Bwin Profits at Partner's Expense

Bwin is one of the largest online sports books in the world. They weren't always this big, it took the combined efforts of tens of thousands of affiliate partners who promoted Bwin relentlessly over the course of many years. Many of these partners have sent Bwin thousands upon thousands of players. These affiliate partners worked countless hours and invested huge sums of money into their websites promoting Bwin. The vast majority of them work under a performance based commission model where they earned a percentage of the house rake or take. In other words, the more players an affiliate sends to Bwin, the more he or she earns. This was all done under contract and that contract provided for specific terms to be applicable to both Bwin and the affiliate partner. The partner expected to continue being paid commissions on all his players for as long as the player continued to generate commissions. That was part of the contract. It's called "lifetime commissions". Most gambling affiliate programs work this way.

Unfortunately for Bwin's partners, Bwin announced recently that it was opening a new Affiliate Platform called Bewinners. Bewinners affiliate terms and conditions contain a number of clauses that were not included in the contracts affiliates first agreed to. I've listed the contentious terms below:

* Commissions will be reduced to 5 percent on referred players 3 years after the player makes his first deposit – applied retroactively so players who have been with Bwin since Oct. 1 2007 will be reduced to 5% this month. Sure, you get lifetime commissions from bewinners, but at a ridiculously reduced rate!


* Players that fail to deposit within 90 days are removed from the affiliates account and revert to Bewinners affiliates, in other words – the affiliate loses the player even though the player was referred to Bwin by the affiliate!


* If no online invoice is created by the Partner within 12 months after credit of the Commission to his online wallet, the Commission shall be forfeited and will be deducted from his online wallet. Bwin gets to keep our earnings!


* The account of the Partner will be closed automatically and the Contractual Relationship is automatically terminated if during three successive months no new Paying Actives are generated by the Partner. Bewinners imposes a quota!

Every company has the right to renegotiate contracts or to apply new conditions to existing contracts as long as both parties agree to the changes or the changes are not applied retroactively.

If Bwin wants to make these changes, no problem, but apply them to newly acquired players only or to affiliates who join their program after the date the conditions were added.

Unfortunately, Bwin has taken the stance that because Bewinners is a new affiliate program, they can force all affiliates to accept the new terms and those terms will apply retroactively.  When Bwin migrated the affiliate records over to the new program, they made it mandatory for affiliates to click a link that indicated acceptance of the new terms and conditions.  If an affiliate did not click the "accept" button, they were not granted access to the new program and the affiliate would then lose all their referred players and be excluded from the Bewinners Affiliate program.  That is nothing more than blackmail.  Many of these affiliates rely on the commissions generated by their referred players to pay their mortgages, buy food, pay staff, cover office expenses, etc.

What Bwin is doing is probably illegal, and is certainly underhanded, immoral and predatory.  What industry insiders would call rogue bahavior.

By now I"m sure you're wondering why I'm posting about this on a player focused blog.  My reasons are actually two fold.

First, I truly believe that any company that is so willing to screw it's partners, those who helped build the company into a market leader, that same company will very likely do the same to it's players at some point.  Rogue is rogue, whether it's a player issue or an affiliate issue.

Second, I am very diligent about publicizing casinos or poker rooms that are not player friendly.  I have stopped promoting a number of poker rooms over the years when I thought players were being taken advantage of.  Absoluter Poker and Ultimate Bet are just two examples.  I was happy to give up my earnings from those companies in order to protect players.  Now I'm asking players to return the favor.  Stop supporting a company that is so arrogant that it thinks it can get away with such roguish behavior.

This is a first for me.  I've never asked players to stand up and fight for affiliates before.  Even when Full Tilt and Poker Stars imposed predatory terms on their affiliate partners which cost us dearly in reduced earnings, I continued to promote them to my players because those two poker rooms are safe for players and are considered top rooms by the vast majority of players.  There are no other poker rooms, that cater to American players, that come close to Tilt or Stars.  If there was, I would be giving them top billing on my site.

Bwin on the other hand is a second rate sports book and their poker room leaves much to be desired.  There are plenty of other and better options for players.  So I'm asking you, the player, to support our battle to force Bwin to revert to more affiliate friendly terms.  Please play at other Ongame Powered poker rooms such as Hollywood Poker.

Many thanks!