Interview with a Former Lock Pro

[Steve-O]

I spoke with a former Lock Poker pro about some aspects of the company which offer an interesting insight into the company, and was able to clarify a couple of aspects such as pros getting expedited cashouts, Girah, and a couple other things.

http://www.onlinepokerreport.com/116...to-lock-poker/

Just a heads up, the editor cut down some of the answers so I may have answers to particular questions that I can offer up

[BeerAndPoker]

Why is this guy wanting to hide his identity? Does he have some long contract that states he can't speak negatively about Lock Poker? The answer to that is no, so he should just state his name to give the interview more relevance.

That isn't to say it wasn't an interesting read because it was but still his real name carries a lot of weight so with that said real name or gtfo

[Dan Druff]

Steve,

Thanks for the link to the article. It's interesting, but I'm afraid I am dissatisfied with some of the answers given by this former Lock Pro. It's not your fault, as you are just the interviewer, but I don't want the reader coming away with the wrong idea about some of these things.

I will break it down below:

“Lock wasn’t always a nightmare,” said the anonymous pro.

I was told the company wasn’t always bad, or at least didn’t appear to be from the point of view of someone on the inside.

“Even when Lock was having speedy cashouts and was a growing site they had a ton of negative PR on 2+2 and via word of mouth, which was ridiculous,” my source explained.

This heavy criticism, which the company and its pros viewed as unwarranted, had an unintended consequence as it “caused a lot of the staff and the pros to not give a shit what people were saying on 2+2,” the former Lock Pro told me.

This outspokenness and speculation allowed Lock Poker to dispel any worries about cashouts as some of the other rumors were simply not true and the staff and pros knew it.

“Lock was always communicating to start with. They were always telling the pros that player funds were segregated and that they were processing many cashouts,” the source said.

The pro has a narrow focus on cashouts and is ignoring everything else.

Yes, cashouts (actually the lack of them) became the primary focus in 2013 and 2014, but this guy is acting like there was a lot of unwarranted criticism of Lock on 2+2 prior to that (i.e. 2012), which made it easier for pros to dismiss the later cashout concerns.



There were two big scandals involving Lock in 2011 and 2012: The Girah scandal and the Casino Bonus scandal. Both involved extremely shady behavior on the part of Lock, intentionally poor communication, and attempts at cover-ups/deflection of blame.

You can read about them here: http://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/sho...ck-Poker-AVOID

Lock was cashing people out just fine in 2011 and most of 2012, so that was not the issue. However, these two issues were both pretty major and were huge red flags regarding the trustworthiness of the site. I started beating the anti-Lock drum after the Girah scandal/cover-up, and then really got involved after the Casino Bonus scandal.

I do not recall any "unwarranted" criticism of Lock during 2011-2012 -- at least not from any reputable posters. This pro chose to ignore these big scandals and convinced himself that everything was ok simply because Lock was still paying people. Big mistake, obviously.

One of the hot topics on 2+2 concerning Lock Poker after it became apparent the site was unable to pay its players was whether sponsored pros and other high priority individuals were receiving expedited cashouts, something some of the pros who were willing to post on 2+2 scoffed at.

But it turns out this was likely a service many of them were either knowingly or unknowingly receiving.

“Pros were expedited cashouts. Even if they didn’t realize it, they were. A lot of them didn’t know they were being expedited because they didn’t follow 2+2,” the Lock Pro stated, further explaining, “If a pro got a check or Skrill withdrawal every two months – which seems very slow – how would they really know it was being expedited?”

This was the excuse offered by Bryan Pellegrino, and I don't believe it.

Basically, the pros were saying, "If the cashouts were taking 1-2 months for us, how were we supposed to know that was faster than everyone else?"

Ummm... because everyone on the internet was screaming about Lock's super-slow (and in many cases nonexistent) cashouts?

So we're supposed to believe that these pros were so ignorant regarding the information being provided on the forums that they had no idea they were receiving them far quicker than everyone else. No chance. Perhaps this might hold true for the really, really out-of-touch few, but almost everyone else had to know. This is especially true because Lock pros were constantly getting tweets complaining about the cashout times.



