Even experienced players regularly face new challenges: from finding additional rakeback and difficulties with deposits to technical problems with software and account blocking. What can we say about newbies!
You can try to figure everything out on your own, but it is much more efficient to contact the GipsyTeam support service. Over the years of work, we have helped thousands of players, solved more than tens of thousands of cases, and accumulated a large-scale knowledge base. Without too much modesty, we can call our support one of the best in the poker community, including your reviews: the average rating is 4.9/5 based on almost 500 reviews.
From now on, getting help is even easier and faster. Previously, we had three services: standard GipsyTeam support for questions about the site, promotions and registration in the rooms, support for GT + professionals for playing in applications and additional rakeback, and technical support for problems with the client and software. Each department had its own work schedule and contacts.
Now, when contacting support, you don’t have to look at the clock: we switched to a round-the-clock mode of operation so that the masters of night leaderboards and deep runs in MTTs will receive an answer as quickly as those who live on a daily schedule. Even on weekends! Players of mobile applications in clubs from the USA, Brazil, and other regions with an unusual time zone win twice: they can make a deposit or a quick cashout at any time of the day.
We are also simplifying the structure and introducing a single window format: now all messages, regardless of the topic, can be sent to a single address. We will determine which employee is the best at understanding your particular problem and will quickly connect you. On average, we answer within 5-15 minutes. You can check!
- Increased rakeback and personal bonuses
- Help with deposits and cashouts
- Access to mobile applications
- Solving problems with accounts
- Technical support
- Questions about the site and forum
You can contact us with any questions: it doesn’t matter if you saw an unfamiliar poker term, H2N doesn’t work, you are looking for the best fields at NL50, or you encountered computer lags when opening 6 tables.
The GipsyTeam editors asked Andrei "Say_Hello" Antipov, head of the support service, to talk about the everyday life of the support team. We discussed the easiest way to unlock an account, remembered the strangest appeals, and thought about whether artificial intelligence could change the service.
– Hi Andrew! Tell us a little about yourself and how it all started. When you came to the support service, what did you do before?
- I have had an account on the forum since 2010, blogged for some time, and played low limits. As a student, I started playing NL20. The maximum rose to NL100, after that, I left MTT and played ABI20. I was such a hard worker, I earned several thousand dollars and lived on it. In parallel, I graduated from the institute, worked at a factory in his specialty, then left the factory, and worked as a trader in an investment company. I traveled a lot, and tried to live only with poker, but it was hard to focus: I was tired all the time, and I wanted to do something else. During one of the many moves I was in Irkutsk, I had a lot of free time, I decided to go to work in a coffee shop. Then I had a little problem with communicating with people, and it seemed that this experience would help to destroy the internal barriers. Then I returned to Omsk and began working as a barista. I went to all sorts of championships in Russia, coached a barista, became a coffee roaster, and manager, launched the website skuratovcoffee.ru (now it looks different), and played poker at the same time. In Omsk, a lot of money was not needed for life, so there was enough for life and travel.
In 2016, I moved to Moscow and realized that it is difficult to earn reasonable money in the coffee business unless you open your own coffee shop. Plus, I really wanted to travel, and such work is very tied to the place. And in 2017, I’m flying on an airplane, writing out my life goals and the things I want to do. What is my relevant experience, and how to find a remote job? At some level I knew how to play poker, but not very consistently. Probably, I was not hardworking enough: I never liked to understand and delve into poker well, I had to force myself.
And in 2017, I learned from poker friends about a vacancy in support and ended up in GipsyTeam. Then GT+ had just launched, and I was one of the first employees: I helped with registrations, answered questions, and did everything at once (this is just my element). It turned out not bad: all this time I was sitting on the forum a lot and was on the topic of all events, since I played NL20 myself, I knew the problems of the players well, how to raise rakeback, and so on. My best friends were also poker players, plus the story with restaurants and coffee houses taught me what service is: how to communicate so that people who contact you are satisfied.
