There are a number of rooms in the online poker industry that allow players to transfer funds from one account to another. This includes rooms like Full-Tilt, PokerStars and Absolute. But why do some rooms allow this whilst others do not? What are the advantages and disadvantages of allowing players to transfer funds between 2 accounts?
The most obvious advantage for the poker rooms is that there will be more players able to play at the tables to generate rake. Full-Tilt would rather have 2 players playing via player B having an account transfer from player A, rather than simply having player A play on their own. The more players playing for real money, the more Full-Tilt can generate through rake. Therefore some rooms are more than happy for players to make account transfers.
The main disadvantage that allowing account transfers brings is the fact that some signed-up players will use the feature to send money for payments, with the recipient withdrawing the money immediately. In the first instance, there were two people playing at the tables with the same overall amount of money. However in this particular instance, there is now only 1 person playing, with half as much money available to be played with. In spite of this, there are more transfers made that benefit the room as a whole than transfers that take money off the tables. Therefore it is profitable for rooms like Full-Tilt to allow account transfers in the long run.
However, despite the advantages of allowing these player-to-player transfers, there are a large number of rooms that do not allow them. In fact, Bodog has measures to prevent players actively trying to transfer money at the tables through suspicious play; this is referred to as ‘chip-dumping’. For transfers to take place, each payment must be monitored and checked to make sure nothing suspicious is taking place. This can be time consuming and costly, so it is not something that can be easily set up by the poker rooms, especially not the small ones. Therefore you will usually find that only the biggest of rooms have such a feature in place to help aid play at the tables.
Inter-account transfers can prove to very handy, especially so if you have very generous friends! But it is good to be aware of the reasons that they are available to the players, so that you can be sure that they are not abused and taken away.
