Home / Poker News August 2008 / Curtains for another online poker room: ChanPoker closes on August 21st
Curtains for another online poker room: ChanPoker closes on August 21st
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2008-08-22 09:14
Launched with big fanfare in 2006, ChanPoker, one of the most modern operations on the Ongame network, has just expired. One may as well say the company behind Chan Poker has missed the window of opportunity for launching an online poker business and ended up with the worst possible timing instead.
The online poker industry’s big boom started in 2004. By 2006, even though the growth was still in full swing, the window of opportunity for starting up new businesses was quickly closing. The reason was the UIGEA. Passed in September, 2006, this infamous piece of legislation managed to create enough uncertainty to exert a long-lasting and quite radical negative effect on all online poker rooms.
While the giants like PartyPoker had a diverse-enough player-base to absorb the blow, smaller poker rooms were fatally affected, and those that just started up never got a chance to truly get rolling. Since the Ongame network adopted a no-US player policy, the UIGEA blow was especially hard on ChanPoker.
Over the past year and a half, ChanPoker did launch a few interesting promotions and began to offer affiliate websites some pretty generous deals, but apparently its efforts were in vain, as it had too much adversity to deal with in an online poker environment in which the US-player accepting giants were slowly but surely expanding their reach over most of the market. In an announcement released a few days ago, company representatives iterated the fact that ChanPoker was still in search for another poker operation that would take over its existing player-base.
They also assured their players that all withdrawal requests would be honored in a timely manner, urging them to make their withdrawals as soon as possible. Players’ accounts will be closed as soon as the last withdrawal is completed, they will not need to undertake any further steps.
Daily freerolls have ceased to appear in their tournament listings on the 19th, and the site has closed for good on the 21st. With its closure, ChanPoker joins an ever growing queue of websites which succumbed to the adversity brought about by the UIGEA.
