Problem with poker and disappointed with the customer support

[ChuckBassPoker]

I've spent way too much time on this already so I'm going to cut this a little bit short, but leaving out no important details.

I'm a longtime poker reg, created my Unibet account around 2008, have played Unibet Opens live since that year, I'm one of the most prominent poker posters (my 2+2 handle is "Chuck Bass"), I currently work for UpswingPoker and my articles are among the most read poker articles in the world, in the past I've worked for Cardrunners, Pokerstrategy, etc. Just mentioning this to point out I'm not some random donk who thinks everything is rigged.

Last Sunday, as I'm sure many are aware, the Unibet network was having massive problems. I started playing at 6PM (GMT+2), and almost immediately I started getting glitches. I was thrown out like 4 times out of the client, the hole cards kept freezing, I kept timing out, there was a terrible lag, the tournament lobbies didn't work, graphics worked on and off so that I saw hole cards from the previous hand instead of the cards that I had, etc etc. Then in the end, at roughly 8.30PM, the entire network disconnected. The downtime lasted what I think was 45-ish minutes? During which I blinded out of tournaments entirely.

I shot all of this on video, took screenshots, all of which I've provided to the customer service. This disconnection was confirmed both here and on Unibet's official 2+2 thread by the poker team higher-ups. There seems to be absolutely no question about who's at fault; Unibet themselves have confirmed that it was their fault because of the mass freeroll being too hard on their servers (or something along those lines, I'm no tech expert).

So I naturally contacted customer support immediately asking for standard refunds. It was in the middle of a Sunday and I had a bunch on non-Unibet tables going, so I didn't have time to make exact notes (obviously you can't expect a site to go down until it actually goes down...), but just as a very rough guestimate I had the following stacks in 5€ tournaments that were affected:

10-11x starting stack,
4x starting stack,
4x starting stack,
2x starting stack,
1x starting stack
1x starting stack (sat out from the start as I had preregged)

I realize this is not exactly how ICM works, but just to point out a very rough estimate if 1x starting stack = 5€, I had ~120€ worth of stacks on my screen. You can see below how Unibet wouldn't let me in, I have video of this as well and like I said this has been confirmed by Unibet themselves.



The customer service got back to me and offered to refund me 2x2€ tickets, 1x1€ ticket (when I wasn't even in MTTs this low, lolol) as "a goodwill gesture". I asked them wtf, explained the whole thing as clearly as possible, but they said this decision is final.

I assumed this rep must have been on drugs or something so I tried to contact @Unibetpoker on twitter and posting in the Unibet thread. I received no response. Today, four days later, I learned why. I've been put on some kind of weird blacklist by the poker team so that no one is allowed to discuss my case further. Here is my chat with some Unibet rep today:




As you can see, they acknowledged this as "the december 12th disconnection" themselves before me even specifying what I was on about. They are fully aware this happened.

I don't even know what to say. I feel like we're living in a sim or something, this is hands down the craziest treatment I have ever received for a poker company and that is a lot said. Well maybe TowerGaming scamming me for 60k back in  the day and stealing funds from my account was worse, but this is at least a clear second.

This is crazy also because I've always really liked Unibet, I've always told people that they are legit and my experiences with their customer support have been 99% positive. And like, I realize stuff like this takes time, I don't care how long it takes to get the refunds, but getting blacklisted for no reason and not being allowed to contact anyone is just absolute madness. And how did they reach the conclusion to give me 2€, 2€ and 1€ tickets when I was in 7x 5€ MTTs? Even if they completely ignored the fact that obviously having 11x starting stack or something is worth way more than the initial buyin, how do they decide to admit they're at fault but still only refund 1/7th of the buyins? I have received no explanation, and every time I ask for one I get ducked. Seriously just read the chat above, it's mindblowing.

If anyone from Unibet reads this, please email me at my address that's registered to my account, my account name (not poker screenname) is DreamOfHanna. You can also tweet me @ChuckBassPoker or 2+2 at me (Chuck Bass). 

