New tally of Lock Poker unpaid accounts jumps to staggering $3.2 million

If we take a step back in time to 2011, when the Black Friday of Online Poker struck in the US and American players were scrambling to find new, trustworthy online poker sites, Lock Poker was at the height of its game. Thousands of players could be found gathered around the site’s virtual felt at any given time. The poker room’s reputation escalated, the promotions were affluent, games were juicy; why go anywhere else? But everything changed in late 2011 when player’s first started complaining of delayed payments.

Lock Poker’s reputation began to take a slow but steady dive as more and more online poker players criticized the site’s sluggish cash outs. What started as an annoyance, with no payments coming for a few weeks, turned into a plethora of irate customers who had been waiting months, and eventually years, to receive their money. By 2013, it was estimated that Lock Poker owed around $1 million in unpaid cash outs to customers in the US, as well as some in other regions of the world. Now, a new calculation has tripled the amount to approximately $3.2 million, including the funds held in accounts by players who have not yet bothered to request a theoretically futile withdrawal.

One avid poker player has taken upon himself the task of tracking Lock Poker’s extensive debts over the last few years. Known at the popular online poker forums of TwoPlusTwo as “IHasTehNutz”, he gathers information from players who have and have not received due payments from the longsuffering poker room and keeps an updated tally of all funds paid and owed (with many, many more being owed than paid). According to his computations, Lock Poker potentially owes a lot more money than originally believed.

At present, there are 394 members of Lock Poker awaiting a payout. Those combined withdrawal requests total $941,270.96. That’s where the original debt of about $1 million came from. However, IHasTehNutz recently calculated in the amount of money those same players still have in their accounts – the amounts that were not yet requested for withdrawal due to limitations per payout request – and that total came to a staggering $2,236,160.52 across 205 player accounts.

Ostensibly, if ever the 394 players who are owed $941k receive their funds, the 205 of them that will still have money on the site will want to withdrawal that amount as well. Thus, adding them together, Lock Poker potentially owes $3.2 million to its players. And if the operator can’t afford to pay $1 million, what’s to say the other $2.2 million will ever be dispersed?

It certainly doesn’t help that Lock Poker’s reputation has plummeted to well below sea level. With thousands of regular visitors a few short years ago, the online poker room’s spiral into ill repute has left the site with an average of around 30-35 concurrent players. At that rate, it doesn’t seem feasible that Lock Poker will ever make enough money to pay back the existing arrears, much less the inevitable future liabilities from players who still hold balances.