slot99 have been struggling all weekend to pay winning players on their poker client.
There have been many complaints of players sitting at a cash table or entering a sit and go, the cash being taken from their accounts but then kicked off the table without refund. Also complaints of MTT and SNG winners not being paid.
Despite this, it took until Monday for the poker client to be taken offline.
Betfair released this email this evening;
“We are writing to you as you are one of the customers who has contacted our call centre to register a query regarding “trapped funds on the poker client”.
The Poker team would like to apologise for any inconvenience this has caused you and ask you to be patient while we do our upmost to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
The issue is a communication problem between our two internal payment systems. Please rest assured that all funds are accounted for and once a fix has been found will be returned to the rightful players.”
I like Betfair as a company, but surely this is another kick in the knackers for them, and again, it will take them along time to rid themselves of the reputation of having a dodgy poker client, which they no doubt had before they dumped their own software and moved to the Ongame network late last year.
The point about a communication problem is quite ironic, because although the system failure is causing the problem today, its the lack of communication shown by Betfair during this incident towards it’s customers which, should they continue in this manner will be more harmful in the long run.
The problem, as far as I am aware manifested itself early Saturday, yet other than a single post on the Betfair forum on Saturday afternoon, no other official notice was given that there was an ongoing issue until Monday afternoon. During this time the site was open for business as usual, thus allowing more and more customers to be affected.
Betfair is a multi million pound organisation, however the way they have managed the fault from a customer perspective reflects more like a tin pot outfit. In my opinion, they should have closed the site as soon as they knew they had a problem, and advised their customers of such on a more regular basis than has been shown. We don’t need to know the in depth technical details, just a simple “still got a problem, still working on it”, every few hours on the forum and the home page would have sufficed. Instead its been left to other customers to get the message across that they have problems through other media.
Like I’ve previously stated, I like Betfair, but I think this weekend will have cost them more than the loss of rake and a few poker players bets on the sports book, the damage to the reputation of their poker client and customer facing service will take longer to recover.