In the most obnoxious part of the interview, the pro asserts that certain people were manipulating Lock's trading price on 2+2 by exaggerating the problems with Lock paying out.

“By this time (early to mid 2013) 2+2 knew for certain the site was broke…with no real proof of course, and Lock was still selling at about 80 cents on the dollar which means that some people were getting hefty cashouts, otherwise it would have been much lower,” the former Lock Pro explained.

The Pro went on to say, “I heard of one non-pro getting biweekly Skrill withdrawals for $10k. He would purposely drive the price down on 2+2 and buy as much as he could on the site, then he would rake $20k or more per month to keep getting the expedited cashouts. He was making $20k a month just by working the system.”

So how does one drive down the price of Lock funds?

“Someone who wants to drive the price down just has to be very active on 2+2. There are many ways to do it.
They can fake long withdrawal times. They can start rumors that Lock had all of its funds seized from foreign banks or frozen from processors being shut down. They can also just keep posting that they are buying funds at .05 lower than market rate, that almost always will drive the funds down.

Ultimately though the only reason the price was dropping so fast was because Lock was taking forever to pay out.
Many poker players don’t have money and they relied on getting funds off just to live. If someone has bills to pay and has 50k on Lock they will sell at .05 lower just to get their money off.”

Nobody was "working the system" to my knowledge, and even if they were, it wouldn't have had much effect.

The price of Lock money dropped steeply because a large number of people were reporting super-slow or nonexistent cashout times, not because one or two sneaky assholes were over-reporting the time it was taking for them to get paid.

I do somewhat believe that one of the non-pros who raked a lot got priority cashouts (from raking really high), and then denied it publicly in order to continue buying up Lock money on the cheap. However, that guy didn't cause the Lock price to fall -- he just took advantage of his own expedited cashouts to benefit from the situation. It's unethical, but he didn't cause the problem.

Lock hasn't been trading at 80 cents on the dollar for a long time, and when it was, there were just many people still in denial about the cashout situation. It wasn't that people were getting paid, but not enough time had passed since Lock had problems paying, so people were still naively optimstic, despite the many red flags that had been seen in prior years.




This pro is also either lying or extremely uninformed regarding Girah.

He said this:

“Nobody really knew much about Girah other than he was some young gun from Portugal who played at the nosebleed stakes and won. He was introduced when Lock ran the challenge to become a Lock Pro Elite [the Bluff Pro Challenge].
Lock wanted him to win so they designed the competition to favor someone like him. What I mean by that is they just did a contest to see who could make the most amount of money in one month.

Even though Lock wanted him to win they did not in any way know he was going to cheat. They wanted him to just show that he was a legend and win the competition in a legitimate way.

I don’t know if Lock tried to cover it up or not, I don’t really think they did. I know that when Girah was caught Lock ended communication with him because he sent out emails begging all the pros to get in touch with Jennifer the CEO. At that point the pros wanted to separate themselves as far from Girah as possible, and for good reason.”

I am on the fence whether Lock assisted in his cheating (when it became clear he wouldn't win the contest legitimately), or if they just looked the other way when he won via cheating (because it was to their advantage that he would win the contest).

However, they definitely tried to cover it up.

First, by no stretch of the imagination is it possible that Lock's management really believed that he won the contest by beating a never-before-seen account out of 100k heads up on the final day. Lock's management can be stupid, but they're not THAT stupid.

But even if you want to believe that Lock was honestly bamboozled by Girah's super-obvious cheat-win of the contest, it's 100% certain that Jennifer Larson attempted to cover it up. Even when finally pressured into disqualifying him, she provided a highly misleading statement regarding what occurred:

We pride ourselves in standing for trust, legitimacy and loyalty. The truth is sometimes hard to stand by but it is the only way we can move forward. Although José won enough money from his own IP to have legitimately won the challenge, the unfortunate fact remains that breaking the rules is strictly disallowed. It nevertheless remains José is an exceptional player and I firmly believe that his mistakes only lead to greatness if he learns from them and himself moves forward.

--Jennifer Larson, Lock Poker CEO

Jennifer's quote highly implies that Girah (Jose) won enough money playing on his own to have won the contest, but was disqualified on a technicality for account-sharing during that month.

