TL;DR: Deposited $1,000 on Ignition with $1,250 Bitcoin Poker Welcome Bonus. In the next 28 days, I played ~45k hands at 50NLz, 50NL and 100NL and paid $2,502.95 in rake. I should have unlocked the entire $1,250 bonus, but instead only received $732.58. Customer service was downright unhelpful, bordering on obstructive. I’d have to assume I’m not the only person this has happened to. Either they are deliberately underpaying rewards, or their software sucks and they don’t care. Either way, I can’t play on the site, despite how much as I would like to for the Zone tables. I’d love to know if anyone else tracked the rake they paid during the bonus period and whether it was consistent with the ignition miles earned and the amount of the bonus you received.
Well I was hoping I was going to have a better resolution to report when I wrote this post (which I was going to write whether they paid me or not), but it is what it is. If anyone from Ignition reads this, give me my money please.
The relevant bonus terms are:
- The bonus is for 125% of your first deposit, up to a maximum of $1,250.
- For every 150 Ignition Miles earned in poker, you will unlock $5 of the bonus funds.
- The Ignition Miles earn rate is 15 Ignition Miles per dollar of rake in poker cash games.
1 and 2 are from the “Poker Welcome Bonus” page on Ignition’s website.
3 is from the “Ignition Rewards” page on Ignition’s website.
So, this bonus is equivalent to 50% rakeback: you earn 15 Ignition Miles per dollar of rake you pay, so after paying 10 dollars of rake, you earn 150 Ignition Miles, which unlocks $5 of the bonus money. So, to unlock the full $1,250 bonus, you need to earn 37,500 Ignition Miles (($1250 / $5) * 150 Ignition Miles) which is equivalent to paying $2,500 of rake. One caveat, they don’t specify precisely what they mean by “per dollar of rake”, but it seems like the most reasonable interpretation is that it means per dollar of rake paid from pots that you win.
On 10/3, I deposited about $1,008 with the Bitcoin Poker Welcome Bonus, so I got the maximum bonus amount of $1,250. Between 10/3 and 11/1, I played 45,418 hands. I downloaded all the hand history files from Ignition and loaded them into PokerTracker. Here are the stats (bad reg, I know, I know ):
You can see Rake Attributed (the amount paid out of pots that I won), Rake Contributed (the amount of rake taken out of my bets, whether or not I won the pot), and Rake Share (the amount of rake taken divided evenly by the number of players at the table). If they’re going by Rake Attributed, I should have received over 37,500 Ignition Miles, but if they’re going by Rake Contributed, I should have received only 36,213.75 Ignition Miles. Obviously nobody cares about how many Ignition Miles they have earned because they are so pathetically worthless it’s insulting, but since the bonus unlocking is tied to how many Ignition Miles you earn, I was monitoring it. I posted this thread on twoplustwo as well, and someone there said the Ignition Miles are earned according to Rake Contributed. The two people I spoke to on the phone told me it is Rake Attributed that counts, so who knows. Either way, On November 1, I had earned only 23,560 Ignition Miles, well short of what I should have earned. (I have a screenshot but I’m limited to 1 image in a post since I’m a new user.)
And on November 1, the total amount of the bonus I had unlocked was only $732.58. (Again, I have a screenshot of this.)
Going by their incorrect balance of 23,560 Ignition Miles, I should have unlocked $5 * 23560 / 150 = $785.33. Their math here only shorted me 50 bucks - not bad compared to their usual standards. The bigger issue is that I was shorted 14,000 Ignition Miles, which should have unlocked $466.67 of the bonus.
I first contacted their customer service about the bonus funds not unlocking as they should be on October 6. In the following 4 weeks, I exchanged dozens of emails and spoke to their customer service on the phone 3 times, and every experience was positively enraging. By far the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had. A couple of good things: during this time I downloaded a couple of hand history files that were corrupted, and their customer service was very prompt and helpful in resolving that. And at the end of my attempts to get them to fix this, I forfeited the remaining $517.42 of the bonus that I am entitled to, and withdrew my account balance from the site. That withdrawal went through in about 12 hours, which absolutely shocked me since I was expecting to be put through the ringer after all the grief their customer service gave me about the bonus issues. So I have to give them some respect for not giving me a hard time withdrawing my money.
