Boycott Magnet Adda52 Lands Itself in Another Controversy Over Extra Rake Charged on Run it Twice Tables

Industry leader and arguably one of the most popular online poker sites in India, Adda52 has quite the propensity for attracting boycotts. Despite being one of the leading poker brands in the country, Adda52 has also become one of the most controversial poker operators off-late.

For a little less than a year, Adda52 has been swimming in murky waters and was involved in two rather damning controversies. The site managed to redeem itself on both occasions, but will this third issue become one too many for the company?

If former WSOP bracelet winner Aditya Sushant’s recent post on the Facebook public forum, The Players Group (TPG), is anything to go by, things are not looking good for Adda52.

In his rather lengthy post, Sushant stated the following:

“Adda52 Rake Scam

Let’s call a spade a spade. There are some things that are forgivable. The adda rake scam is not one of them. Not compensating the affected parties is blasphemous. I barely played any cash there but I can’t even imagine the extent of the extra money they have profited through this from cash players.

The media have been alerted. They will be stepping into the act shortly.

I don’t care for boycotts and what nots. I however promise to not play a hand on Adda52 until this is resolved correctly. A full compensation. To all affected. Not a partial one.

I’m a_sushant. I will be withdrawing my balance from the site shortly. I will not play a hand of poker on the site until this gets resolved. I humbly plead more to follow. I have a voice and I’m choosing to exercise it. I’m hoping more choose to do the same for what’s right. All I want to see are some co-signs.”

We will talk about the first two controversies later. First, let’s get to the issue at hand, namely a ‘rake controversy’ that has led to a lot of resentment in the domestic poker community.

Extra Rake Charged on Run it Twice Tables

The matter was first brought to light by Durga Deepak on April 27 when he posted a thread on the poker group The Players Group (TPG) on Facebook.

“Adda is charging the rake up to double of the rake cap in run it twice scenarios. I already took to their site representatives and Mukesh Choudhary is actively looking into data and talking to management. Below are the proofs of rake being charged as 1600 in 800 cap 200/400 table. This happened in all the run it twice scenarios. In my opinion it’s a technical glitch and while applying cap they rightly applied on each chop pot but while summing them they missed the capping of it. I started with 30,000 stack and other one went all in on flop and dead money is 5200 summing the total pot to 65,200. Now deduct rake from it 65,200-800 = 64,400 and as it is chopped divide by 2 that is 64,400/2 = 32,200. So, the profit in my hand should be 2,200 and my stack should be 32,200 but my stack became 31,800 and as you see in the screenshot, profit displayed as 1,800.”

Following Deepak’s post, Abhineet Jain also revealed his calculations of the extra rake paid by him. “The excess rake charged for the last 6 months by adda52 came out to be INR 86141 for my account (courtesy Siddharth Chabra; file attached). I have sent a mail to adda52 asking for compensation for the same; will update the group on the response received.”

Another well-known reg and the first-ever WPT India Main Event champion Vikas Mantri pitched in with his views on the situation, “I think the investors seems to understand the performance of Adda52 much better than the poker players. While investors have clearly shunned the company (even before lockdown) … and maybe are aware of the callousness of the mgmt. The company needs to realise that if they continue such behaviour it might be too late to revive the traffic. While many poker players are degens (yes, I strongly believe) … and continue to play despite the negative EV as they are supremely over confident off beating the odds. Whereas truth be told only 1-2 % can win as per current scenario in India. While Siddharth Chabra has done a commendable job in precisely calculating the impact of the rake fiasco on few players. It’s high time – adda mgmt made a statement and clarified their stand. They should not wait for TPG to raise their voice or boycott (the only language they understood earlier). Meanwhile – my request to poker players – what makes you play on a site despite this kind of behaviour. U think u can still beat the odds or u r a degen?”

Adda52 Responds

Mukesh Choudhary was the first Adda52 representative to comment on Deepak’s thread, “bro our tech is already informed about this and they are identifying all such instances in previous data till yesterday. We have to scan through almost 2.5 Lac hands per day to search for a particular incident & then cross check with capping. Would need some time to confirm anything on this.”

Chief Player Officer at Adda52, Priyanka Sengupta, also replied on the same thread. “Guys, I’m in continuous discussion with the internals team and we’re looking at Run It Twice in a holistic way. I’ll get back with updates when things are finalized.”

Mounting Dissatisfaction: Nearing the Boiling Point

The TPG over the past week has been flooded in this controversy, with several players sharing their opinions on this matter.

Commending Deepak on his post, Mohan Rao (alias) wrote, “easily saved a few thousands/lakhs for the community, not something the site would’ve easily found out about without bringing it to their notice, and even if they found it on a future date would’ve silently rectified it without highlighting it and making the refunds retrospectively.”

