Originally Posted by
mdj1980
Just thought I would share my Global Poker experience here...was waiting until I had my first cashout processed before posting.
If you go back and read my first post in this thread I was definitely very skeptical of the site from the beginning. I didn't think the terms and conditions were worded clearly enough. And then there were the concerns that others brought up about the possibility that Global would get busted soon and would just take everyone's money and run.
So of course I wasn't going to deposit anything onto this unknown poker site. But I was willing to risk a few stamps and envelopes, so I mailed in a couple months' worth of envelopes requesting my free Sweeps Cash. From the end of June until now I have received a total of $54 free from Global just by sending in the envelopes (nine $6 credits). For the first month and a half I played very little and only at the micro-stakes when I did. My balance went up to about $80. Recently I've had more time to play, I played some slightly higher stakes, and I ran it up to about $195. Then after a bad beat at Omaha and some poor play on my end cost me $60 of that, I figured I should try a cashout just to make sure I came out ahead on this whole experiment. Plus, if I couldn't even cash out $100 then how was I ever going to cash out anything more than that in the future?
Last night I requested my $100 cashout and they emailed back requesting two forms of ID. A few hours later I sent those in, and just a few hours after that the $100 was in my PayPal account.
So overall the experience has been a positive one. And every time I have ever emailed customer service or dealt with them in any way I have always received a prompt, courteous response that was worded in proper English...you don't get the idea that you are dealing with third-world customer service reps who can barely speak English, as you often do with other companies (online poker and otherwise).
There is one thing that I remain skeptical about...that is the RNG issue that was discussed in this thread and on the show. Like I said, I've only played on there a couple months, and I have seen some very strange things. Of course in poker you expect to see some strange things, but when they happen over and over again you start to wonder.
The first thing that I thought was weird (although not RNG-related) was when I first started I would play in the gold coin games to qualify for the daily freeroll (which is now the daily $250 - $0.11 buy-in with tons of overlay). Very often - not just on occasion - my opponents would just fold when they had the option to check, even heads up, and even in situations where they had actually checked the flop and turn, and could still just check the river. I didn't know what to think of this...maybe they were just trying to get their Gold Coin hands in as quickly as possible, or maybe people were playing with bots and this was some sort of bug in the bot. I still am confused as to why this happened so much.
The second thing that still bugs me is that of all the daily freerolls I entered, and of all the $250 daily guarantees with the $0.11 buy-ins, I think I have only min-cashed in one for like a total of $3. I have probably played in 20 or more of these, and consistently, almost every time I get knocked out it involves someone with a worse hand sucking out on me one way or another. It has really gotten laughable...I wish I would have kept a log of all of these. I know this could be a sample size issue, but I know I am not that bad of a player...could I have just been really unlucky these 19 times...maybe....?
In the cash games I have played, I've felt like things have been pretty fair and pretty normal for the most part. Usually the games that I have been in have been pretty tight, but once in a while someone will come in and start giving away money. So I do think the higher rake is beatable. But I do worry that if someone found a way to exploit the RNG thing, then who's to say that four or five people at your table might not also be exploiting it? That worry would keep me from depositing and would probably keep me from playing the bigger stakes on the site if I did run my account up to more than a few hundred dollars.