Here are the cliff notes on the communication regarding the bonus problem. Almost every email contradicted the one before it. It took from October 6 until October 13 for them to finally make a manual adjustment to the amount of the bonus I had unlocked, and that adjustment actually seemed to bring the number close to the correct amount. But after that, it continued to accrue slower than it should have, and the Ignition Miles were not consistent with the amount of rake I had paid. On October 12, I asked them to confirm the total amount of rake I had paid on the site, and they told me it would take 24-48 hours (their favorite time estimate to give and subsequently miss) to calculate the amount of rake I’d paid. By October 19, I still had not heard back from them, I pinged them again, and after that they essentially refused to talk to me, answering every email with “I see that we have already helped you with this issue”. Absolutely made my blood boil, and eventually they told me to call if I needed further assistance.
Album of emails in case you want to read, it’s actually pretty funny just how unhelpful they are: https://imgur.com/a/a9YsqUE
I called 3 times. First time, November 2, 55 minutes on the phone with someone who didn’t understand the way the bonus worked, and eventually said she would need to escalate it to the Promotions team and I should hear within 24-48 hours. I gave her as much information as she could understand to make sure they understood the problem, since they refuse to let you talk to or email a supervisor or the Promotions team directly.
Didn’t hear anything, as usual, so I called again November 6, 24 minutes on the phone and the guy told me to just monitor my account messages and there was nothing to be done. There was a ton of static on the line so I couldn’t really contest anything since I could barely hear him. Finally, on November 9, they send me an account message that just says it’s correct, with no further explanation whatsoever:
Poker Welcome Bonus
Nov 9, 2019
Hi Andrew,We understand your concern regarding your poker miles and are happy to look into this for you.
We have reviewed your account and can confirm that the miles have been updated correctly. The poker welcome bonus is also released in the account accordingly. This is calculated automatically by the system and no manual intervention is needed at any time.
We’re available to help 24/7 if you need anything else.
Thanks,
Bovada Customer Service
service@bovada.lv
Infuriating.
I called a final time on November 11 and it took 39 minutes, again trying to explain the problem to some guy who didn’t really understand, and at the end he told me he needed to investigate further and potentially talk to another department, and would send me an update by the end of the night. Refused to let me talk to any supervisor again, and I told him that I was fed up, that I’ve seen this routine before, and that if his “update” was just that he had investigated and found that the account was correctly adjusted, with no further explanation, I would stop playing on the site and withdraw all my money. If the update was that he needed to escalate it to the Promotions team or anyone else, I was going to give it 48 hours to hear from them, and if I didn’t get an ACTUAL EXPLANATION of why my math is wrong, I would stop playing on the site and withdraw my money. He said he understood, and here’s the update he sent me later that night:
Ignition Miles
Nov 11, 2019
Hi AndrewI am sending you an update regarding your Ignition miles.
We have reviewed your account and can confirm that the miles have been updated correctly. The poker welcome bonus is also released in the account accordingly. This is calculated automatically by the system and no manual intervention is needed at any time.
If there are any further question feel free to contact us.
Well, Ignition, you wore me down and wasted my time until I gave up. Please spend my 500 dollars on something cool.
Of course I’m happy to answer any questions about any of this, and I actually have screenshots of all the bonus payments I received in the time the bonus was active if people want to see that, just didn’t bother posting them because this is long enough anyway.
If anyone else who was tracking hands when they first started playing on Ignition with the Poker Welcome Bonus, I’d love for you to chime in with how much rake you paid in the 30 day period, and how much of the bonus you unlocked if you can still find that information. I actually remember searching 2p2 and other poker forums before I deposited because I was trying to estimate how many hands and how many hours of 2-tabling 50NL Zone I would need to play to clear the bonus, and I read multiple posts where people said they were multi-tabling 8 hours per day and couldn’t come close to clearing the whole bonus, which seemed strange to me since I was able to comfortably play enough hands while having a full time job and taking a bunch of days off completely. I guess it makes more sense if you’re only earning 60% of what you should be. I find it tough to believe that I am an isolated incident, so again, it would be great if anyone else who claimed the welcome bonus could confirm/deny that this happened to them too. And if you’re considering signing up and claiming it … uh, normally I’d tell you to just make sure you’re being paid the correct amount, but obviously that didn’t work for me, so I guess I’d have to recommend finding another site to play on unless you’re okay with being stiffed on the welcome bonus.