Deepak Raina said, “Omfg! This is negligence of a different magnitude! Thanks Durga Deepak for bringing this to light.. Question is how do we tackle this now? There seems to be a new demon emerging every few days.”

Gaurav Mittal stated, “The same way it’s important to ensure what must happen, it is equally important to ensure what must not happen. To put it simply, every time a technical team develops a feature, they test each and every module with a set of test steps and precise expected behavior. If Adda52 says that their entire Technical team and Business team overlooked this aspect, it would be a lie because you don’t approve a functionality unless it generates exactly the kind of result it must. This situation is pretty much a Check-Mate the way I see it.”

Former IPC High Roller champion Pranay Chawla, expressing complete shock on the topic, said, “Have come to expect a lot of things from Adda but despite past experiences, this is still unbelievable. For a lot of other things there are checks and balance, and accusations and evidence, but this is daylight robbery. Absolutely disgusting how Adda has made crores in extra rake. No boycotts, no explanations, FULL compensation is the only solution and not just for the last 6 months. I refuse to believe Adda doesn’t have data pertaining to periods prior to the last 6 months and we should really take this up strongly.”

PokerGuru Investigates

Members of the poker fraternity reached out to us, asking us to take a closer look at the issue. We contacted some of the key players involved in the matter for a better and unbiased understanding of the controversy.

First up was the online poker operator, Adda52. On being asked to comment on the issue, we received an official email response from the site’s Chief Player Officer Sengupta that read as follows.

“Adda52 holds to be India’s No. 1 Poker Site and a choice of Lakhs of poker enthusiasts in the country with one of our core values – Perseverance.

We’ve been continuously enhancing our game offerings, policies, promotions & customer service in order to serve our players better. Be it revamping our tournament offerings for the first time in Jan’18, new loyalty program for a better rewarding experience in Dec’18, moving all games to one wallet with a user-friendly Tax policy in Jan’20 or extending Vegas Package usage for the complete year in Apr ’20, we have persevered towards better future.

Recently, there have been some discussions about House Rules related to fees levied in online poker. This fee varies from platform to platform & for a lot of different scenarios. Looking at the online poker industry holistically in India & globally, there are so many sites which levy rake on split pots in all games, some websites have no capping on PLO games, some sites/casinos levy flat fee on multi runs and few others have higher rake capping. These are just a few examples of House Rules.

We at Adda52 keep reviewing the system and have always worked on the best possible solution for players. Hence, you will see that in the past all such issues of split pots were eliminated. Recently identified Run it Twice’s rake structure is worked upon, and effective 1st June, our beloved players can reuse this feature & we aren’t charging any extra fee for the same.

Meanwhile, players can enjoy the benefits of a competitive rake structure at our high action cash tables combined with super rewarding Adda52 Advantage Loyalty program, Zero Rake in Split Pots & extra earnings in cash game contests/challenges/leaderboards.”

This was similar to the response given on social media. While the company has stated that it will look into the situation, it has given no indication of compensation or refund for any affected players. In fact, Run It Twice tables have altogether disappeared from the Adda52 lobby since the issue was raised.

However, there was some vital information brought to our notice by Sushant, who happens to be a former Adda52 Team Pro. Apparently, Adda52 changed its Terms & Conditions by including a specific clause for the rake charged on RIT tables. From the looks of it, the RIT related clause was added recently. According to Sushant, “as recent as March 9 before they updated that on the page, there was nothing pertaining to run it twice pots listed on page.”

A screenshot of the Terms & Conditions page acquired from the ‘Wayback Machine – Internet Archive,’ does, in fact, prove Sushant’s point.

However, now the ‘Rake Rules’ page explicitly states:

“In case of multiple runs in the same hand

Effective 1st June 2020, no extra rake will be deducted for running it multiple times on cash tables.”

In his Facebook post, Sushant also alluded to this fact, “I was told that all the different scenarios raked are clearly explained there. For RIT pots, this section was edited in post this issue coming to light.

‘In case of multiple runs in the same hand

Effective 1st June 2020, no extra rake will be deducted for running it multiple times on cash tables.’

I demanded to know what was given on this page before they edited it that justified them raking pots for twice the cap. I haven’t bothered waiting for an answer.

https://web.archive.org/…/…//www.adda52.com/poker/rake-rules(This is from March 9)

https://web.archive.org/…/…//www.adda52.com/poker/rake-rules(From even before)

In short, there was nothing mentioned on the page that justified their actions. So I see no reason for them to justify pocketing the money in any way.”

PokerGuru reached out to Deepak, who said, “So out of 100’s of poker operators, no one follows this practice and the reason is simple it’s absurd and outright unacceptable. My guess is this is technical blunder rather than policy blunder. As it is observed on compulsory run it twice tables too. Adda trying to show this as it is their policy and now that upon player’s request, they are changing it which is a novice way of covering the things and even a new player can notice that.”