I don't even care about 120€ all that much and the time I've spent on this has already cost me way more, I've probably spent 8 hours of my life writing emails and explaining this case over and over again. But I just can't let it go, it's too unfair. I doubt 120 euros means much to Unibet either, I mean they pay more in overlays every single day. And this isn't a controversial issue at all. When you admit yourselves this is your fault how can you possibly reach another conclusion but to refund?

PS. I have another standing issue from 8 days earlier, when I was HU in a 5€ MTT and was disconnected very very briefly. I was able to get back immediately, and only lost something like 5 hands to the glitch. It cost me something like 20-30k chips in a tournament with a 3k starting stack as my opponent was able to blind me out. They also decided to not refund me anything and have ducked any emails since. I feel like *this* is an issue where I would have take a "goodwill gesture", as it was such a random little thing that only lasted 30 seconds, but just happened to be costly as I was HU and my opponent was able to blind me out for high equity blinds. It's been two weeks since this happened and since the original "we are not refunding anything, gg" I have received no response. I don't care about this one much, but just to point out that this also wasn't the first time in recent past that I've received questionable treatment...

HELP PLEASE.

[ChuckBassPoker]

edit: Oops I can't edit the post. I meant "December 10th disconnection" and not 12th obviously.

[FeelsBadMan]

Just tagging señor @JeppeL 

[nekoneko]

Well, the rest of us understood it was a server problem and it rarely happends so we didn't ask for any compensations.

No wasted time :) life moves on.

[ChuckBassPoker]

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@nekoneko wrote:

Well, the rest of us understood it was a server problem and it rarely happends so we didn't ask for any compensations.

No wasted time :) life moves on.

---

Lol wat

 

So you buy an iphone, it doesn't work, and you just shrug "oh well, sometimes you end up buying a dud, life goes on" and don't even bother to get it back to the store? Man you must be a dream customer. Give me your email and I'll recommend you to my Nigerian friend, he's a prince who's trying to send some one 50 million dollars but he's been having a hard time finding someone to accept all that money. You sound like you could maybe help him out?

[nekoneko]

I could respond in the same manner :)

Like " you seem like the kind of guy that goes on cruises and claims that have tripped on the carpet..blame the carpet and wants free stuff"

But don't wanna make a circus of your topic.

 

Yes it sucked badly at that time, couln't see ranks and anything. I closed and restarted client and then only one window popped up. The rest of them took a big time to pop up.

Other people like Mathrim were in the Supernova on twitch.

But yes we didn't make a big fuss of it.

[ChuckBassPoker]

That's just a ridiculous stance. I mean wtf. It's one thing to have some mild glitches that happen occasionally and mildly affect your play (see: every day playing on Unibet during the first year of the new client or so). If one complained about every little thing they'd get carpal tunnel in a week.

But it's a completely different thing to get disconnected entirely from the client after having built stacks while some others can still play (for whatever reason) and get blinded out. Surely anyone understands this. Even ignoring that I had x times starting stack everywhere and just focusing on the initial buyins, if you buy into a tournament and then can't play because the network crashes SURELY you get refunded for the buyin since you just purchased a product you didn't get at all. This is just 101 basic logic...

The much milder case I mentioned at the end of my post is a good example something not that significant and something I wouldn't bother to make a fuss over. In that case, if starting stack = 3k chips in a 5€ tournament, you could argue I lost quite a bit since it cost me 20k-30k chips immediately. But whatever, glitches happen, I would never make a post about that. I'm pretty pissed off they didn't even refund me the buyin but it seemed like a minor thing. But the thing from last sunday was not minor at all. You seriously must LOVE this company with your heart and soul if you were in tournaments, got kicked out and couldn't get back, and didn't ask for a refund. That's pretty mindblowing if you ask me, usually poker players always complain about everything and that's the first time I hear of someone being this far on the opposite end of the spectrum.

