Like a lot of you i had a large balance at bet islands as did several other people i know. I have several contacts in costa rica and they are all telling me the major books and some of the minor books finally started to realize just how much the theft of 1.5 million dollars worth of players funds by bet islands would hurt the offshore industry as a whole and have decided to meet in the coming weeks in an effort to find a solution. Early word is that several books could get together and offer players a bailout package where your bet islands balance would be split up 4 or 5 ways and you would be required to deposit 25% of your bi balance and then roll that plus your bi balance over 20 times and no one would be able to withdraw for 30 days. A solution like this would be beneficial to all parties involved as the bigger books would protect the industry and restore faith amongst offshore players they wont get ripped off and players obviously would not lose their hard earned money. Also for those of you who had money at bet islands do not give up hope. We are more powerful united and we cannot let people steal our money. I have no beef with sbr at this point unless i see some direct evidence i think that they were not involved with this but do owe their members and the offshore industry as a whole a big effort to help facilitate this proposed deal among the major book managers in cr.
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I hope you are right..i think it's highly doubtful but i want to believe it. I do think these books would benefit in a big way in the PR department.
I agree that we need to let it be known that we wont stand for people stealing our money..for one thing we cant send them anymore money until this problem is solved..any other ideas?Comment -
Everybody needs to just stop sending money to any offshore book until its all settled and something is offered up by a good book. There are other outs like using a local or flying to Vegas and wagering once a week. Just dont buckle and cave in to a bail out from a book like EZ who I believe was in on this with BetIslands from day one.Comment -
everyone has a contact or connection in Costa Rica. LOLComment -
hope your right. i would be willing to deposit the 1,500 tht would be required to have a chance to get back the funds that were stolen from me.Comment -
I hope you guys get something out of the BI screw over, but if books really wanted to do something to improve their image the 1st thing they should work on is getting payments out as fast as they get deposits in. Untill they can accomplish that their image is never going to improve.
I agree with a previous poster, the way to hurt them is to not deposit. Its tough times right now for offshore books, football ending, hockey and basketball dont bring in the deposits football does. If anything Id say the offshore industry is in worse shape than its been for a long time, at least for US player books,JMO.
laterComment -
If you have several connects in CR, none of them were able to give you a heads up that BI was about to fall?
just wondering....Comment -
If there are four books involved, which just doesn't sound like the stuff anybody would make up, I would say there's a high chance of a bailout.Comment -
The books participating BI bailout will show the world (actually US only) that they have strong financial standing and trustworthy for a long long time. Remember even once A-rated books like BetCascade and WSEX became stiffs, but did they even once bailed out other failed books? I don't think so, but correct me if I am wrong, as I don't know what was like way back.
So after BI fiasco, new players will want to know which books are safe. A-rated here? See Cascade and WSEX. Player popular books? See BI. So who do you trust. I would say the books who stand up bailing out BI players.Comment -
yeah that makes a lot of sense if they would get together and do that
player confidence is shot, nobody wants to get burned again
best way to restore faith is to offer bailout, enforce rollover requirement, then pay the players
get this industry back on its feetComment -
good luck to everyone who used betislands. hope we all remember this theft before sending any funds to another johnny come lately sportsbook, or for that matter, any sportsbook. risk/reward keeps getting worse and worse for sending funds offshore.Comment -
Are you guys still in Stage 1 Denial, or is this Stage 3 Bargaining? Let me know when you complete Stage 5, and figure out our money is gone.
Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance
The stages have evolved since their introduction and they have been very misunderstood over the past three decades. They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.
The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ‘s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss.
Denial
This first stage of grieving helps us to survive the loss. In this stage, the world becomes meaningless and overwhelming. Life makes no sense. We are in a state of shock and denial. We go numb. We wonder how we can go on, if we can go on, why we should go on. We try to find a way to simply get through each day. Denial and shock help us to cope and make survival possible. Denial helps us to pace our feelings of grief. There is a grace in denial. It is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.
As you accept the reality of the loss and start to ask yourself questions, you are unknowingly beginning the healing process. You are becoming stronger, and the denial is beginning to fade. But as you proceed, all the feelings you were denying begin to surface.
Anger
Anger is a necessary stage of the healing process. Be willing to feel your anger, even though it may seem endless. The more you truly feel it, the more it will begin to dissipate and the more you will heal. There are many other emotions under the anger and you will get to them in time, but anger is the emotion we are most used to managing. The truth is that anger has no limits. It can extend not only to your friends, the doctors, your family, yourself and your loved one who died, but also to God. You may ask, “Where is God in this?
Underneath anger is pain, your pain. It is natural to feel deserted and abandoned, but we live in a society that fears anger. Anger is strength and it can be an anchor, giving temporary structure to the nothingness of loss. At first grief feels like being lost at sea: no connection to anything. Then you get angry at someone, maybe a person who didn’t attend the funeral, maybe a person who isn’t around, maybe a person who is different now that your loved one has died. Suddenly you have a structure – - your anger toward them. The anger becomes a bridge over the open sea, a connection from you to them. It is something to hold onto; and a connection made from the strength of anger feels better than nothing.We usually know more about suppressing anger than feeling it. The anger is just another indication of the intensity of your love.
