Spades Lounge, Gone but Not Forgotten
12/28/2006 5:31:38 PM
In early October, 2006, SpadesLounge.com went offline, posting a notice they were closing for a major structural and software update and would be reopening under new management on October 12th, 2006. As of November 9, the site was still up, but nothing worked. Now, the site is gone entirely, leaving in its wake numerous angry players, owed money when they locked the poker room down.
Unanswered questions remain. Did they really intend to reorganize? To update their software? To hold player funds in trust until they came back online with a new and better platform? Or, did they put up that notice merely to give the operators ample time to facilitate their getaway?
It seems, from the very beginning, this room was tainted.
TheOnlineWire went on record early in a report entitled “Secrets of the Scam Poker Room Unveiled.” In it, they reported there was a link between the ownership of Spades Lounge and the defunct BetonStars, a sportsbook that went out of business owing bettors thousands and thousands of dollars. Though Spades Lounge management denied it, claiming that they merely bought domain addresses from the parent company of BoS, the die had been cast.
Spades Lounge officially went online March 1, 2006, offering freerolls to attract players. In May, when The Online Wire posted their report, PokerRoomReview also posted a newswire, cautioning players that there might be a link between SL and BoS. We received an e-mail from the manager of SL, stating they were backed up by a group of investors and managers that came from different poker rooms, and went on to say we would eat our words when SL paid everyone for the freerolls they were offering.
Well, as it turned out, the words remained uneaten. By mid-July, we began receiving complaints from frustrated players who were not being paid for the freerolls, accusing SL of changing the terms and conditions after they had originally assured players the ‘Beta’ winnings would be restriction free. On 7/20/06, we filed this report ‘SpadesLounge.com Not Honoring Original Promotion.’
The freeroll dispute was never resolved.
As time passed, we would receive various complaints about inadequate support, buggy software, and we filed another report regarding a player from Washington who was having problems withdrawing due to the recently passed legislation, making poker playing illegal. We attempted to contact SL, but the e-mail address we had for the manager came back undeliverable, and the private phone number we had was answered by an unknown individual who claimed that particular number was incorrect, though we had contacted the manager there on past occasions.
Fast forward to Early October. The site went down, but a notice on their homepage promised they would be back up on the 12th. A poster on a forum wrote that the owner had fired all the employees when the site went offline, and if this is true, it suggests the reorganization claim was bogus.
Seeing as how they had their own software and didn’t belong to a network, there is no one to go after on behalf of stiffed players. The manager is long gone, and there are no records listing the identity of the group of investors that he had mentioned in his e-mail.
All that remains now are angry players owed money, maybe a hard lesson or two learned, and perhaps even an additional verification of the old proverb, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well, it probably is indeed a duck.”
As a footnote, one immediate result of the recently passed Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) was that it provided a legitimate-seeming excuse for online poker sites with marginal traffic to close up shop, and disappear, as in the case of Jetset Poker among others. At this time this article was written, both Jetset and Spades Lounge owe players funds for the settlement of accounts.
Any player who made a deposit to Spades Lounge can e-mail a screenshot of the deposit info (excluding account numbers or personal data) to Help@PokerRoomReview.com, and we will assist you in getting your Neteller deposit compensated at a highly rated online poker room.