When has the date been extended to ? I would have thought most would only pull out a day or two before the deadline
1st November.
We were seeing operators pull out long before the original Oct 1st deadline, often giving little or no notice to players. This caused problems where players were competing in tournaments spanning several days, or taking part in longer term promotions. Although players' accounts were migrated, their promotions and tournament positions were not. The lack of notice meant that players could not make an informed choice as to whether or not to begin a tournament or promotion. We now have the same problem again, but with a new date. If the casinos could give players some certainty by confirming that they will be closed, migrated, whatever on a given date like Oct 31st, then they could choose only to start tournaments that end before then. Given that casinos are not prepared to make such announcements, players can only assume that they are not necessarily going to allow them to play right up to the 31st October.
Some operators had already acted in advance of the court case & delay, and so could not take advantage of an extra month of UK players' money. Those that did take advantage had to postpone plans to migrate UK players almost at the last minute, and some had planned to close a week or two before the deadline, rather than allow UK players to stick around until Sept 30th.
The issue for UK players is that we can't trust them to give us enough notice, we are taking a gamble every day that the next day we can still log in to our account and continue whatever tournament or promotion we were playing.
These was one casino that closed to UK players without notice, and then told them they had been migrated, but that if they were in the middle of meeting WR on a bonus, their bonus and WINNINGS so far would be confiscated, rather than migrated. They considered this perfectly fair because the cash balances were not being lost. The players however held a different view.
From a business perspective, there is no real value in keeping hold of a group of players that have to be ditched in a couple of weeks. They may as well ditch them right away and move on. Casinos are looking to hang on to existing players as well as gain new players that they hope will stick around for long enough to recoup the initial marketing costs, including the welcome bonus that is often +EV being used as a marketing "loss leader" to get new players through the door.
The court case gave them a chance that the act would have to be canned and resubmitted to parliament, which could have delayed it by YEARS, rather than months. This WOULD have made it worth while hanging on in the UK, and those operators that acted early would have been kicking themselves.
