troublesome pokerstar customer service

[ycjason]

I was bored and was browsing pocketfives.com and saw the following post
pokerstar fcked me

first of all, I am a royal pokerstar player who pays thousands in rake every month, and sometimes 10s of thousands. I choose to play at pokerstar over ftp mainly because I thought this kind of things do not happen at pokerstar. Even though this matter does not affect me at all, I find that the way they handled it was terrible.

cliff note of from OP's post:
- I played 3 sngs on stars for first time in a year
- They revoke my playing privileges for 5 minutes
- I miss important hands in a TURBO sit n go
- They won't do anything to reimburse me for their wrong

stars response:
Hello Ryan,

Thank you for your email.

When reviewing a refund request, we do not consider how many hands a
player has missed. It is much more important to analyse how many chips a
player loses in relation to the blinds at the time of disconnection.

You lost 30 chips in one event when the blinds were at 10/20. This still
left you with 73.5 big blinds and plenty of time to play out the
tournament as you would normally.

If we can be of further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.


Regards,

StevenB
PokerStars Support Team

[bustowithnobra]

lol

[Jzo19]

i agree with stars here...OP at pocketfives wants full reembursement which is pretty ridiculous when he only lost 2 big blinds

[ycjason]

as for fairness, OP should be refunded by a very small amount. As a good business, star should probably refund the whole amount the mistake and a bad experience to the player (pretty small amount anyway). Either way, the way star handled it seem unacceptable and unfair.

[MicroBob]

"I am a royal pokerstar player"


Is this a new VIP level?

[ycjason]

[ QUOTE ]
"I am a royal pokerstar player"


Is this a new VIP level?

[/ QUOTE ]
lol.. just that I used to play both FTP and stars, now only on star, and about to hit 200k vpp this year, and likely 500k next year.

oh.. and like I said, this did not happened to me, just felt strange/surprised that pokerstar would handle it this way.

[brian8065]

Pokerstars should refund this person.

[StellarWind]

Gambling is intended to be entertainment. People play poker because it's fun. PokerStars is in the entertainment business.

When a good restaurant does something awful that spoils my experience, I expect them to buy me dessert, comp my meal, or somehow make up for their mistake. If they didn't I might not go back.

Revoking someone's playing privileges during a tournament is traumatic. To say that the EV loss involved is insignificant is beside the point. It's like a restaurant spilling soup all over you and then saying "Why should I pay anything? Your clothes are machine washable permanent press!"

The least PokerStars should possibly consider doing is refunding the fee portion of the entries. They certainly don't deserve to be paid for hosting those SNGs. But really a $50 bonus seems more like it. You spill soup, you apologize. It's got nothing to do with how many orbits were missed. Compensating any major loss of EV should be a separate issue.

[mbpoker]

I never heard about Stars suspending play privileges in the middle of the tourney. Did this guy post any proof that Stars did this and by mistake?

[[Phill]]

I agree with stellar that something like a $5 refund of tourney dollars if it was a 50+5 or whatever the fee was would be the right thing to do. Or maybe a small $10 bonus or something like that.

Good customer support is not about deciding what is right, its about going above and beyond expectation.

mb,

Im too tired and lazy to find it, but ive heard of it happening before during an MTT - its really rare though for obvious reasons - usually the CS person looks at what youre doing before suspending play priviliges.