Written by Thomas | Saturday, May 21st, 2011

In what could be telling sign for the online poker market here in the United States, Hero Poker has recently announced through a formal press release on the popular poker forum DonkDown.com that it will no longer accept poker players from the USA as of May 25th, 2011.  The site’s CEO has made it clear that this will not affect existing USA players, so signing up before that time will grandfather you in to their system.

Hero Poker, which is a Merge-powered skin, was becoming a very popular hit with members at TwoPlusTwo and other big-time poker forums.  The site had been spiking with great traffic, solid customer service response times and some very unique freerolls they were offering to all their new customers.

The site’s outspoken CEO David Jung also was a breathe of fresh air in terms of transparency with the room, frequently communicating with members on any poker forum that the room had sponsorships on and not being afraid to answer tough questions about the online poker climate here in the USA and what it meant for it’s future around the world.

However, in his announcement that was made in a post this morning at Donkdown.com, Mr. Jung commented that him and his team are “not operating Hero as an upgraded affiliate or fly-by-night skin. To that end, independent of the Merge Network, we have decided to stop servicing new US players and instead focus on upgrading our overall boutique service and general security of all our players. Our player base will continue to be part of the Merge Network and Merge Network maintains our full confidence and support in all aspects.”

His statement, while truthful and straightforward, should be taken as a warning that Merge Gaming may be thinking twice about accepting USA players – especially in the wake of Black Friday.

Sportsbook.com and PlayersOnly, which were both very popular Merge skins, recently shut down a few weeks ago due to mounting pressure from it’s executives to pull out of the US market.

With Hero Poker now closing its doors to the same US demographic, one has to wonder when it’s much larger and more popular sites might be leaving the market here in the United States….

Yes, we’re talking about YOU Carbon Poker and Lock Poker 😛

 

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