for quite some time now. I've played on pretty much all the sites out there, for years now, and until now have never had any problems with any of them.
Recently, GG-Poker decided to confiscate my site balance. I think the confiscation is entirely disproportionate on their end, so I've decided to make this post, in order to:
- Get a public and fair opinion on the case; and
- Make everybody - especially other high-stakes regs - aware of what can happen to your
balance on GG-Poker
The total amount of my balance there is around $180,000 USD.
So what happened? We'll have to go back in time a bit to puzzle all the pieces together.
In 2016, I deposited a small amount on Natural8, and played NL400-NL1k for around a week or two. I won around 3-5k in the first couple of days. (I can't check the exact time frame or amount won anymore, since they deleted my account, and it's been 4 years - but it's somewhere around these numbers.)
After the first few sessions, with no warning, Natural8 told me to take my money and not play on their network anymore. These days GG-Poker always gives a warning to players before banning them. They said that if I came back to play there, they would proceed with their "security protocol", whatever that meant - I asked, but they wouldn't give me a clear statement on either what they meant by that, or what I'd done wrong.
Fast forward to the year 2019:
GG-Poker had grown to be one of the bigger networks around, so I decided to give it a shot. I didn't know that 2016 Natural8 and 2019 GG-Poker were the same network, nor did I really even remember the 2016 incident at this point. 3 years later, I'd forgotten all about it.
In 2019 I created an account on a GG-Poker skin called Bestpoker, under the Nickname "TheViolence". (At this point I'm wondering: if I was joining a network from which I'd been banned, why was I able to not only create, but to fully verify an account, using the exact same personal data I had previously used?)
So I played NL5k-NL40k on Bestpoker in 2019. During that time I was raking an insane amount, and was losing around 85k. At some point, Bestpoker decided to remove the high-stakes tables, so I was forced to change skins.
At the start of 2020 I moved to Betkings, created the account "ElBernardo" using the same data I had always used, and played there for maybe half-a-month before all the skins from the network fused to one skin, "GG". At the time, I was still losing on that account.
When the fuse happened, I changed my affiliate, and from then on played as "Ben ABC" on GG-Poker itself. At this point I'd like to mention that all former accounts got deleted after the fuse, before I got my "real" GG account. All of this was in agreement with both my affiliate and a representative from GG-Poker; again, all of this is clearly within the rules and TOS of GG-Poker. I was never trying to hide my identity nor was I trying to get any advantage from changing nicknames.
You might be thinking: "Wow, this guy had 3 different accounts!" To be clear, this only has to do with the different skins and the aforementioned merger. (Ask around if you know people playing on GG, as I'm sure a lot of them are familiar with this event.)
At this point, things start to become interesting. Again, I was able to fully verify my account, and had no problems depositing a big sum ($50,000 USD). I played for a while on the account, still losing, until around the weekend of May 29th. At this point I've paid tens of thousands of dollars worth of rake, and I'm stuck big time on the site.
Finally, around the end of May, I spun up my roll from 30k to 180k within a period of about one-and-a-half weeks.
Then GG forced their high-stakes players to change to their real name, instead of a nickname. So I was doing the verification yet again (recall that they already had all of my data: ID, phone bill, etc) when my account suddenly got locked. I had no idea what was going on until a few days later, when I got an email telling me that my funds had been confiscated, because I wasn't allowed to play on GG-Poker in the first place.
So if I wasn't allowed to play on GG-Poker, how is it possible to play there for over a year? Don't they check the accounts being created on their network? Have they just been waiting until I finally had enough money in my account to make it worthwhile for them to keep it? If I would've kept losing, would I still be able to play on GG-Poker?
There are a lot of questions - that I suspect I know the answers to.
I'm currently texting back and forth with the security team from GG-Poker, trying to understand what's happening, and why I was able to pump money into their system for 1.5 years even though I was supposedly banned.
After some back and forth they finally said they would allow me to take my deposit back, but would not pay out what I'd won. Again, the money I won was won 100% fairly: I never hid my identity; there was nothing to cause an unfair advantage over anybody; most of the other high-stakes players were aware of who I was, since I play across all sites and it's not very hard to find out who I am.
So why does GG offer to give me back the deposit, but not my winnings? By giving back the deposit, they've essentially admitted that I didn't win in an unfair way. Apparently, they've just decided to take a cheap shot at my money.
In my opinion, it's easy to see why I'd think the confiscation of such a large sum is disproportionate (especially after losing a lot of my own money to GG players, and to the system), but I'm obviously biased because for me, personally, there's a huge sum on the line.
So I decided to talk to other high-stakes players that I know well, and ask them about their opinion on this. The responses I got were all in agreement with me - it seems very obvious that I got free-rolled here, and that it's almost a scam by GG-Poker, from an ethical point of view.
It would be much different if they told me in 2019, after a day, or maybe a few days, that I wasn't allowed to play and that they'd have to return my deposit. But letting me play for such an extended time as 1.5 years, while losing, and then not paying me when I'm winning fairly, makes me wonder about two things:
- Either GG-Poker really didn't realize I was banned for this entire period of time, and thus their security-system is the worst on the market; or
- I just got free-rolled for 1.5 years, good to them for only as long as I kept putting money into this highly questionable system.
Please feel free to decide which one you think is more likely.
All in all, I just feel very sad about the decision GG-Poker has made here. I think their decision is far too harsh. Especially when I think the fault lies mainly with their security team.
I don't know if they're technically within their rights with what they're doing to me, but I'd think that after free-rolling me all this time, it should only take a little bit of ethical consideration on their part to come to a more sympathetic decision.
Now, you might think here: "Well, dudd1 is just stupid for not knowing he's not allowed to play on the site!" That's one way to think about it, and that's okay. But in the current high-stakes climate, especially with all the new modern troubles out there, I think I am, and have always striven to be, a very fair player. I would never try to get any unfair advantage over anybody else, and I'm sure there are a lot of well-known and respected players throughout the poker community that would be happy to vouch for my integrity, if it comes to that.
I don't know if this situation will ever be resolved to my satisfaction. But I wanted to post this in order to at the very least raise awareness, and to remind all of you to keep an eye out for all the things out there that can happen to you and your money.
I hope nobody else has to go through what I'm going through right now. If this post will help prevent some of you out there from having trouble like this, I consider it time well spent.
Kind Regards,
Tobias/dudd1
