Having had a few days to "cool off" and reflect back on the events in the recent player dispute with mybookie.com , I was able to ultimately come to the same conclusion as many people have expressed here, and that is that we were 100% wrong in withholding winnings in this case.
Although I was not involved in the daily activities of this players account I was the one that ultimately turned it over to our lawyer and agreed to the original settlement.
Yes there were suspicions and yes there were irregularities but that did not change the fact the player had won fair and square. I would like to believe that because we had a legal signed and notarized document agreed to by both parties ,we were right, but this is not about legal technicalities only about whether or not we acted in accordance with sound business ethics and on this I must say no we did not.
I did not put principals before personalities , as it became somewhat of a personal thing with certain promises and verbal agreements being broken . I am sure that our attorney also was convincing in his arguments (as that is what he is paid to do) to the player that it would be better to accept a settlement rather than have the account frozen and investigated for fraudulent activities.
I must say that initially when I was contacted by Roberto from TOW i was adamant in that we had done nothing wrong. Also when contacted by General and Shrink and Russ I felt we had a legal agreement and that was that, but after explaining to them all the details(which do not need mentioning) they still drew the same conclusion WE WERE WRONG.
At this point I was ready to fight and was convinced that if we went to arbitration that we would win (after all we had legal documents). Luckily for me this was not the end , I received another phone call from General and Shrink stating they had spoken to 6 different people in the industry and they all had the same conclusion WE WERE WRONG. I also got opinions from Russ at MW and Rick from my own staff who also stated WE WERE WRONG .
So after getting my pride and ego out of the way, and listening to what was being said from people whose opinions I respected I could draw no other conclusion other than WE WERE WRONG and agreed to pay the player in full.
I am sorry that it did have to go this far and that the people who work hard everyday at our company in which they take pride would have to be subjected to embarrassment for something over which they held no control. We made a series of bad decisions and I am glad that we were able to make it right.
We are also going to implement some player dispute policies in which RX, MW, and SBR web addresses and email addresses will be made available to players vis our web sites. This being an unregulated industry these sites do in fact hold operators to a certain set of standards.
Best Wishes,
Mike Nichols
Although I was not involved in the daily activities of this players account I was the one that ultimately turned it over to our lawyer and agreed to the original settlement.
Yes there were suspicions and yes there were irregularities but that did not change the fact the player had won fair and square. I would like to believe that because we had a legal signed and notarized document agreed to by both parties ,we were right, but this is not about legal technicalities only about whether or not we acted in accordance with sound business ethics and on this I must say no we did not.
I did not put principals before personalities , as it became somewhat of a personal thing with certain promises and verbal agreements being broken . I am sure that our attorney also was convincing in his arguments (as that is what he is paid to do) to the player that it would be better to accept a settlement rather than have the account frozen and investigated for fraudulent activities.
I must say that initially when I was contacted by Roberto from TOW i was adamant in that we had done nothing wrong. Also when contacted by General and Shrink and Russ I felt we had a legal agreement and that was that, but after explaining to them all the details(which do not need mentioning) they still drew the same conclusion WE WERE WRONG.
At this point I was ready to fight and was convinced that if we went to arbitration that we would win (after all we had legal documents). Luckily for me this was not the end , I received another phone call from General and Shrink stating they had spoken to 6 different people in the industry and they all had the same conclusion WE WERE WRONG. I also got opinions from Russ at MW and Rick from my own staff who also stated WE WERE WRONG .
So after getting my pride and ego out of the way, and listening to what was being said from people whose opinions I respected I could draw no other conclusion other than WE WERE WRONG and agreed to pay the player in full.
I am sorry that it did have to go this far and that the people who work hard everyday at our company in which they take pride would have to be subjected to embarrassment for something over which they held no control. We made a series of bad decisions and I am glad that we were able to make it right.
We are also going to implement some player dispute policies in which RX, MW, and SBR web addresses and email addresses will be made available to players vis our web sites. This being an unregulated industry these sites do in fact hold operators to a certain set of standards.
Best Wishes,
Mike Nichols