Party time

[peterbirks]

Curiouser and curiouser on the Party Poker cashout front. I received an email back from Paytech (Party's payment processors, a subsidiary of Party Gaming), within about three hours, apologizing and stating that the money would be put back into my Party account within 5 to 7 business days.

For people who assume decent customer response times and service, this might not seem a surprise. But, trust me, for a personalized response to come back from Party overnight on Saturday/Sunday is on a par with the Second Coming. Usually you have to go through the base camp level of customer service, who answer the simplest of queries from a FAQ sheet on their screen. Response to stuff such as stopped cheques and don't charge me the standard fee is not in the FAQ list of standard replies. Someone had to write the reply, in decent English, no less. At Party Customer Service, that's somewhere around senior vice-president level.


More interestingly, the reply continued "We notice you have a Neteller account. We suggest that you select Neteller as a cashout option for future withdrawals."

So, what's the story, I wondered? Here's my theory.

The cheques come to me in US dollars. I pay them into my Citibank account, which has a UK Sort Code. However, the ACTUAL bank is a branch in New York. Party, as you know, has pulled out of the US, so in theory it has no US players. I suspect that sometimes when their clearing bank (Barclays Corporate International) gets a Party cheque presented to it for payment to a bank with a New York address, alarm bells start ringing, and it gets "lost" in a system where it's in the interests of a number of people not to have to deal with the complexities involved.

At least, that's the only reason I can think of for Party suggesting to me a withdrawal system that costs them more than the system I have been using.

On the downside, it takes away one more option that I had been using to get money out of these sites in dollars. Neteller will only wire to UK banks, in GBP (and they use a rip-off exchange rate). I think that Stars remains an option, provided it's all "excess" money over and above that which I have paid in via Neteller (i.e., only my profit on Stars). I suppose I could start looking at the possibilities on Full Tilt.

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Comments

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

Might be a daft idea, but would there be a way for you to transfer $x to trustedplayer on inconvenienttogetGBPfromsite and trustedplayer transfers $x (or even $0.999x) on convenienttogetGBPfromsite? There might be some transfer fee issues, and there's always the trust issue, but I wonder if people have a way of solving the problem already...

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Sterling is easy to get from any site. And dollars are easy to get into Neteller. Trouble is, Neteller will only send me cheques in GBP (because I live in the UK) or transfer money to a UK account in GBP. Exchange rates are one of their profit earners.

What I would really like is a site that would write transfer stuff, dollar denominated, either to Schwab (as Neteller used to do back in the day) or to Citibank. I can arrange the wire transfer OK, but they all want to convert to GBP before transferring the funds, which kind of defeats the object.

All of this is solely to avoid exchange rate costs, which can come in at about 5%. It's also a neat way to keep poker wiinings "separate" from my general finances, (in which the poker sums might get "lost", so to speak.) They'd still be there, but I wouldn't notice them so much in the other noise of rental income, salary, money lost to IG (lol) etc.

PJ

Industrious Gnomes

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

This is the sort of thing I love. Ever since the Western economies stopped making anything, we've been treated to all sorts of dubious monetary transactions dressed up as "the financial industry." (To be fair, it goes all the way back to John Law.)

I notice, for example, that there are a number of vultures circling around the remaining debt instruments of Lehmans. There's clearly (as you have pointed out, several times) a shit-load of money there ... as in, billions. I'd love to see a quant PhD model the point where those instruments are no longer opaque, and not yet transparent, but merely translucent.

I'm also very keen on the next multi-billion scam, which involves term life insurance. I understand that the next generation of financial loons are buying up life insurance for a fixed amount, and re-packaging the paper as, effectively, gilts.

The beauty of this, and I wish I'd seen it ahead of time, is that something like 20% to 25% of life insurance holders let their policies lapse, for whatever reason. Which means that, if you as a third party purchase the right to continue the payments, you're on the right side of what those who know claim is "a mistaken business model."

This is great. You don't even have to lie about the possible returns ... sorry, bundle them up into incomprehensible derivatives. All you have to do is to spot a weakness in the market and plunge in.

Mortgages, savings and loans, dot-coms/telephony, life insurance. Who'd a thunk?

We'll be back to tulips next ...

[(Anonymous)]

I got a $ cheque off Full Tilt a while back. Arrived in about 2 weeks - no charge - and Citi cashed it ok.

Div.

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I don't play that much at Full Tilt! I'm now in a situation where I can get money out in US$ from Stars and from Pacific (which I can keep in dollars), and I can get the Party money into Neteller and, provided I take out a sufficiently large sum, the hit on the exchange rate is only horrible, rather than insufferable.

Might be interesting to try some money in, play for a whie, and money outs on FTP, though, just to see if I can use the same system that used to work so well on Party. BTW, my cheque from Pacific, although it took a month to arrive, doesn't appear to have got "lost" in the system -- leading me to suspect that there was something odd going on at the Barclays/Playtech end of the whole transaction.

PJ