stevesbets

The very best cardplayer I know is also the worst poker player I know. He consistently displays above the rim thinking, sharp wit, and great holdem hand reading skills. With that said, He is a consistent and large lifetime $ loser at poker. Aside from the obvious lack of discipline that someone who fits this description must display, he has the biggest tilt problem of anybody I have ever seen. He admits that when he is tilting he is awful. What he doesn’t admit is that I would venture to guess he is on tilt for 99.9% of the hands he has ever played. For nearly every other human on earth this would be absurd hyperbole, but for this young man it is fact. I’m convinced that the ONLY hands he plays not on tilt are the ones he folds immediately after winning a big pot. After one fold though the inner tilt builds up and his “normal” tilted play resumes. To me he proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that it takes more than innate card sense and intelligence to win at this game.

Over the last couple years I have twice had small debts that I allegedly owed sent to collection agencies. While both were more or less the company’s fault and not my own, the way the two companies handled their respective situaitons once I contacted them to me proves the difference between a good company, and a terrible company. In general, the system of collections is really outrageous, I believe consumers need some recourse.

The first story begins two years ago when I lived at The Left Bank apartment building in Philadelphia. When my roommates and I moved into our apartment, it was totally empty save a cable box from Viking communications that the previous tenants had used. Representatives from our apartment building came in our first day in the apartment to take it out. We wanted to get Comcast cable but the building had some sort of deal that gave Viking, a company no one had heard of, a monopoly on cable and internet access. In order to get our viking cable box we simply needed to go down to our lobby to pick up the box from our leasing office, to me this made it seem as if the Left Bank was an alter-ego of Viking Communications. Throughout our days at the Left Bank, Viking proved to be one of the most horrendously run companies that I have ever come across. Their customer service number consisted of an answering machine. A human could only be reached if there were over 10 complaints lodged on the machine by different people in the same day, the internet went down all the time proving very costly to me, and they did not even offer cable packages that included HD or DVR. When our time at Left Bank was up in June of 2006, I paid the final cable bill and canceled service. We moved out and left our cable box in our apartment to be scooped up by left bank representatives.

I thought I was done with the situation until the fall of 06 when I first received a call from a collection agency. It was an automated message on my voice mail informing me that I owed a debt and giving me a number to call.  A very rude and angry old lady on the other end informed me that I owed 256 dollars to Viking Communications. She could not offer me any hint of what the bill was for, but informed me that until her company was paid they would be calling me every day multiple times per day, as well as sending debt collection letters to my home. Frustrated, I tried calling Viking, forgetting that they have no customer service outside of a machine. As the absurd debt collection calls continued, and with no way of finding out exactly why they believed I owed them money, I decided to call the building manager at Left Bank. He told me that he would call his “contact” at Viking and let me know. The next day he called me to inform me that I owed them for my cable and internet bills from August and September of 2006. (Note that this was over a month after I moved out making it impossible that it was even some sort of glitch with canceling my account, since if it were I would have “owed” for July of 2006).

After 5-6 phone calls back and forth I finally got a hold of a Viking representative who told me that the burden was on ME to PROVE that I didn’t live in the Left Bank during those months and therefore it was impossible that I had the service with them. I faxed them documents that proved my left bank rental time period and my new apartment rental and they agreed the matter was resolved. Sure enough though, a week later another call from collections claiming I owed Viking 151 dollars. I go through the same deal as before to finally get through to a Viking agent. She informed me in the sassiest way possible that I never returned the cable box to the leasing office of Left Bank and therefore owed the money. (They had never said a word about this before while claiming I owed them for August and September).

To make a very long story short, I was assured over and over again by Viking that they would stop coming after me for these fraudulent debts, and over and over again the collections company harassed me the next day and every day. It took over 10 months for them to finally stop calling me. There was a total disconnect between Viking and the collections agency, and the collections agency doesn’t care one bit about rightness or fairness, they only care about annoying the hell out of whoever they believe MIGHT owe them money.

So these two entities were able to take up my time for over 10 months and as a consumer I have virtually no recourse. Even retelling this story now infuriates me to the point where I want to walk over to Left Bank and tell no one to live there because they have to deal with the scummiest company around.  Maybe some sort of company should be created to constantly harass and bother the officers of a company that harasses consumers with fraudulent charges.

This blog tilt has turned pretty long so I’ll save the next story about collections for later.

My buddy Luke (http://lukekim.blogspot.com) has recently had quite an ordeal with UB which  he wrote up on his blog. I of course think it’s outrageous how they evaded his emails, calls and questions, but you can read his blog and draw your own conclusions. I think it is insane that one of the mega poker companies out there (absolute poker/ultimatebet) are as shady as they are. They avoid answering emails, they have no phone number that average players can use to contact them, and give players no recourse when they decide to confiscate funds for shady reasons. It is pretty much beyond me how someone can play regularly on these sites as opposed to more reputable sites like pokerstars and full tilt.

I recently had tried to log into UB for the first time in years and I discovered that my account was banned for unspecified “scamming”. Additionally, two of my good friends’ accounts were banned for being associated with my account. Needless to say, I hadn’t touched the account in years and I have never been involved with fraud or scamming of any sort. All three of us tried emailing UB. They responded to one of my friends offering a phone number he could call to clear up the issue. The phone number was out of service. How can a site that makes more money than most of us could ever dream of offer up a customer service number that is inoperable. After a couple weeks of run around, I got my friend Nat involved, and since he has connections with the higher ups he was able to clear it up and get our accounts clear. Without Nat I think it is safe to say that we would have never been able to fix the issue due to UB’s policy of either ignoring emails or offering up unhelpful responses.

Thinking about the issues that Luke and I have had with Ultimatebet gets me angry at the fact that some well known and allegedly reputable people are spokespeople for this site as well as absolute. I think the “celebrity” faces of Ultimatebet (Phil Hellmuth, Antonio Esfandiari, Annie Duke and many others), Absolutepoker (Mark Seif) and other large sites need to be held responsible for the outrageous business practices of the sites they represent.  I know I personally could never be the face of a site that steals, scams and generally offers a poor experience to players and if I ever do get offered a deal from a site, I would be personally willing to attempt to rectify any legitimate issues that players have.

Mark Seif in particular did something even more outrageous in the face of the now infamous potripper superuser scandal. This player was an Absolute insider who won a tournament, his play made it blatantly obvious to everyone that he was able to see everyone’s hole cards. It was fortunate that the mastermind behind this scam did not have a masterful mind because otherwise he could have stolen money for years and never been caught. However, just before this scandal was officially proven, Mark Seif made a video in which he stated that he watched the video of the tournament and saw no proof or even strong evidence that the player could see the other hole cards. His statement was certainly disingenuous, he compromised his integrity for the money Absolute threw at him.

I have met Mark and outside of a bit of a temper, he seemed to be a good guy, and he is certainly a well known member of the poker tournament circuit. It amazes me that he can both go out in public and look at himself in the mirror after making those absurd statements. If online poker is to survive and thrive, the celebrity spokespeople need to have honor that is beyond reproach. Additionally they need to hold the sites they work for accountable for terrible service or worse. After hearing what Mark Seif said, I would never trust him again and I hope other players also do not.

On a personal note, if it isn’t clear here I have trouble containing my outrage at these sites and their spokesmen. I love online poker and it is under attack by our country and by lots of live poker players who claim they don’t trust it. I would argue tirelessly in it’s defense but it becomes impossible when those in power are unethical or downright criminal. The poker community needs to be less forgiving and truly make it impossible for those who lie, cheat or steal to be around the big tournaments without constant complaints, questions, and harsh criticism.