That's not what happened at all.

Girah was ESSENTIALLY BREAK-EVEN for the month when entering the contest's final day, and was behind the contest leader by almost 100k. Haseeb Qureshi then chip-dumped 100k to Girah (under a fake account not known to have been Haseeb), and suddenly Girah barely won the contest thanks to that 100k.

So what did Jennifer mean by "won on his own IP"?

Well, technically Girah was on his own IP when he won the 100k -- he just won it from a chip-dump!

Jennifer phrased her statement very carefully to imply that Girah hadn't cheated to win, when in reality he had, but threw in "from his own IP" so she had an "out" to the lie if questioned on it later.

Really scummy, and definitely was the sign of a highly dishonest company and CEO. This was in 2011. Look at all that has happened since then, and tell me that this wasn't a clear sign of what was to come. It didn't take Nostradamus to predict that Lock would eventually steal all of the player money, just as their sleazy predecessors UB and Full Tilt did.

The only thing I believe of that pro's statement about Girah is that fact that Lock developed the contest as an expected publicity-generator for Girah, believing he would win. Of course, that just adds evidence that they were complicit with Girah's cheating the whole time. It has never been explained how Haseeb Qureshi got 100k online to that fake account so quickly to dump to Girah. Seemed to me that Lock could have been in on the whole thing, after Girah failed to win the contest on his own.


All in all, I have no idea who this pro is, but he's spouting a bunch of inaccuracies from a rose-colored viewpoint, probably hoping to excuse his own delay in leaving Lock as a paid promoter of that scam.

[Steve-O]

Why is this guy wanting to hide his identity? Does he have some long contract that states he can't speak negatively about Lock Poker? The answer to that is no, so he should just state his name to give the interview more relevance.

That isn't to say it wasn't an interesting read because it was but still his real name carries a lot of weight so with that said real name or gtfo

The person I spoke to had valid reasons for keeping their identity anonymous, and I don't think you're going to get any former Lock employee on the record at this time, maybe down the road though, and there is definitely more insights to be gleaned in the future.

[Steve-O]

I'll break your comments up so I can answer them over time:

There were two big scandals involving Lock in 2011 and 2012: The Girah scandal and the Casino Bonus scandal. Both involved extremely shady behavior on the part of Lock, intentionally poor communication, and attempts at cover-ups/deflection of blame.

You can read about them here: http://pokerfraudalert.com/forum/sho...ck-Poker-AVOID

Lock was cashing people out just fine in 2011 and most of 2012, so that was not the issue. However, these two issues were both pretty major and were huge red flags regarding the trustworthiness of the site. I started beating the anti-Lock drum after the Girah scandal/cover-up, and then really got involved after the Casino Bonus scandal.

I do not recall any "unwarranted" criticism of Lock during 2011-2012 -- at least not from any reputable posters. This pro chose to ignore these big scandals and convinced himself that everything was ok simply because Lock was still paying people. Big mistake, obviously.

We never touched on the casino bonus scandal, so I'm not even sure they were aware of that.

But they were very clear that because the forums got certain things wrong, the spinning done by Lock was easier to believe --think of your recent Palms Poker Room thing, where you had virtually everything correct, but one thing wrong, so it kind of killed the credibility in a lot of people's eyes. It sounded like the same thing happened here, the forums would go off in one direction on something the Lock Pros knew wasn't correct, so it made it easy for Lock to say it's just shills and trolls.

My feeling was that the person I spoke to realizes now the red flags were there, and feels they should have recognized it sooner. but that's just speculation on my part.

We also spoke about the different sponsorship deals (this didn't make the article) and let's just say they weren't making a ton from Lock, unless they were a really big name or had a ton of signups and hit their RB Bonus, which makes them little more than an affiliate

[Steve-O]

This was the excuse offered by Bryan Pellegrino, and I don't believe it.

Basically, the pros were saying, "If the cashouts were taking 1-2 months for us, how were we supposed to know that was faster than everyone else?"

Ummm... because everyone on the internet was screaming about Lock's super-slow (and in many cases nonexistent) cashouts?

