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http://pokerfuse.com/news/poker-room-news/a-year-after-its-re-opening-pokerroomcom-is-shuttered-once-again-19-02/
An open and shut case: Ongame skin PokerRoom.com and its forum community Pokah closed today.
Little more than a year after reopening for business, PokerRoom has closed once again.
Owners bwin.party are encouraging players to move over to the main PartyPoker site where they can take up the standard new player sign up bonus.
Players are assured that funds are secure, and players have until March 19 to log in and cash out balances. However, today any uncleared bonuses were forfeited, and unused tournament tickets were converted to cash.
It is unclear if players were given advanced warning of today’s closure. The long running Pokah community forum has also closed.
PokerRoom launched as one of the pioneers of online poker in 1999, and was sold to Bwin in 2005. Bwin chose to pull out of the US market after the UIGEA passed, and PokerRoom never really recovered.
2009 saw bwin merge with PartyGaming, and the PokerRoom.com brand was closed down. Three years later, bwin.party decided to reopen the site on the Ongame network. The brand was certainly well remembered, having built a faithful player base before PartyPoker and PokerStars even opened their doors.
The reopening came during the process to sell the Ongame network and may have been part of a corporate strategy to make that network more attractive to potential buyers; Alternatively, bwin.party bosses may have simply been trying to squeeze some profits from an unused depreciating asset.
The site was started by Oskar Hornell and Claes Lidell, two students at Uppsala University in Sweden. Both took a course in psychology, where they learned about the possibility of having an edge over the house in some casino games. This led them to blackjack and the start of a long and profitable European casino tour.
After being banned from almost every casino in Europe, they returned to Sweden and started reading up on poker. Live grinding casino poker tables proved profitable but frustrating and with one of their university friends they wrote the first iteration of the software that would become PokerRoom.com.
Their misspent youth paid off as PokerRoom surged in popularity during the poker boom of the early 2000s, and its sale to Bwin made them both millionaires.