PokerStars Moves Operations to PokerStars.eu


By TheNuts Staff - Apr 16, 2011

PokerStars.eu
It’s been a roller coaster ride for online poker players in the United States. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice handed out indictments against 11 people, including the founders of PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker. In a shocking turn of events, PokerStars and Full Tilt, the two largest sites in the industry, promptly blocked real money play from the United States. Now, the poker industry has been turned upside down.

In a post on TwoPlusTwo, “PokerStars Steve,” an official representative of PokerStars, attempted to calm players’ fears about the future of the site: “Please be assured player balances are safe. There is no cause for concern about loss of funds in your PokerStars account. For all customers outside the U.S. it is business as usual.”

He added, “The PokerStars website has been moved to PokerStars.eu, and the PokerStars Support email address is now support@pokerstars.eu. PokerStars apologizes to all players for any inconvenience caused by this disruption. Please be aware that PokerStars Support is currently experiencing a very high volume of emails, so response times are delayed. Player emails will be answered as quickly as possible.”

If you click over to PokerStars.com, you’re met with the same FBI warning and U.S. Department of Justice logo that appeared around 3:00pm ET on Friday. PokerStars.eu, contrastingly, is a mirror image of the old site and comes complete with Daniel Negreanu’s face once again donning the home page.

Attempting to access the dot-com versions of PokerStars, UB.com, Absolute Poker, and Full Tilt Poker from outside of the United States on Saturday resulted in the same FBI warning. ESPN’s Andrew Feldman reported, courtesy of Gambling Compliance, “For those that are asking, yes, I was told that the sites will be down even where the sites are currently legal. Only the 3 though (AP/FTP/PS).”

Players trying to cash out were met with a barrage of error messages, including one posted on TwoPlusTwo that said, “Deposit and Cashout Transactions are currently disabled in your account due to the result of a routine security investigation. We do not mean to imply any wrongdoing, however, please understand that we have to make security checks routinely to make sure that PokerStars remains a safe and secure environment for its players.”

The response from poker’s elite has been unsympathetic at best. Take DoylesRoom front man Doyle Brunson, for example, who serves as the face of a USA-friendly Yatahay Network site. Brunson wrote via Twitter, “Now maybe we will see if these online ‘superstars’ can play real poker. Ante up suckers!” Also making light of the situation was Joe Stapleton, who Tweeted, “It's been a stressful day, but it could be worse. I could be married.”

Negreanu took to the live felts on Friday night, telling his nearly 100,000 Twitter followers, “Going to Aria to play $400-$800 Mix just like I did over 10 years ago when I was a professional poker player. Save me a seat boys.”

Finally, Full Tilt Poker pro Erick Lindgren blamed Negreanu for the Justice Department’s action, Tweeting, “This is all clearly the fault of @RealKidPoker. I told him if he ever started beating online poker the world would end.”

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