So we're supposed to believe that these pros were so ignorant regarding the information being provided on the forums that they had no idea they were receiving them far quicker than everyone else. No chance. Perhaps this might hold true for the really, really out-of-touch few, but almost everyone else had to know. This is especially true because Lock pros were constantly getting tweets complaining about the cashout times.

Basically my source said THEY knew 2 months was expedited (and some others did as well) but there were people that truly didn't know --I have no idea if Pelligrino was one of these people but he's active on 2+2 so I find it hard to believe he didn't know.

[Steve-O]

Nobody was "working the system" to my knowledge, and even if they were, it wouldn't have had much effect.

The price of Lock money dropped steeply because a large number of people were reporting super-slow or nonexistent cashout times, not because one or two sneaky assholes were over-reporting the time it was taking for them to get paid.

I do somewhat believe that one of the non-pros who raked a lot got priority cashouts (from raking really high), and then denied it publicly in order to continue buying up Lock money on the cheap. However, that guy didn't cause the Lock price to fall -- he just took advantage of his own expedited cashouts to benefit from the situation. It's unethical, but he didn't cause the problem.

Lock hasn't been trading at 80 cents on the dollar for a long time, and when it was, there were just many people still in denial about the cashout situation. It wasn't that people were getting paid, but not enough time had passed since Lock had problems paying, so people were still naively optimstic, despite the many red flags that had been seen in prior years.

You're misreading the comments, they basically said what you did, people were gaming the system but the only thing really driving the price down was Lock's inability to pay --you might want to read the comments again

[Steve-O]

I think the source is pretty spot on with Girah, although I would be more inclined to believe they swept what really happened under the rug where the source is on the fence.

The comment that Girah e-mailed all the pros because Jenn cutoff communication is something the person would know 100%, so I don't think Lock knew he was going to cheat otherwise why end communication? Aided in cheating, No. Swept under the rug afterwards, Yes.

-------------------------------
I'll dig through later on and see what the editor cutout and try to post some more of the comments here. There are some comments/thoughts about Jenn and Rizen, the pro contracts and RB deals and some other stuff

[ownmatusow]

I think the source is pretty spot on with Girah, although I would be more inclined to believe they swept what really happened under the rug where the source is on the fence.

The comment that Girah e-mailed all the pros because Jenn cutoff communication is something the person would know 100%, so I don't think Lock knew he was going to cheat otherwise why end communication? Aided in cheating, No. Swept under the rug afterwards, Yes.

-------------------------------
I'll dig through later on and see what the editor cutout and try to post some more of the comments here. There are some comments/thoughts about Jenn and Rizen, the pro contracts and RB deals and some other stuff

Anyone surprised by any of this is naïve - unless there are strict regulations equal to banking laws - you cannot be surprised.

You don't see many people putting money into foreign banks that are not FDIC regulated - and there's a reason for that.

[UseHerName]

No comment on the rest of the stuff, but the pro clearly knows fuck all about what went down with Jose.

[Steve-O]

No comment on the rest of the stuff, but the pro clearly knows fuck all about what went down with Jose.

Enlighten us please

[Dan Druff]

[Dan Druff]

Steve-O posted on 2+2 some more comments from the live pro, which didn't make the article.


Regarding sponsorships:

There were different tiers of sponsorship.

The lower level guys just got a rakeback deal and usually a bonus if they hit a certain amount of rake between them and their affiliates. The worst part is the site was giving out better rake back deals to non pros, some guys with the rake races and VIP were actually making over 100 or very close to 100%RB.

Everyone had their own rake goal to hit to make the bonus, some people it was 12k others it was 15k, also depends on what their affiliates were doing. The top dogs could easily clear 15k rake from their affiliates in a month all it really took was getting 1 or 2 super grinders under your name. Heads up sit n go players or mid stakes cash players would literally print money for you.

The better known players were making a salary but it wasn't a ton of money. Some pros were making 3k a month regardless of how much they played. All money was paid to players lock poker accounts, none of it was just sent western union or skrill, so any money made through sponsorship was still monopoly money until a cashout cleared. Which means, depending on their channels to cash out the pros weren't really making as much as people thought. For example, is there any difference between having 1 million on the site and 10 million, if you can only get 5k off a month?

