by Mario Alfonsi | Published on Jun 20, 2012 | Updated on Jun 20, 2012Usually, online poker players don’t have to worry much about the relationship between their poker room and the network operators. Even when a room decides to leave a network – as Lock Poker recently did when it jumped off of the Merge Poker Network – the impact on players is negligible, and many players might not even realize anything had happened at all.But occasionally, a poker room’s issues with their parent network can cause real trouble for their players. For a recent example, take the current dispute between 5050Poker and the Microgaming Poker Network. As of late last week, Microgaming has suspended play on 5050Poker, citing a “material breach” of the site’s contract with the network.The dispute appears to be linked with a number of changes to policy on the Microgaming Network. These changes have seemingly been made to attract casual and recreational players – similar to the strategy employed by Bodog Poker and Bovada Poker. Microgaming first changed the way rake would be apportioned to their players (and thus, their affiliated sites), giving sites who had attracted new players a bonus and switching to a “contributed” rake distribution, which tends to assign less value (per hand) to winning players.That move likely hurt a site like 5050Poker, a room that had a small number of customers who were mostly high-volume and winning players. But the final straw came this past week, when Microgaming limited the number of tables players on the network were allowed to play on simultaneously to two. As 5050Poker was home to many players who utilized the maximum of ten tables at a time, this change threatened to cripple their business.“The company believes that the measure is yet another example of several discriminatory measures taken by Microgaming in order to get rid of unwanted gaming operators (whose players mostly belong to the category [of] winning players),” said a statement from 5050Poker.Several posters on poker message boards have questioned whether 5050 Poker will return, or whether players will be able to recover their account balances. Others have pointed out that incidents such as this one were part of the risk of playing on a relatively unknown room in the hopes of getting slightly better promotional offers – one of the many reasons why we recommend playing at larger, more establish poker rooms.
