Official Response to PokerRebel Issues and Questions

Throughout the history of this thread, PokerRebel has been pretty quiet about what has actually happened in the past few months. I have temporarily taken over this user in order to attempt to provide some light. My name is Cole Gibson, I am the General Manager for PokerRebel and the guy behind all the difficult decisions that have had to be taken in the past several months.

First things first. I want to apologize to all those who have been affected by these decisions and I hope I can provide answers that will, if not provide a solution to your problems, at least give an idea of the hows and whys of the events.

To those of you still waiting on cashouts, I'm sorry it has turned out to be such a long wait. Unfortunately, being a startup has prevented us from obtaining reliable accounts from which to make these payments. I would like to say that the money that is owed to you was sent out to one of our service providers and "lost" when the account was shut down. Meaning we are out this money. With this I am not saying we will not take responsibility for this money, we have every intention of doing this, when we can find a responsible processor to make sure this will not happen again. This is turning out to be more difficult as time passes and processors become more scarce. We will keep you posted from now on as to any developments that may arise in this matter.

I am going to address why the decision to move to a membership poker site and what events affected the making of these decisions.

Obviously the payout debacle had much to do with it. But if you take a snapshot of the industry as a whole, you would see that sites accepting US players do not seem to have a bright future, in our opinion at least. We do not want to end up in the same boat. The difficulty and risk of having processors handle large amounts of money, along with risks involved, make it very difficult for a new entry in the market to make any head way. And as can be seen by the events of the past few months, much more difficult for a new startup in the field.

Why membership? It seemed like a natural road to follow, and after a thorough study of the types of gaming in the free and membership poker models, we found that we could very well provide a poker game, along with the essence of a role playing game that would be interesting and fun for everyone. Of course, we don't know what levels of success we'll have in the future, we know we are providing a better product than other membership sites, and a better experience in the game with our role playing armies, than any poker site out there yet. What I can say is that we have every intention of making good on our existing debts to our players. Which is one reason why we have made the offer to exchange old balances for months of membership, and changed our offer in order to make it worthwhile for those who have long suffered our inability to find a way to get you paid.

And finally, I'd like to thank all those who have taken the time to critique, like, play, yes, even those who have bombasted us. Everyone is right. We have made mistakes and have been victimized by our noobie status. But I like to think we are gluttons for punishment and the only test of our character is going to be how we manage ourselves in the near future. The one thing that will never be said of us is that we are going to give up and disappear, we will find our place among the poker world, and I invite you to come along with us, we still have much fun to find.

PS: We have made no mention of prizes being awarded in our tournaments because we want to make sure we do not fall under any sweepstakes laws which would limit our reach. Our attorneys are studying ways where we can give out cash and prizes and still not fall under the sweepstakes laws. If you guys have any suggestions, questions, I will be watching this post for the next couple days and answering them.

Cole Gibson
General Manager
Poker Rebel Dot Com

thanks for the info mr gibson

Thank you for stepping up to the plate and giving an explanation, its appreciated. Converting current balances to credits is a nice good will gesture BUT does not answer or help the main underlying issue of non payments on withdrawals since Feb.

If players do stick around on the subscription model, can you guarantee they will get their winnings and what exactly are they playing for?

How does poker rebel plan on generating revenue to pay existing withdrawals, when the existing player base will not deposit to fund? New players to the site are needed to pay the subscription fee but many players affected by the recent changes would prefer to recommend carbon poker and even juicy stakes over poker rebel as the other two rooms pay up (slowly but pay).

If word of mouth is out, the other option is affiliates who would if brought in the majority of your player base. Issue there is that we have not been paid either and now the affiliate section is locked.

Without affiliates and good player comments, what is the strategy?

I have included your post as a quote with my answers inside...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NFI

Thank you for stepping up to the plate and giving an explanation, its appreciated. Converting current balances to credits is a nice good will gesture BUT does not answer or help the main underlying issue of non payments on withdrawals since Feb.

Cole: And of course we understand this. The biggest issue facing us through all this time was, being a startup, we were not able to guarantee any volume apart from what we had to pay at the time. This made it very difficult for us to even get an account. We still have not been able to recover the amounts sent which never arrived. It becomes increasingly difficult to ask our investor group to put up money to pay players when the money already put up is still in limbo supposedly waiting for the reserve periods to end before we can get it back.

