The Merge Poker Network will temporarily stop accepting NEW US players in a day or 2 in order to catch up on a backlog of customer service requests but more importantly on poker transactions. As it stands now customer service has a 2 week backlog and cashouts are much worse. They simply were not prepared for the influx of players they’ve received since Black Friday and are feeling growing pains. If they don’t catch up soon they will end up angering all their players. This is for NEW Players Only, for all existing players it will be business as usual.
The only part of this story that we have not yet been able to confirm is if this is for all Merge Skins or just those that use the Merge cashier and customer support. We’ll update this post as soon as we get confirmation.
We’ve been told that the temporary ban on new US players will last about a month but from past experience in dealing with the Merge Network we’re guessing it will last through the end of the summer. What they will be trying to do is add more processing options as well as hire more customer support personnel to handle the extra traffic.
This move was brought on by internal rumblings among Merge Poker skin operators regarding the current processing problems. With the loss of QuickTender / UseMyWallet the main option became credit cards. the success rate for successful credit card transactions is roughly 20% which is just unacceptable. It is rumored that for Carbon Poker the success rate is closer to 70% which leads us to believe that the Merge Network was putting their site Carbon Poker ahead of all others. This lack of transparency will only lead to more problems and is most likely the main reason this is happening.
UPDATE: This is now in affect. We’ll let you know when they reopen to new US poker players.