Cake/Betus Scam-- Class Action Suit

[TWCReborn]

Several months ago, if you were playing on the cake network, you would have noticed up until very recently, almost daily tournament/SNG cancellations. The problem is not their presumed technical difficulties. The issue at hand is how they dealt with player's money after the cancellation.

Although on first glance, they have always seemed to have treated me fairly and promptly, there is a lot fishy about how they handled things. Firstly, they would promptly refund me the buy in money. However, if you think about a long tournament, or even a sit-n-go, the buy-ins of the BUSTED players prior to the "technical problems" are the REMAINING player's money-- to be distributed according to play.

When a tournament is cancelled and never resumed, the money SHOULD have been distributed according to proportion of chip stacks or at worst according to ranking given the pre-determined tournament pay structure. Instead where did this money go?

This is a question no one is asking despite the fact that cake for 4+ months had almost daily cancellations of ALL their games once or twice a day. If you tally up the number of tournaments (or make an estimation), I would venture to guess they had 50 cancellations per month during prime hours, perhaps 50 tournaments and SNG's running at once (conservative), an on average, 8 players busted prior to the cancellation (it would be more for a MTT during the final table period, and it would be much less for an SNG that just started). Also, let's assume the average buy in is $15 (range would be $1-$300 with a higher weight on the low-end but the high end skewing the average up). That would mean that with these extremely low estimations, they would have pocketed at least $300,000 per month with LITTLE damage to their reputation (remember they are responding promptly and giving prompt refunds).

Over the at least 4 months (could be longer) then where there were frequent technical problems and tourny cancellations, they have pocketed at least $1M of player's moneys and potentially much much more. Why is nobody saying anything about this? I venture to guess that any given player has lost less than $200 on this site due to server problems, and because they were refunded their buy in, very few people have thought that they have been scammed. However, this site did take money away from their customers. Say in a 400 man $30 buy-in tournament, the top 30 get paid (total pool $12,000). Say 300 people bust out when the tournament gets cancelled, and the remaining 100 get a prompt and "fair" refund. That is, $3000 is refunded, and $9,000 is pocketed by Cake. Does this sound fair to you? People forget that money in the prize pool is YOUR (the poker player's) money. Poker player's that have not bust are entitled to that money! Instead people are pacified with a refund of their buy-in.

If anyone played in Betus/Cake and suffered a tournament cancellation-- we need to get together. Especially if you have tournament history/data and/or screen shots. I have many screen shots of tournament cancellations/technical glitches. Also if there are any lawyers who who are poker players that think this case would have merit in court, I would love to hear from you. My email is r-kawai@northwestern.edu. They probably took a few hundred of potential winnings from me in the past several months. I might've busted in these tournaments, or I might've placed 1st. I don't know. I'm particularly harmed by several high buy in $120, $240 buy in sit-n-gos where I was refunded 1-2 from the money when I had a good shot as chip leader or 2nd chip leader to make $500-$1000.