[FeelsBadMan]

Let's not troll the thread and let Jeppe respond whenever he gets the time, maybe tomorrow as it's late today and he can't work 24/7 . And yes losing money due to a disconnect than having not that great of an experience with support is suuuuuuuuper annoying for anyone, and should happen way less, be dealt with better.

[DepchZ]

I think nekoneko got lost in the relativity of things there. I don't know did I get it right either but if you have spent ~120e worth of bins to tournaments that you lost because of provider fault then I'd only be happy with a refund of the buy-ins worth I made. A compensation of 4% of the total worth would feel disgraceful because it was not your fault.

I hope this gets another look by the higher ups. GL. :)

[ChuckBassPoker]

Sounds like a plan, thanks man.

[Sect7G]

Chuck until an official Poker rep gets back to you I think it would be best if you let things run their course.  If by Monday Jeppe, Marco or David tell you that you're pitiful refund is all that you deserve then by all means speak your case loudly... but it seems that you've been turned down by a support worker that may or may not be informed about ICM, chip values etc.   Please give one of the names I mentioned above a chance to review your case and make a final decision.

Btw you might want to ask what is Unibet's official policy for when there's a mass disconnection.  I'm sure they would have one like Pstars does.

Anyways best of luck and keep on grinding that challenge :)

 

[ChuckBassPoker]

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@DepchZ wrote:

I think nekoneko got lost in the relativity of things there. I don't know did I get it right either but if you have spent ~120e worth of bins to tournaments that you lost because of provider fault then I'd only be happy with a refund of the buy-ins worth I made. A compensation of 4% of the total worth would feel disgraceful because it was not your fault.

 

I hope this gets another look by the higher ups. GL. :)

---

 

Just to clarify, numbers might be slightly off as I had tables on other sites running and had to focus on them also, but as close to as I can get from memory:

 

I regged ~50 euros worth of stuff

I had x times starting stack in many of the tournaments, basic logic says that if a tournament starts with 5k chips and you have 60k chips, then 60k = worth more than the initial buyin

I would estimate that the stack values based on icm or literally any method you want to use would result in a combined 120 euros or so

 

So basically two different things going on:

 

1) I have received compensation for 10%-ish of my ~50€ worth of buyins, and Unibet says this is their final stance. No one has explained how they reached this number, or how it's even remotely possible they decide to refund for 1/10 of the tournaments that got destroyed only

 

 2), Obviously also a bunch of money got lost because the stacks were more valuable than just the buyin, so the actual refund should be way more than the buyins. The best I can explain is this: Imagine you're in a 25€ winner take all satellite. The winner gets a 1650€ Unibet open seat, the 2nd gets nothing. You have a 90%-10% chiplead heads up. Assuming neutral skill edge, your stack value would be 90% of the 1650€ obviously=1485€. In a case like this, would you accept a 25€ refund after getting blinded out because of a Unibet glitch, or would you demand the 1485€ that was yours before the disconnection? This is what ICM is for, you can pull up a calculator and find out the exact value of any stack in any tournament in 0,5 seconds. So it's actually very easy to refund correctly in a case like this. 12x starting stack is worth roughly 50€ in a 5€ tournament without doing the math (if it's not WTA, chips don't go up in value linearily, but it's that ballpark). It should at least be obvious to anyone that 60k chips is worth more than 5k chips in a tournament with a 5k starting stack, etc.

 

2 is obviously less important than one, but it's still very important. Every poker site besides (apparently) Unibet has a very standard procedure where they just refund according to ICM. This happens on Stars and you don't even have to email them, you get the exact ICM stack value on your account the next day. If they don't want to do ICM refunds then whatever,  just send me a sum that's roughly correct and we can leave this mess behind. It should be a 3-digit number, that much is very clear.

 

But yeah, we can start from getting refunds for the buyins and then discuss the specific one Jeppe or someone comes online. Currently I've been given 1€ MTT tickets when I didn't even play in 1€ tournaments and on top of that Unibet has ceased any communication with me, so it can't get much worse than that...

