Funding online poker accounts is still a pain

I wrote a couple of months ago about my frustrations trying to get money into one of my online poker accounts (see http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/10/funding-online-poker-accounts-is-pain.html). I don't play particularly well online, so don't do it often, but once in a while I take another stab and see if I'm getting any better at it.

My epassporte account works, but there's a $5-$10 charge every time, and it's slow, with the money I send to it from my online bank not available for a week or two. Completely ridiculous and unacceptable in an age of instant transactions for everything else.

I had read several places that Visa gift cards worked like a charm, and were accepted at online poker sites where regular credit or debit cards would not be. So I decided to try it. I stopped at a local Walgreens and purchased a $100 Visa gift card for $105.95. I figured the worst that could happen would be it got rejected, and I'd be out the $5.95, but still be able to spend the $100 on whatever expenses came up in my life.

I naively assumed that all Visa gift cards were equal. Turns out not to be so. When I found that the one I bought would not be accepted at Full Tilt, Poker Stars, or Ultimate Bet, I did a little more searching around the poker forums where this subject is discussed. Various cards are issued by different banks, and some of them tend to get accepted and others not. By coincidence, the one I bought ("gift2go") is one that many users have reported success with, but for whatever reason, I couldn't make it work. Other users say that whatever brand is sold through Target has the best track record of being accepted, but I haven't tried that yet.

In the process of this after-the-fact research, I also came across favorable reports for gift cards purchased through http://www.giftcards.com/, so I gave that a try. The most detailed account I found online described the whole thing going through in a couple of hours. That wasn't my experience. They only gave me the option of buying the card via a direct withdrawal from my checking account (i.e., I couldn't use another credit or debit card to buy it), and my bank doesn't process such transactions any faster than two days. I put in the request Monday afternoon, and got the approval about noon today. It cost $105 for a $100 card.

I sent the "virtual gift card" to myself, and received an email telling me how to access it. That all worked fine. Then the big test: will it be accepted for online poker? Full Tilt: No. Poker Stars: No. Ultimate Bet: Yes! The card issuer charged a transaction fee of $0.06, and $99.94 showed up almost instantly in my UB account. (Yeah, I know about their association with Absolute Poker and the big scandal. But I still like playing on UB more than the other two big ones.)

There is another potential problem with funding an account this way: you can't withdraw by the same means, which probably means that if I start turning an actual profit and want to cash out, I'll have to settle for a slow paper check to be mailed to me. But that's a small problem, and I'll deal with it when the time comes. (Nevertheless, I'm bracing myself for a possible nightmare of an experience, after reading this account of trying to make a simple withdrawal from UB: http://hardboiledpoker.blogspot.com/2007/11/ub-kidding-me.html.)

When Full Tilt rejected the card, it suggested instead a new option, something called an Ultra account. So I went through the tedious process of signing up for one of those accounts, typing in all the usual redundant information, answering its questions to see if I was really who I was claiming to be, etc. Then I clicked "submit," and got one of those horrible error screens that tells me their server crashed or something. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHH!

This is all so pointless and stupid, and all due to that idiotic, anti-American UIGEA passed in 2006. If you vote for a presidential or congressional candidate who is on record as supporting that awful piece of legislation, well, you deserve all of the obstacles and frustrations that are now attendant upon trying to engage in the simple pasttime of running a bluff in your underwear. It is said that people get the government they deserve, so if people of this country are so ignorant and/or apathetic not to punish politically the people who visited this insanity upon us, I guess we're just getting what we deserve. (Quick hint: Ron Paul is far and away the most freedom-loving presidential candidate this country has had in my lifetime. Shame on us all if we let slip away this opportunity to have such a man in the White House. I'm afraid he'll be too old to run ever again.)

Addendum, January 18, 2008

I created accounts at two new (to me) sites last night, Carbon Poker and Players Only. The "gift2go" card mentioned above was rejected (as with every other place I tried it) at Carbon, but sailed through at Players Only. If there is any logical reason for this discrepancy, it completely escapes me.

Addendum, January 18, 2008

An amazing breakthrough! One of the commenters said that Poker Stars can be funded diretly through one's checking account. I was skeptical of this, because nothing has been that easy since Netteller stopped doing business in the U.S. But I dutifully went to PS to try it. It's the "E-check" option. And it worked like a charm! In about two minutes, I had $100 sitting in my Stars account--with zero fees! Simply amazing. It's just like the old days. I wonder if it will last.


Addendum, January 19, 2008

Another commenter mentioned the gift cards issued by http://www.allaccessgift.com/. They are sold locally at, among other places, Von's grocery stores. I needed a couple of things last night and was going right past a Von's anyway, so looked for and found the cards, right by the cash registers. The highest they had was $50, but that was fine, since it was just to see if it worked. Bought the thing for $55. The first place I tried to use it was a new account I just set up at Carbon Poker, and it went through without a hitch. Looking more closely at the card, it is issued by "Inter National Bank," which is the same place I've seen mentioned in the forums as the bank whose cards tend to work most consistently for this purpose. It seems that that information is correct. The commenter also mentioned something I hadn't seen anywhere else, which is that not all of this issuer's cards work equally well, and you need to check to see that it also gives the name "NetSpend" somewhere on the card's packaging before buying it. I can't confirm that exactly, but this one did have that label, and worked fine on the first try, so it's probably worth checking for that notation.


Addendum, February 5, 2008

I tried another one of those Inter National Bank NetSpend Visa gift cards on Full Tilt, and they wouldn't accept it. I tried it on Bodog and BugsysClub, and it went through instantly on both. There is no logical pattern to what works and doesn't work. It's all just trial and error, as far as I can tell--which is why I'm reporting my experiences here for each specific combination of funding method and site I try.

Addendum, April 9, 2008

Another of the same type of card worked like slick on both Poker Host and True Poker. I couldn't get it to work on Eurolinx, because that dumb site requires you to go to a third-party intermediary, which appears to accept only standard credit cards, not gift cards.