Categories: Poker News
| Published On Apr 20, 2015 8:16 pm CEST  |  Updated on Aug 8, 2023 8:25 am CEST | By Daniel Allermand

Lock Poker Seems To Have Pulled The Plug – Finally!

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Everyone who follows online poker forums just a little bit knows that Lock Poker has been a sinking ship for the past years. The site, which was well known for catering to the US market, especially after Black Friday, has not been paying cash outs for several years and allegedly owes around $10-$15 million to players.

While there is no way to know exactly how much money Lock Poker owes to their players, a small estimate has been given by IHasTehNutz on the popular TwoPlusTwo forums, who has been collecting cash out data for players on Lock Poker since 2013.

On Friday it seems that Lock Poker finally decided that enough was enough, probably given the fact that the amount of deposits could no longer cover the costs of having the room online. It has not been possible to connect to the poker server or the casino server since then, with no updates from Lock Poker on the issue. The downtime was initially reported by USPoker’s John Mehaffey, which you can read more about here.

Lock Poker has from the start attracted tons of negative attention, with Calvin Ayre bashing the owner Jennifer Larsson publicly. He warned players about the site being underfunded back in 2010, but that didn’t keep many players away from the site, due to their insane promotions where many got over 100% rakeback to play.

Lock Poker initially started out on the Merge network, but later moved on to the Cake Network, which they rebranded into the Revolution Network, citing that they had bought the network. That turned out to be a load of cr*p as usual from the site, who never acquired the network and left it in 2014 to start their own stand-alone poker platform, leaving the Cake network with tons of debts.

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The player traffic has been going down for lock ever since their move move from the Cake network, with around 10-20 players online in primetime right before they shut off the servers. The site has not paid any cash outs for more than two years, despite their support reps claiming that they were paying out some money and that their payments were about to turn around.

Former Social Media manager of Lock Poker, Shane Bridges, came out from his hidings in February this year and gave an interview to Pokerfuse, where he cited that Jennifer Larson and her wife had spend tons of money on a house in Tuscany, Italy, spend $500 every night for a bottle of wine, overtipping waiters and many other things.

In the end it is a shame for the industry that a site who was an obvious scam could continue to run as long as it did. Besides the obvious blame on the owners of the site, the regulators from Curacao also has a huge blame as they did not revoke the license they gave them, despite all the issues they have had for all this time.

Hopefully this will lead to fewer sites choosing the rouge Curacao regulators as their choice of license in the future, avoiding more scammers coming into this business and stealing millions of player funds. As for the players, there is bigger chance to win the lottery than there is that they will ever see any of the money they have in the site.

Daniel Allermand

Daniel Allermand is a freelance writer, with more than 14 years of experience in the industry as an operator, affiliate and poker player. Daniel has decided it was time to try and bring more coverage about the industry to the general public by writing articles about everything from poker to casino.