 

 

[ChuckBassPoker]

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@Sect7G wrote:

Chuck until an official Poker rep gets back to you I think it would be best if you let things run their course.  If by Monday Jeppe, Marco or David tell you that you're pitiful refund is all that you deserve then by all means speak your case loudly... but it seems that you've been turned down by a support worker that may or may not be informed about ICM, chip values etc.   Please give one of the names I mentioned above a chance to review your case and make a final decision.

Btw you might want to ask what is Unibet's official policy for when there's a mass disconnection.  I'm sure they would have one like Pstars does.

Anyways best of luck and keep on grinding that challenge :)

 

---

 

I have been told the same thing by a Finnish random worker, a Finnish manager, I've been told by international support that the decision is final and no one is allowed to communicate more with me, I've been ducked by Unibet's twitter account and no one has responded to me in the 2+2 thread either. It's been 2 weeks since the first incident and soon 5 days since the second, and I've already been told the decision is final. I think them not understanding ICM is putting it mildly, I mean they gave me 1€ tournament tickets when I didn't even play that low and refunded 10% of my initial *BUYINS*. We didn't exactly get to the point where I could teach them ICM when they already told me that this is all I'm getting. I feel like at this point my rant is pretty validated, but yeah I'll stfu until tomorrow :) thanks for the gls, really sucks to deal with this kind of stuff mid-challenge and waste grinding hours on emailing these people over and over

[FeelsBadMan]

The unibet twitter hardly ever deals with support cases, it's not a direct line to support, just an advertising platform for the most part. And unfortunately David doesn't really have that much time to respond regularly on 2+2 anymore, the community mods are very competent however, and when the client is in the right and they have all the information they always fix everything. But I agree that the fact that someone would have to come here for decent service and wouldn't get it from the start does suck both for you and especially the people that won't make their way here, and for unibet of course 

[ahojjjjj]

For what it's worth, Unibet has had major problems with Twitter today as their account had been suspended for a substantial period of time during the day. While my opinion means jack squat in the ultimate realm of things, I personally would feel insulted by the offer you received, too. I don't think you should be expecting a refund based on stack sizes, but to be refunded the amount you invested in each tournament seems only fair.

I have had only positive experiences dealing with the customer service agents here in Sweden, but you have to kind of know their limitations, too. They aren't going to be able to go and offer something beyond their restrictions. This is probably the best place to go with it here in the community as the moderators will almost certainly be able to set the record straight. Try to have patience and I'm sure they'll get back to you on this matter.

[pirahn]

You and i would have a different definition of "cutting it short"

I take it your new on here so let me assure you that if you have a case it will be looked at and resolved. I cant guarantee it will be quickly as a member of staff is moving on and in process of recruiting more staff.

The reason why sometimes people shrug it off is precisely because weve had it good. The guys on here really do look after us.

Ive had my fair share of poor service at all sites and this is the best place to come to. You will get a response on here, very unlikely anyone will contact you elsewhere.

[JeppeL]

@ChuckBassPoker We'll go into the post deeper tomorrow, but at a glance it looks like there's been quite a number of misunderstandings/lack of communication. You aren't blacklisted and there are no guidelines not to communicate further with you on the subject, so we are here and we'll look at it :)

You mention a video, could you please point us to it so Marco and myself could have a look?

/Jeppe

[ChuckBassPoker]

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@pirahn wrote:

You and i would have a different definition of "cutting it short"

I take it your new on here so let me assure you that if you have a case it will be looked at and resolved. I cant guarantee it will be quickly as a member of staff is moving on and in process of recruiting more staff.

The reason why sometimes people shrug it off is precisely because weve had it good. The guys on here really do look after us.

Ive had my fair share of poor service at all sites and this is the best place to come to. You will get a response on here, very unlikely anyone will contact you elsewhere.