Regarding Jen Larson

This is a really hard question to answer.

Jenn is a really nice person and an even better motivator. I don't think she took a day off from work since she started lock. Her dedication to the site was contagious and made everyone else (the pros) work really hard. Between accumulating affiliates and raking money for the site she was continuously pressing us to do more, in a good way.

She did however make lofty promises that she didn't follow through with and sticking to a deadline rarely happened. Also at the end of the day she is the one responsible for getting players their money, so there is no way I can say she is a good person until she makes player's whole again.

Regarding Eric "Rizen" Lynch:

I have no idea what he even did. He didn't manage pros.

I have to say that I highly suspect Steve-O's "Lock pro" is actually PriomordialAA/Bryan Pellegrino. Sounds just like him, right down to the praise for Jen Larson.

Anyway, read this pro's comments about Jen Larson, and it's pretty clear the guy has absolutely no clue (or is intentionally delusional).

[BeerAndPoker]

Jen Larson is a nice thief. Wow, we all should just forgive her because of that.

All joking aside I don't think Lock ever had the intent to steal money from people but they got in over their heads trying to expand the business too quickly, switch networks, buying percentages of networks, spending too many advertising dollars, hiring a bunch of Lock Pros trying to be FTP 2.0, etc...

Lock is/was really bad with money. A HUGE problem the poker community including myself has with them is when Lock knew things were going down the shitter they didn't make spending adjustments. Lock continued to advertise heavily and spend tons of money to pamper their pros on a trip to Portugal when the company was not in a place financially to do that. I read somewhere this trip was planned for several months ahead and paid for but come on I'm not buying that shit at all that they couldn't cancel it and at least get a big portion of the money back which should go to paying players.

[Steve-O]

There will also be a follow-up to this in the near future, the next one from a multiple sources including my original source who will answer some of the questions from 2+2

[vookenmeister]

Jen Larson is a nice thief. Wow, we all should just forgive her because of that.

All joking aside I don't think Lock ever had the intent to steal money from people but they got in over their heads trying to expand the business too quickly, switch networks, buying percentages of networks, spending too many advertising dollars, hiring a bunch of Lock Pros trying to be FTP 2.0, etc...

Lock is/was really bad with money. A HUGE problem the poker community including myself has with them is when Lock knew things were going down the shitter they didn't make spending adjustments. Lock continued to advertise heavily and spend tons of money to pamper their pros on a trip to Portugal when the company was not in a place financially to do that. I read somewhere this trip was planned for several months ahead and paid for but come on I'm not buying that shit at all that they couldn't cancel it and at least get a big portion of the money back which should go to paying players.

this... I would say one of the obvious killers was their decision to throw out huge rakeback offers to generate long term volume.

I was approached privately shortly after Black Friday (May/June) to "switch" to Lock. At first I was getting maybe 80% or so rakeback but then later it shot to greater than 100% rakeback... often as high as 108% (47% black ops, 40% deposit bonus, 19% or so from scattered monthly promotions). This was because the deposit bonus did not go away when you withdrew. It stuck until you cleared it. I also had no rakeback requirements so I received the top tier (black ops) regardless of my volume. So even though I was just a part time player (15-20 tables maybe 8-10 hours a week) I was able to generate a decent hourly solely due to rakeback. (Nothing clever or exciting. I was playing simple strat DoNs mostly. I did not do HU flips like some others did).

later I discovered I actually could make more playing elsewhere on merge as an affiliate (feltstars before they folded) and instead started staking players and/or buying discounted Lock and cashing out through WU (I did this for 8-10 months when cashouts were only taking 4 weeks or so). My hourly at Feltstars was lower as I was only getting around 70% RB for myself but I was turning over cashouts on Lock from discounted fund purchases (75-80% at time). that pretty much came to a halt around Dec 2012 or so...

by the way one thing I was told was that when I made over 100% rakeback due to promos it actually generated negative rakeback income for the pro who registered me. Kind of like how affiliates see negative rakeback when someone plays the casino and wins. He had tons of players generating positive rakeback from him whereas there were some like myself who "cost" him during big promotions. Trust me, my personal amounts weren't enough to make a difference and I can't attest to this being accurate... just putting it out there.

as stated nicely above, it just was not a sustainable business model, regardless of intent. I still wonder how much they lost on processors, etc as well as whatever might have been pocketed as "salaries" and "cost". Who knows?

