It’s taken two weeks, in which damaging speculation has been running riot, but the chief exec of the currently shuttered Infiniti Poker site, Michael Hajduk, has at last started communicating.
After various false starts and banking hassles Infiniti soft-launched late last year, accepting conventional and virtual currency, only to mysteriously go offline in February, leaving players anxious about their account balances (see previous reports).
The unusually reticent executive insists that his problems are not related to the Bitcoin crisis at Mt. Gox, as has been speculated on various poker forums.
Hajduk assures players that their funds are safe and will be made accessible soon, explaining (without giving any details) that he has been the victim of what he describes as an “offshore institutional bureaucracy” – whatever that may mean.
It was clearly a bureaucracy with power, because Hadjuk admits that his “operational capital reserves” were locked down, impacting his technical capability to keep the site open.
In an environment where online poker players are justifiably careful with their money following expensive debacles like the Purple Lounge failure, Hajduk should be concerned that some two weeks went by – a long time on the internet – in which his company left players uninformed following the sudden shuttering.
There is a need for better and more transparent exchanges than that if he is to succeed in a highly competitive sector.