---

 

Glad to hear. It seems kinda crazy and suboptimal to me that you'd have to register to a forum to receive proper support/refunds. I personally don't care how long it takes, and if this gets resolved somewhat fairly I won't hold any grudges, but what about some recreational who's not so good at the internets? He would already have quit Unibet forever after this treatment. Even I didn't know about this place until someone 2+2 told me about this. I mean, props to Unibet for having a place like this to discuss things and actually get responses from people who can affect things, but I think in easy refund cases just emailing customer service should be enough to do it.

[ChuckBassPoker]

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@JeppeL wrote:

@ChuckBassPoker We'll go into the post deeper tomorrow, but at a glance it looks like there's been quite a number of misunderstandings/lack of communication. You aren't blacklisted and there are no guidelines not to communicate further with you on the subject, so we are here and we'll look at it :)

You mention a video, could you please point us to it so Marco and myself could have a look?

/Jeppe

---

Hey and thanks so much for getting back to me. Absolutely no rush with anything from my end, so if you're busy tomorrow don't sweat it, feel free to get back to me whenever. My OP had such an urgent tone because I was already told by customer service this was the final decision made by the poker team, if this is not the case then by all means feel free to spend as much time reviewing the case as you want. I'm just happy to finally get a respectable response from someone and to know that someone's at least looking into it properly.

 

What would be the best way to send you the video? Do you have like a dropbox or something? I could upload it to youtube but I wouldn't like to make it public because it shows all my screennames from other sites that aren't public, my unibet account balance etc etc. If that's the only way to do it then I'll do it, but if there's an alternative way I'd much prefer it.

 

Feel free to email me at the address in my Unibet details (DreamOfHanna is my SN) or by whatever means of PMing and we'll figure out how to send the vid. It's a ~2 minute video basically of me just trying to login back to Unibet with other clients working normally and showing the error messages I'm getting etc, exact same setup as in the screenshot in my OP but in video form.

 

Thanks!

[FeelsBadMan]

@ChuckBassPoker you could PM him a link to the video, idk what he prefers but you can make private videos on youtube as well. Hover over his name, Send Message.

[JeppeL]

@ChuckBassPoker No offense taken to the vent, we we're hoping you were filming the session for other reasons and that the video was made before the disconnection happened, but it sounds like the screenshot shows exactly the same as the video which is fine, no need for you to put it up on youtube.

I know you make a rough estimate in your OP on the number of tournaments affected by the disconnection, but in order to look into this properly we really need you to please try and check your playing history and mention which tournaments you had going when the disconnection happened, at least your best guess. 

[pirahn]

---

@ChuckBassPoker wrote:

---

@pirahn wrote:

You and i would have a different definition of "cutting it short"

I take it your new on here so let me assure you that if you have a case it will be looked at and resolved. I cant guarantee it will be quickly as a member of staff is moving on and in process of recruiting more staff.

The reason why sometimes people shrug it off is precisely because weve had it good. The guys on here really do look after us.

Ive had my fair share of poor service at all sites and this is the best place to come to. You will get a response on here, very unlikely anyone will contact you elsewhere.

---

 

Glad to hear. It seems kinda crazy and suboptimal to me that you'd have to register to a forum to receive proper support/refunds. I personally don't care how long it takes, and if this gets resolved somewhat fairly I won't hold any grudges, but what about some recreational who's not so good at the internets? He would already have quit Unibet forever after this treatment. Even I didn't know about this place until someone 2+2 told me about this. I mean, props to Unibet for having a place like this to discuss things and actually get responses from people who can affect things, but I think in easy refund cases just emailing customer service should be enough to do it.

---

I agree entirely, however most sites work in a similar fashion for reasons of business synergy. I actually went to 2+2 to have a rant and found Andrew who used to look after the site. From there on it was plain sailing and never a problem. Im sure it will work out the same for you. 

[ChuckBassPoker]

Jeppe I'll PM you in a second here, as I assume there's no reason to keep the thread popping up at the top of your forums for now :)

[JeppeL]

@ChuckBassPoker I've seen the pm, thank you! We'll have to dig a bit deeper regarding the log files and see if something more can be found, but here is what I have for now:

Without being able to draw a conclusion as of yet, but from how it appears as described and with what we can see in the back office, my personal theory is that you where experiencing cpu lag before the disconnection happened.