[Dan Druff]

Interesting story, vookenmeister. Always nice to hear from someone with direct experience with the situation.

Clearly their unsustainable rakeback/marketing was a large reason for the collapse, but the problem was that they treated player funds as a reserve bank account when their operating budget ran to zero. And that's stealing.

The Portugal retreat was a perfect example of the brazen wastefulness and disregard for player funds. Here they were already having major cashout problems, and Jen chose to go through with the very expensive retreat, presumably because she felt it was needed in order to keep the loyalty of the pros.

She took the warped attitude of, "If it gets pros to stay, then it will lead to more deposits, which will end up helping the cashout situation in the long run."

But you can't do that with other people's money, no matter how good you think your idea is.

Let's say I owe you money and can't pay. Let's say I come up with a supposedly great plan to make money and pay you back, but it requires some more of your money to get it started. Rather than ask you, I just steal it out of your bank account, planning to return it only if my plan works. Would that be okay? Obviously not.

That's why I hate when the Lock situation (and the Full Tilt situation) is characterized as simply poor money management and unsustainable spending. It wasn't. It was stealing, so Jen could risk the player money to grow her business further.

[BeerAndPoker]

as stated nicely above, it just was not a sustainable business model, regardless of intent. I still wonder how much they lost on processors, etc as well as whatever might have been pocketed as "salaries" and "cost". Who knows?

^^^

Any business model that requires someone to offer extremely lucrative deals that seem too good to be true is going to fail. In online poker it definitely is the rakeback deals but stuff like what the Palms was doing in that promo of only keeping $1 for the house isn't sustainable either. You need to find balance and other ways to drive people to using your services.

Take the restaurant industry for example. Their are some places that offer the best specials in the world trying to draw people in that they can't make much money off of it but the key is to hope to gain new customers, sell additional alcohol beverages ,etc... Now you can have a restaurant that has a good reputation but more on the pricey side yet still people rather go to that place because of how they are treated, overall atmosphere, etc...

If some bar has to offer $2 drinks in order to get people into the place otherwise nobody shows up then the public is telling you they don't care too much for your product but are willing to go because the special is too good to pass up.

Now you could take a bar across the street which has established a better reputation for themselves charging $4 or $5 for the same drink and they may still get three times the traffic as the other place offering it for half price or less.

The point I'm getting at is these insane rakeback deals are going to hurt the company and they really shouldn't have to offer something so lucrative to drive traffic to a site. The key is to find that sweet spot in the middle and create a solid reputation for your company which will increase your traffic from word of mouth which is SO crucial in the online poker business way more so then it was prior to Black Friday.

What us 80% rakeback from a site that don't pay out? Lock could promise their players 2000% rakeback at this point and it's essentially the same as offering 0%.

[vookenmeister]

True. Also, the whole rakeback wars under the table by Lock, other sites, and affiliates themselves within Merge had a lot of reason for the breakup of the Merge skins as well. (Leading to the splintered semi-death of Merge itself). Black Friday was bad enough but at least there was some unified volume on Merge which kept cash and SNG stakes running much higher than they do now on any US site. The split off of Lock then BCP really hurt. Invariably while benefiting in the near term I was also indirectly contributing to the overall death.

Anyways, sorry, back to the topic. Looking forward to more input by Steve-O...

[UseHerName]

No comment on the rest of the stuff, but the pro clearly knows fuck all about what went down with Jose.

Enlighten us please

Druff more or less covered it.

I don't know for sure but I doubt she was complicit in the chip dump. In her defence she was probably as swept away with the 'next big thing' line that had been spun as everyone else. I suppose she saw $$$. But she knew what had happened when the misleading statement was released.

Not 100% sure, but I think Jose had money on Lock when it all hit the fan...which would probably explain radio silence just as much as wanting to put some distance between the company and the whole shitstorm.