I Submitted a Claim for My Absolute Poker Funds. Here’s How it Went.
It came as quite the pleasant surprise last week when the poker world found out that – basically out of nowhere – a remissions process was beginning in order to reunite former Absolute Poker players with their poker funds that were lost on Black Friday. Six years is a long enough time that most of us, except for maybe those that were hit the worst financially, by and large forgot about the money. Absolute Poker disappeared. There was no deal with the U.S. Department of Justice. Our money had faded away into the ether.
But now, apparently because there were leftover funds from the Full Tilt claims process, those of us with money seemingly spent by an Absolute Poker exec on margaritas on a beach somewhere in Central America might actually get our cash back.
Last week, I took the Absolute Poker claims website for a spin to try to track down my missing funds. Now I want to share with you my experience.
First things first: I went to AbsolutePokerClaims.com. Run by the Garden City Group, it is setup much in the same way as is the site for Full Tilt claims. On the home page, I clicked on the “Online Filing Page” link on the left-hand menu. There is also a link that reads “To File a Petition for Remission, click here” at the bottom of the home page.
The next page presented me with a login screen with two options. One was to enter a Petition Number, a Control Number, and either my last name, Absolute Poker player ID, or zip code on record with Absolute Poker. The Petition Number and Control Number were provided in an e-mail sent by the Garden City Group to players whose Absolute Poker records it had. My problem in this regard was that I never got the e-mail. GCG had my information, but being in the United States, it had been so long since I had played online poker that I had not checked my poker-specific e-mail account in approximately forever. I could still login to that e-mail account, but because so much time had passed, my inbox was wiped.
Therefore, the e-mail never got to me.
The good news is that GCG anticipated something like this possibly happening, so there was a second option given to login: provide the e-mail address used with Absolute Poker, Absolute Poker player ID, and last name. Fortunately, as mentioned above, I did have access to the e-mail account and I remembered my player ID, so I was able to login with this method.
The next screen asked me to enter my personal information like address, phone number, current e-mail address (the one I want my claims info to go to), and social security number. In addition to the fact that my login from the previous screen was accepted and got me to this point, it was also apparent that my Absolute Poker record existed, as my name, Petition Number, and Player Identification Number were auto-filled.
And that right there, is the extent of the information that was required from me. The next screen showed me my Absolute Poker balance, a whopping $14.96 (we’ll say I withdrew a lot of money before Black Friday). I have no idea if this amount was correct, but since I have no records to double-check, I just clicked the button to confirm the amount.
The final screen was a checklist of eligibility criteria that I had to confirm and electronically sign my name.
That was it. The entire process took a minute or two and I received an e-mail confirming my submission at the end. One thing I noticed (and that Haley Hintze mentioned in her unofficial FAQ) was that there was no banking information asked of me. It looks like once my claim is approved, I will be contacted to provide that info. Overall, the remissions process was extremely easy.
Don’t forget, like I almost did, that UltimateBet is part of this, too. I went through the process a second time to claim my UB funds (less than fifty bucks – I was a high roller). Hopefully all of you will remember your poker login IDs, as I did not remember my UB login. Luckily, I did remember that I had recorded all of my poker information in a password manager and it turned out that my login name that I had saved was correct.
So there you have it. Claiming my Absolute Poker and UltimateBet funds was much easier than doing my taxes. Hopefully this is the last I will have to hear of Absolute Poker and UltimateBet because screw them.
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