Bargaining
Before a loss, it seems like you will do anything if only your loved one would be spared. “Please God, ” you bargain, “I will never be angry at my wife again if you’ll just let her live.” After a loss, bargaining may take the form of a temporary truce. “What if I devote the rest of my life to helping others. Then can I wake up and realize this has all been a bad dream?”
We become lost in a maze of “If only…” or “What if…” statements. We want life returned to what is was; we want our loved one restored. We want to go back in time: find the tumor sooner, recognize the illness more quickly, stop the accident from happening…if only, if only, if only. Guilt is often bargaining’s companion. The “if onlys” cause us to find fault in ourselves and what we “think” we could have done differently. We may even bargain with the pain. We will do anything not to feel the pain of this loss. We remain in the past, trying to negotiate our way out of the hurt. People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.
Depression
After bargaining, our attention moves squarely into the present. Empty feelings present themselves, and grief enters our lives on a deeper level, deeper than we ever imagined. This depressive stage feels as though it will last forever. It’s important to understand that this depression is not a sign of mental illness. It is the appropriate response to a great loss. We withdraw from life, left in a fog of intense sadness, wondering, perhaps, if there is any point in going on alone? Why go on at all? Depression after a loss is too often seen as unnatural: a state to be fixed, something to snap out of. The first question to ask yourself is whether or not the situation you’re in is actually depressing. The loss of a loved one is a very depressing situation, and depression is a normal and appropriate response. To not experience depression after a loved one dies would be unusual. When a loss fully settles in your soul, the realization that your loved one didn’t get better this time and is not coming back is understandably depressing. If grief is a process of healing, then depression is one of the many necessary steps along the way.
Acceptance
Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves.
Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.
At times, people in grief will often report more stages. Just remember your grief is an unique as you are.Comment -
Mountaineer,
Do you think SBR is lying about the meetings in January where a bailout will be discussed or do you just think nothing will come from the meetings?Comment -
Id bet we could find a solution to the problems in the middle east faster than we could solve the problems with the West Virginia defense.
Im still hoping that Bill Dozer and SBR John can help us out in some way...they know they screwed up in a big way and im sure they have a lot of contacts in the industry..im just choosing to be optimistic at the moment, accepting the fact that someone stole $6,521 from me will be a tough mental hurdle for me to get over.Comment -
An optimist's view on why it makes sense for books to come up with a bailout.
1. offshore industry confidence
The manner in which this book went under has eroded customer confidence to send money anywhere offshore. Reputable books would be using their advertising money in a manner which I believe would be well spent and their bottom line would be less than the book value of the sum spent.
2. square money
This "buyout" amount is coming back with the rollover requirements. Not only that, but this customer is most apt to have cold feet about playing at offshore books and will be probably playing at the place that helps more often in the future.
3. sharp money
Probably the biggest hurdle to overcome but not nearly as daunting as it appears. At the type of book that could offer a meaningful bailout the sharps already play. With the rollover requirement, the books would get some of the sharps bailout money back just because they would have to expand their range of bets to complete the rollover. Somebody who knows what they are doing could make -EV bets there and still make money on the bet. Speaking personally, if a book that is trustworthy offered the same deal as EZ I would do it in a heartbeat but would expand my repertoire there considerably to include many -EV bets to complete my 1000000 plus rollover in a timely fashion.
4. SBR
Right now as a result of at least perceived wrong doing their reputation is at an all time low. Whether they care or if it even impacts their bottom line I do not know. If they wanted to help and have some skin in the game they could waive some fees for sponsor books that help with a bailout. Then statements that they make that they care and they help do not ring hollow. The most insulting comment throughout this mess was made by SBR John when he mentioned that they are out December advertising revenue so they "lost" money too. Brings to mind Marie Antoinette " let them eat cake!"
In conclusion, do I think their will be a bailout....probably not. Do I wish there was someone at the table who could advocate for the players...absolutely.Comment -
Quite simple to see the truth...
If you send more money to another book with a rollover, you are locking up your funds even further than they already are....
If another book is offering such a deal it is their way to obtain players and lock them in....
You mention a book offering may have been in business with BET ISLANDS, perhaps they too got stiffed by the crooked closure. Now they to recover by trying to claim players with 25% deposits. so if the BI guy stole from everyone maybe the new book offering bailout also got stiffed and had 25% share so now they want you to re-deposit that much at least into their pockets....
It is not rocket science, If you want to test the strength of a book, gather yourselves together and everybody withdraw at the same time on the same day in the same way.. sit back wait your funds and post to each other what happened. If a book gets withdrawl request from all their players or a large percentage of them in the same day you will quickly who you can trust and what happens...
Any book offering a BI bailout would be a place/person of interest and I would begin by withdrawing there first.. should you hold an account already with them..
Sorry to all who have lost funds.. hopefully your balances were mostly winnings...Comment -
What about the guy with 280k? He is supposed to send 70k? And then bet 10 million dollars and they will pay him 350k
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I have seen a lot of posters in these BI threads say "but what can we do?". Here is a concrete suggestion that could actually get a books attention. Of course, there is always that darn if. If enough of us have clear money at the right target. And, we should all mention to the book when requesting the w/d that we don't feel safe off-shore anymore and want to quit playing.Comment