If players do stick around on the subscription model, can you guarantee they will get their winnings and what exactly are they playing for?

Cole: Please keep in mind that we are doing something we have not seen anyone do in a very long time. We have decided to stick around and weather this storm and believe we can come out stronger for doing so. Other outfits have closed for less. I think the fact that we are still going ahead should help us show our guarantee in getting everyone taken care of. What we cannot guarantee at this point is the when. Which is frustrating for us just as much as it is for the player involved.

What they are playing for; We're trying to build a model from scratch which can serve the purpose of real poker play to the player, where players can get paid based on performance within the site. But we are also trying to keep clear of falling into sweepstakes laws. Our attorneys believe they can come up with the right combination, but too early to tell since they have not finished their evaluation. We're trying to fall in the middle of Zynga and Membership sweepstakes sites.

How does poker rebel plan on generating revenue to pay existing withdrawals, when the existing player base will not deposit to fund? New players to the site are needed to pay the subscription fee but many players affected by the recent changes would prefer to recommend carbon poker and even juicy stakes over poker rebel as the other two rooms pay up (slowly but pay).

Cole: We are not waiting to generate cash to pay. It's mostly been about acquiring the channel and not the cash. We believe the site is going to be successful or would not be continuing, we like the new model, we think it will generate a steady growth rate in the near future. We completely understand that present players will need to be taken care of before we can expect them to recommend us, but also know that when they do finally get taken care of, they will be happy to at least acknowledge the fact that we may have taken an extremely long time to make good on our obligations, but came through in the end. That would be good enough for us. Also, keep in mind that my appearance here has not been with the intention of getting anyone to promote our site, I merely feel that it is time you guys get some answers and assurances. So here I am.

If word of mouth is out, the other option is affiliates who would if brought in the majority of your player base. Issue there is that we have not been paid either and now the affiliate section is locked.

Cole: The affiliate section is closed until the new model is integrated. Any affiliate having a balance will see their balance upon reopening. The same I said for players, I'll say for any affiliates. I understand there have been many frustrations to deal with, but if we pay everyone next month, I am sure people will again, at least acknowledge our tenacity. At least, it is what is keeping us going. Trust me, closing down would have been much easier. This that we are doing, is much tougher, but in my mind, very worth it. You will be paid, again, it's the when I can't say today.

Without affiliates and good player comments, what is the strategy?

Obviously the strategy is to exploit new avenues of reaching new players, and offering a game the likes of which has not been seen. We don't believe that this incident counts as a scandal, or even registers on the scandal scale. For example, compared to the scandal of Ultimate Bet a few years ago where they were found to have a client which could see all the player cards. Our issues are relatively minute in comparison and encompass a very limited number of people. We believe that the new model will have a much wider audience that will be interested in playing. Our integration into Facebook will eventually pay off, our new ability to market in non gambling media will also pay off.

On another note, once we get the opinion from our attorneys on how to give away cash and prizes without falling into the sweepstakes category, finding a channel to pay should be much simpler.

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This is very sad. From the beginning I warned there could be pay out problems and I avoid playing at this site for that very reason. Good luck on having a subscription site.

Well for one thing. I had almost 500 dollars on the site. And being a grown man I dont care too much for role playing army man. I did that as a child with GI Joe's. Alot of my friends that have asked question to rebel support have been banned so I have remained quiet. But most poker players around here dont play subscriptions sites and as you well know most dont want to pay much for anything with this economy. I do appreciate you coming out of the jungle and giving us a word and I continue to play there for whatever reason there is. We shall see.

one more question maybe 2 or 3 the more i think about your post- can you prove your credentials? If you are who you say you are why not liven up rebel's dead facebook page with something like this? Really the more I think about it we really have no idea if this is real or someone hacked the account or what. never seen a signature use Dot Com . Being in the field I'm in I'm just not buying it. Sorry.

PokerRebel

Feb 19, 2026

BREAKING NEWS: 11-25-2026 will be the end of the Free $10 promotion. last post on rebel facebook by them. So your integration into facebook seems to have ended a long time ago except for the people who are beating you up on there but thats been a while also. I think its been declared dead.

Well, turns out you were right about payout problems. Unfortunately, processors were very sure they would not run into problems, yet here we are.

When you say you had 500 on the site, what happened?