• From the screenshot you sent it's clear there is a lot of tables going outside of Unibet and I know our client takes a bit to process due to the graphics, it makes sense in the way that you describe everything to run slower on the tables than they should.
  
  
• I can't find other posts here on the community that describes the same issues of everything being slower before the disconnection, not in the poker chit chat and not in the main thread where the disconnection issue was reported. 

What would be good for us to know here, is if you have ever noticed a pattern for when you experience the disconnects. E.g if you only ever play at Unibet when playing x number of other tables as well? If not, do you ever experience lag issues when only playing Unibet?

Another reason I think it's what happened is from what I see in the back office, and this is where it gets a bit strange, and from my pov adds to the theory of cpu lag: before the disconnect happens, there is only one single hand timed out in all the tournaments played and it's the €150 fireball for a loss of 12 chips. Outside of that, all hands in all tournaments from that day are logged as "ok". It was the same when you reported days earlier that you had timed out and lost 30K chips while being heads up, only one recorded hand in the back office showing a loss of 15 chips.
This also ties in as to why you where credited the 2+2+1. When you reported the disconnect via email, a case was made to our second line team who checked the tournaments and they saw the same thing as me, that you had disconnected before the start of the €5 Supernova and blinded down to a 1334 chip stack. They decided to issue compensation for that, but second line agent handling it appears wasn't aware we had €5 tickets and added the 2+2+1 instead, but only for issues in the one tournament and not multiple.
The second part of the compensation would be for the tournaments in which you timed out after disconnection, and I would have gladly issued those right away and I know the second line team would have as well, but from what I can tell there aren't any as you were knocked out in all active tournaments shortly before the disconnection happened. This is why I asked for a specific list of possible tournaments you believe to have been affected by the disconnection as neither @MarcoV or myself could find them. It was also the reason I was really hoping for the video you recorded to have been of the slow functioning tables, because I've never personally come accross a described time out not showing in the back office before.

Regarding your contact with customer support in the screenshot: The agent in question is deferring to the conclusion made by second line, that you had only disconnected a substantial amount in the one €5 tournament, that's what he means when he mentions that from your case file, the decision is final. I think he definitely should have recognized that you were describing larger issues and have the case pushed to a poker expert, instead of just sticking to the case he could see as already fixed and closed. When a player uses that much effort to describe an issue it's usually because something is up, I think it was poor judgement not to recognize that and I will make sure that information is relayed to the agent - you have our apologies for that.

I wouldn't mind everything you describe as being the same as I see in the back office, it would have made your post a lot easier to look into :), but as I mentioned first we'll have to have a poker expert check the log files and perhaps other information as well, to see if the hands logged as "ok" could somehow be part of a disconnection from our side.

Feel free to let me know if anything, 

/Jeppe

 

[ChuckBassPoker]

Hey,

 

I'm in an insane rush, just woke up and friend coming over to pick me up in 5 minutes for a christmas party so I will be offline tonight.

 

Anyway, those chip value just can't be right, for example the tournament I was HU in was at blinds of like 3000/6000/antes or something. How is it even possible to lose only 15 chips at that level when it's impossible for a single pot to be less than 13200ish chips? Surely you can see that there must be something really wrong with how your systems show this stuff.

I always play the same amount of tables, I actually had *less* tables than usual because it was early on a Sunday. I hit peak tables after your restart when it actually started working. In the case of that HU incident I had no other tables, it was my last mtt of the night. No CPU lag here. I had a bunch of issues with Unibet about a year ago and I stopped playing there around last January because the client kept crashing. Then I was told last summer you had finally updated it and have a good working product. Since around June or July I've played on Unibet ~5 days a week on average and never had a single issue up until now.

IIRC there was people complaining about the same issues on 2p2, I can get you chat logs from twitch where a bunch of people were complaining about the same issues at the time as well.

Sorry I really gotta run, hope this helps at least a little!