Online Poker payment processing report for August
The August edition of the PAS payment processing report for US online poker players is now live.
And while August may traditionally be a slow month for online poker news, it was anything but slow for the report’s rankings, which saw major gains by some rooms, and even more substantial losses by others.
Read on for a recap of the review, which you can view in full here.
Major improvements at two rooms
The big story of this month’s payment processing report was the fact that two major US-friendly rooms bucked recent trends and saw their grades improved for the August report.
Merge – home to poker sites such as Carbon Poker and Sportsbook.com Poker – was the first of the two rooms, and managed an impressive improvement of a full letter grade, jumping from a C in July to a B in August. That gain was largely on the back of two-week check times and minimal fees.
Top honors in August went to Bovada, who saw their grade bump up from an already-impressive A to a top-of-class A+. Money transfers arrive in days. Checks are measured in days, not weeks. As the report notes, the dawn of football season may prove a greater test for the popular betting site, but as things currently stand they’re the unquestioned leader among US online poker sites for cashout speed.
Bovada does not accept players from a few U.S. states, including Utah and Washington. This is a fairly common policy among US-facing online poker sites, although the prohibited states do vary from room to room.
Winning maintains strong position in rankings
While many US-facing online poker sites have found themselves embroiled in one sort of controversy or another, the Winning Poker Network has kept steadily growing and growing. A big part of that growth has been the room’s steady ability to handle a fair volume of cashout requests quickly and reliably.
That trend continued into the August report for Winning, who maintained their A rating for another month. That leaves them behind only Bovada, but effectively you would expect no difference between the rooms – Bovada might be a day or so quicker, but the advantage is relatively miniscule. That’s especially true when you compare the two rooms to the rest of the competition.
Significant downgrade for Lock
That’s the positive side of the report. There’s a negative side as well, and the big story there is Lock Poker getting what is believed to be only the second F in the history of the report.
That F is justified by check speeds and by what appears to be a six-figure cashout backlog that has been unresolved for months. Players are advised to also make note of the fact that Lock recently shuttered their public support forum on TwoPlusTwo in favor of a restricted-access, private support forum.
Problems continue for Juicy Stakes and Revolution
The other F on the payment processing report belongs to Juicy Stakes, another skin on the Revolution Network. The presence of two such rooms definitely suggests cause for concern.
But there’s an interesting twist to the story of payment processing at the Revolution Network. While the network is home to the two lowest grades in the report, it’s also home to one of the highest-graded rooms among all US-facing poker sites: Intertops.
At Intertops, players get checks and wires in respectable time frames, generally in the 1-2 week range. The one major downside has nothing to do with speed and everything to do with profit: Intertops does charge a nominal fee for cashouts. The fee varies by cashout method.
The major problem, however, is that Intertops does not accept new players from the United States, so if you’re not already signed up, you won’t be able to take advantage of their superior banking speeds from America.
For more updates about payment processing and other developments at US-facing poker sites, bookmark our online poker news section.