“Adda should discuss with players on what needs to be done rather than unrelated automated essays. I have noticed in the hands replayer in a split pot when my winnings on that hand is low even with a lot of dead money and then I did a bit of research on all kinds of tables and noticed that in fact double rake is being charged across all tables and even mandatory to run it twice tables,” he added.

We connected with Siddharth Chabra, who wrote a script to automate the computations for the extra rake collected from the players. He said, “I don’t know if the adda52 rake issue is deliberate or just poor programming. The fact is when you say the rake cap is 1000 and then charge 2000 it is just wrong. Players are correct to demand a refund. I wrote a script that parses the hand history of the players (who shared their hand history) and identifies the hands where there is potentially more rake charged than the rake cap. This is converted to a report and shared with the players. The 6-month restriction is due to the fact that adda52 does not share HH older than that in their interface”

To find out what the general rule of thumb is regarding the rake collected on Run It Twice tables, we checked the practices followed by some of the other industry leaders.

Global leader PokerStars states: “We do not charge extra rake for ‘Run It Twice’ hands.”

Asia-facing online poker operator, GGPoker, who is presently hosting the ongoing WSOP Online Super Circuit Series, has a slightly different version – Run It Three Times. However, they, too, have stated, “There is no extra rake for Run It Three Times.”

Third Time Unlucky?

At the start of this report, we had talked about two recent controversies that Adda52 had gotten embroiled in.

The first one happened in August 2019 when a majority of the poker community, led by veteran pros Raghav Bansal and Raman Gujral, chose to boycott all Adda52 tournaments after the company’s refusal to update its archaic TDS policy. After much debate and discussion, the company did announce a revamped TDS policy at the start of 2020.

Barely a month later, the online site landed itself in yet another soup. During the inaugural run of its Adda Online Poker Series (AOPS), the site added an unscheduled fourth flight to its ongoing AOPS Main Event Finale ₹1.5 Crore GTD tournament. This created quite an uproar among players. Sporting a buy-in of ₹11,000 (includes ₹1,000 fees), the event was initially slated to host three starting flights. Day 1A and Day 1B had registered a field of 656 entries. Pre-empting a massive overlay, the site decided to add an unscheduled fourth flight to the event. The misstep got the site a lot of flak, and they came out of the mess by announcing a ₹21 Lakhs freeroll for all the Main Event participants.

However, Sushant also stated that while Adda52 did announce a freeroll, in an interview with Online Poker News (OPN), Adda52 CEO Naveen Goyal made it seem like the freeroll was in celebration of the success of the inaugural AOPS series and not compensation for the Main Event participants.

“Call me a propagandist. Here’s some revisionist history for you all.

When they added the extra flight for the main event out of the blue for the first AOPS they held, they benefitted nearly 21-22L that they were losing to overlay otherwise. Under pressure from the community, they decided to host a freeroll and give back that money to the people who played the tournament.

Here’s an interview from right after the series

I’m quoting

OPN: Hi Mr. Goyal, welcome and thanks for speaking to us! On behalf of OPN (Online Poker News), a big congratulation to you and your team on the grand success of the Adda52 Online Poker Series (AOPS)! What is your take on a flagship series like the AOPS?

Naveen: Honestly, I was not sure how successful it will be. We just wanted to give players a grand series to have fun and earn big. But it was awesome and people loved it. To celebrate the success of our first AOPS edition, we even hosted a special 21 Lac Freeroll event for poker players who participated in the AOPS Main Event.”

While all these facts are quite damning, it is safe to say that Adda52 is very conscious of its player base and does work hard to make up for any unwanted incidents. However, it seems like transparency in management is not their strong suit. In the present scenario, Adda52 has not done much besides stating that starting June 1, no extra rake would be charged on RIT tables. Instead of accepting the technical mistake, the site is claiming that the extra rake charged is according to company policy, which is likely a step being followed to avoid all suggestions of compensation to affected players.

Going by past instances, the brand does eventually make up for its mistakes. Often times, it takes a lot of time for it to happen. But it is also true that so many mishaps, in such a short period, could result in a lack of confidence in the brand.

Sushant ended his statement with the following call for action, “It doesn’t matter if this was intentional or down to gross negligence. Whatever the truth is, retribution is the only answer. Even if it comes down to taking legal recourse, that shall be done. If a listed entity thinks they can just have this shit fly under the radar, I think we need to show them the radar and shove it somewhere it hurts. Don’t care however long this takes.”

Will Adda52’s silence regarding player compensation, finally tip them overboard? We will have to wait and watch.