I closed my Party Poker account yesterday.  Got them to confirm it, close it out, pay it out, and that is it.  That’s right folks, Rawalex has left the room, and isn’t coming back.   I will never in my life play another game of Poker at Party Poker again.

Here’s the story.  I have played quite a bit over the last year or so, and I am not a horrible player, not a great player… middle of the road and in with the right groups I can make some money at it and have a good time.  I don’t make the money fast enough to make it a living or anything, but it wouldn’t be unusual to make $100 or so a night net for a few tables.  Not a great amount of money, but I am not a big money player so no big deal, right?

Anyway, about a month ago, I realized that I still had 10,000 or so Party Points in my account.  I had recently cashed in almost all the cash in my account, so I figured I would play some points tournaments for a while to keep in practice, while not really putting any more money on the table for a while.  No reason to throw money at it when I can get into some pretty interesting tournaments with points, right?

Now, I don’t typically do so well at big tournaments.  I have some issues with attention span I guess, and I get pretty antsy after sitting for a couple of hours and want to get on with it.   With some concentration I can pretty much make it to the money, but not much further.  So I play my points with the idea to try some different strategies for getting to the end of the tournament.  Some worked better than others, as you can imagine.

Anyway, I log in yesterday, and suddenly my account has no more Party Points in it.   Guess which poker company added in a new rule that says “if you don’t earn any new points in 30 days, we take all your existing points away”?  It is change from their “account not active” rule they use to have, so now you literally have to put money on the table every 30 days or your points are withdrawn.

This rather major change wasn’t exactly made public.   I had played down just over 5000 party points in a month, and they wandered away with the other half of my points.

So, pick up the phone and call their support center, and well, that is when the fun starts.  (I am not going to be racist here… but) It doesn’t take too much intelligence to realize that the call center is located in India.  Professional script reads and totally helpless otherwise.  I described my problem, and the person on the phone proceeded to lecture me about not playing enough, and how I should read the rules because I obviously don’t understand how the party points system works, and that it is my fault that I didn’t read the rule carefully.  I don’t disagree that I should stay up to date, but I missed this last change, and they didn’t go out of their way to update their members about this points grab.

I tried to explain how this was different from the terms when I signed up, and the guy had the balls to say “It is your job to re-read the rules regularly.  Things change, and that is your responsiblity to re-read those rules on a regular basis.”

I asked them to close my account.  I didn’t call for a lecture.  This guy won’t close the account, but keeps trying to restart his lecture about my responsiblities to check the terms regularly.

STFU already.  CLOSE MY ACCOUNT.

He won’t do it.  I am steaming by this point.  How hard is it to close an account?  He is waffling, trying to once again launch into his prepared speech about my responsilbities… and I had to bite my tongue to keep from going off on this breathing automon of a “service” agent.  Finally he gets a clue, and still won’t cancel my account, but says he will transfer me to his supervisor.

Supervisor comes on, and the first thing he does is start to lecture me about my responsiblities to read the terms and conditions on a regular basis.

Do these people not have a fucking clue that by this time I am about ready to ream them hard for all this fucking “it’s your fault stupid customer” talk?

Anyway, after 10 minutes of explaining carefully how much this level of customer service isn’t serving me, the supervisor has the balls to say “I cannot close your account”.  Some dumbfuck arrogant rule that requires that the account closing request come by email from the email in the account – this even after they have identified me on the phone, used my pin number, and made other checks to assure who I am.  They are able to talk about my account with me, but not actually help me.

FUCK THEM ALL, I AM GONE!

If you have a party poker account, close it.  There are much better places to play, and they won’t fuck you over like these guys did to me.  FUCK THEM!