Off with a bang....

After a slight technical problem we are off and running again, starting with the betfair STAX scam...


7 pm says goodbye to Betfair.... September has just started and it is time for me to kill my Betfair account. I played the months of February, March, April, May and August. Those five months i made approximately £50,000 and entry to the world series main event worth an additional £5000. The money i was making was good but I just couldn't no longer put up with being cheated. It is both easy and yet difficult at the same time to take the decision to play Betfair no longer. Betfair does have a great community of players, I can think of 20 just off the top of my head. Actually I will name a few now and obviously more than I name i will forget off the tip of my tongue. Many are not friends of mine, and i don't even speak to a lot of them yet they are all part of the great community that is Betfair poker. (let me add that many of this community are absolutely rubbish at poker, yet very few do make a decent profit from poker. just because someone is a losing player it doesn't mean they don't have a positive affect on the poker community in general). Well just naming a few people from this betfair community off the top of my head i name in no particular order, doobs, dubai, mandylou, zelda, gatsby, ariston, shaa, kpnuts, dealem, poker queen (yes i know she is a bitch but nethertheless is an integral part of this community), duffs, smartmoney, highstack, soap, reactive, and i cant be assed to keep on naming them!
My main gripe is the constant attacks from a small minority of the staff, this year i have had two chat bans. I often play over 100 games a day so games played divided by complaints i am nowhere near as guilty as most, however maybe people will disagree. Here is my first chat ban on betfair poker....
A player called Fastfoot is playing somebody called Ontheup daily, I notice that any game over $150 which is on the las vegas leaderboard is won by ontheup, any game under $150 is won by fastfoot. No games last past level one. It is clear that the leaderboard is being manipulated, this is reported to betfair who say nothing can be proved. I mean what are the odds of somebody winning around 20/20 games at $150 or below versus the same player yet losing 8/8 at the higher stake. So in a game with fastfoot i call him cheating scum, betfair email me saying you have a life chat ban etc etc. Calling someone cheating scum is a lifetime ban? My chat is reinstated at a later date and then this month AGAIN i am given a chat ban for life... obviously i am a bit puzzled so i ask for the conversation and i am emailed this...

11:01:44 7 pm says : 7 pm: f urself
10:59:28 7 pm says : 7 pm: wtf
10:59:30 7 pm says : 7 pm: f o

Now this is part of an edited conversation, whereby the other player Hangboot issues veiled threats that he can find me, knows who I am etc and calls me by my full name. Now if someone can get a chat ban for the above i am baffled, however it was part of the bigger picture, the STAX SCAM.
Betfair ran a promotion called STAX with a first prize of $23000. Midway through I realised i wasn't going to be allowed to win, the exact reasons I still cant be sure of. But basically I believe it to be a criminal action by Betfair. I was top for around 25 of the first 26 days yet realised from around day 15 that I was going to be cheated out of first. This is clearly not sour grapes as i realised when i was top and way ahead of other people. I had won $100 from someone on heads up micro stakes who was going all in every hand, i had called behind on several of the hands and got lucky. My account was locked and my leading score on STAX taken down, betfair vip called the next day and said there was an error and reactivated my account. However I wasn't on the stax leaderboard, they assured me I would be back on their the next day. On the normal leaderboards i had 60000 points on low stakes cash. The next day i was back on stax and all my cash points had disappeared! This was when I knew it wasn't meant for me. So i am a million miles clear and out of nowhere a player called smokeysi steams up the leaderboard in two days, i watch him and he is clearly endlessly dumping on cash tables. I have a better stt and mtt score yet he goes above me as he has just a cash score better than mine. I complain to betfair and they say nothing is amiss, then over ten people say on the betfair forum that they have seen him cash dumping so betfair finally throw him out. So thats twice that I have been affected by dirty deeds, then in the last few days all hell broke loose. New leaders by the day, knowing that if my stt and mtt score were better than someone who had a cash score they would be top i got to work on my cash score. The second last day here is the top of the leaderboard....

1 fuzzard 1375 1550 1875 99.8
2 7 pm 1150 2250 1525 99.77
3 Tesa 500 1500 1525 93.32
4 EnAnNi 1050 1550 1000 92.4
5 Wingding2 1025 1250 1375 91.47

Then on the final day....
1 Wingding2 1025 1500 1875 99.79
2 fuzzard 1375 1525 1750 99.77
3 7 pm 1250 2250 1525 99.74
4 EnAnNi 1600 1550 1000 99.41
5 Tesa 500 1500 1525 93.32

I have scored more points by far than anyone else yet am not top, the person who gets first than me is behind in stt and cash yet ahead on mtt.... wait two weeks ago i was ahead on stt and mtt and someone ahead on cash was given top spot! Add to this the fact that some days peoples scores went up and overall score went down. Now betfair said this in the terms and conditions...
The formula for STAX#RATINGS™ is confidential and Betfair will not enter into discussions regarding how this is calculated.
Fair enough you don't wish to say how you work the scores out, yet after the promotion is over and so many people query the results surely for peace of mind there is nothing to lose in revealing it? Its not as if stax will ever be used again, but no betfair wont reveal the formulas as 7 pm has clearly been robbed. I will have nothing to do with betfair again. If this is how they treat a player who rakes £10000 a month good luck to them. I have bubbled for slightly more than $23000 in the past yet its different coming second than coming first and been given second. Betfair would definitely reveal a formula rather than lose hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in custom unless there was no formula to reveal. I fully expect that withing two weeks a formula will be worked out to show how wingding could have scored way less points yet still be top. I shall continue to avoid contact with Betfair and play elsewhere. I will not accept any bribes or sweeteners neither. Note one day after the promotion is over the auto-updates are on and someone goes top with less points but a better cash score than wingding!...

1 EnAnNi 1650 1550 1000 99.83
2 Wingding2 1025 1500 1875 99.78

Wingding2 has benefited from the scam but in no way at all is he to blame and i hope he does get a good finish in the WSOPE. Betfair however have lost over 6 figures sterling from me alone a year and whatever they lose from people I know not playing there anymore. Surely revealing the scoring system after the event wouldn't have been that hard? I have been informed by Fuzzard that he has also lodged an official complaint, exactly on what grounds I don't know.
Good luck to all who continue to play at betfair and remember no matter how much you rake you can get turned over. Always read rules of any competion you enter. My chat ban was given just to silence me as i was questioning stax to other players even though i was top. If you think you can get chat ban for saying wtf fo good luck to you! O yea, also Betfair ran tournaments over the weekend whereby some players started with more chips than others. How can this be possible, the software is set and works fine for thousands of games then suddenly it freaks out. Well the software is written and cannot go wrong unless it is manually altered, hackers have possibly gotten into betfair and messed around with the program. However betfair could not admit to this as share price and customer confidence would go down. There are several more betfair stories that I have but probably wont mention as at the end of the day many great staff still work there, it isn't fair on the likes of ruru, estelle and others to be tarred with the same brush as the corrupt few. Time will tell what I reveal, however 7 pm is definitely dead on Betfair.

Tomorrow I shall reveal the threedom pass lies also a case of more lies by Betfair Poker