PokerRoom.com Closes Its Doors Again

PokerRoom.com Closes Its Doors Again

PokerRoom.comPokerRoom.com, one of the earliest operating poker sites, ceased operations on Tuesday. Players have a month to cash out their account balances.

This is the second time that PokerRoom.com has been shut down. The current owner of the site, bwin.party, closed the site after bwin and PartyGaming merged in 2009. It was re-opened about a year ago as part of the Ongame network but failed to garner any significant share of the market.

PokerRoom.com first opened for business in 1999 as the brainchild of two Swedish college students, Oskar Hornell and Claes Lidell. During the pre-boom years it had something of a cult following, especially among Mac users, for whom there were almost no poker clients available. PokerRoom.com allowed players to play through their web browsers, giving those frustrated Mac users an online outlet for poker.

The PokerRoom.com staff also broadly encouraged the development of a community centered on the site, with active forum posters able to register their likes and dislikes about the directions in which the site was moving. At a time when other sites were having scalability problems and growing pains, PokerRoom.com was a relative pillar of stability.

After the UIGEA was passed in late 2006, however, the cult and the community died. Bwin, which acquired the site in 2005, chose to pull out of the United States. That move significantly slashed PokerRoom.com’s player pool and market share. It lingered on for a few years until bwin.party first closed it down in 2009.

Kim Lund, an independent consultant for the poker industry who worked at PokerRoom.com for several years starting in 2004, tweeted about the shutdown, “People are asking me what I feel about PokerRoom.com closing again. Nothing. Sadly it was dead already. New owners, new life? Hope so.”

The landing page of the PokerRoom.com informs players of the shutdown with the following message:

PokerRoom will close its doors on 19th of February.

Registration for new players has been stopped as of today.

PokerRoom will continue to run as usual up until 19th of February, including deposits and cashouts as well as freerolls, bonuses and the Loyalty shop. On 19th of February all real money tournament tickets in players accounts will be converted to cash, however all uncleared bonuses will be forfeited at this time. The Pokah forum will also close on this date.

After 19th of February you will still be able to log in and cash out funds until 19th of March.

We would recommend PokerRoom players take up the excellent 100% up to $500 sign-up bonus being offered by our sister site PartyPoker.com.

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