– How did support look in 2017: rigid structure or creative chaos?
– GipsyTeam then resembled a family business: a minimum of regulations and documents, everything was based on verbal agreements. The atmosphere of a family shop next to the house, where everything is very cozy. GT+ was then called GipsyTeam VIP, and even the name implies some segmentation: you are either a VIP or you are not a VIP. There were two of us, one was engaged in managerial tasks: he came up with ideas, was creative, and negotiated. And I became just a support system: a full cycle of questions, from how to install the software, to what stats are displayed in HM and how to withdraw money. Plus, in parallel, there was a support service for the site, where they solved issues with rooms, account locks, etc. There was another person working full-time, with no days off per se.
– What did they do then? Did you start recruiting quickly?
I started working with the players. There was CRM, it began to wind everything up, create signs, and figure out what, where, how, and what promotions are. Expertise has increased, and we have held several small but good promotions. And people are very active. I remember that in the summer we launched free layouts – and they really blew up the audience, a lot of people applied. And I worked alone. I remember when they just wrote endlessly, you can no longer sit at the computer, you go to sleep, then you wake up, and you already have 100+ messages. Day 3-4 was a hard time.
Raised the question that in the three months since I joined the company, we have tripled the player base, and I would like to have some kind of weekend. The search began and Artyom Yakumov was the first to be picked. There were shifts, they worked for 15 hours, two after two. True, on the weekends he tucked up some tails, finalized something, and so on. The player base grew very quickly, there were more requests, and it was necessary to expand. A year later there were already five of us, then more.
– Now how many people?
– Now, if we take all the support… It all started with me: I had to set up the software alone and replenish chips in applications. And now these are all separate units, some with a dozen people. There are about 40 of us in total. There are some people who specialize only in applications, they try to understand and develop in this. There are guys who are engaged in technical work – setting up software. There are those who help on general issues: the site, forum, and blocking. There was a division of labor: it is more and more difficult to be a generalist because the level of expertise is greatly deepened. And you either know everything superficially, or you know your part of the work very well. We went in the direction of depth and specialization.
At the same time, the vast majority of our guys with a poker background have played before or continue to play now. Many declare "from players to players", but for us, this is not a marketing trick, but a reality. Therefore, we can speak the same language with the players, humanly, without turning into a soulless machine. How can a person who has not played poker understand what it means to play for a month and a half with plus in terms of EV and, in fact, zero?
– Can you name the top three problems that are most often addressed to support?
– The first is to download something, the client does not work, there is no access to the site, and so on. These are related to government regulation… Since 2017, everything has changed a lot. Then the restrictions were only introduced, and now the life of poker players has become much more complicated. Access to the room, deposits, withdrawals of money, all this is now relatively difficult.
The second is to find out the conditions of the game in the rooms. Where is the rakeback higher and is it possible to make deposits and withdrawals with a card, does H2N or HM3 work?
Recently, players are interested in mobile applications – if there are no acquaintances who play there, it will take time to figure it out. And here, of course, it is easier to ask us, we do this every day.
– How exactly can they help? Suppose I am a regular NL50 and decided to write to you.
– We will select the best room for you: we will tell you where the select and statistics are available, and where the highest rakeback and low rake are available, we will orient you by the number of tables played at any time of the day. You can compare all this and, depending on the activity (how many tables you need, how many you select), you can make a decision. Plus, there is rapidly changing info that cannot be made accurate – the quality of the fields. We track it according to several criteria. The most banal thing is that if the game appeared recently and in some especially exotic regions, then most often the players there will be weaker, especially in the first months. You will be given this information. Here the club appeared a week ago, we are convinced that there are no scams (carousels, suspicions of bots, teamplay) – and we suggest trying the club. We honestly say that the club is new, but we must be careful.
– The most popular problem is access to the rooms, in second place is information on the fields and the game. What is the third?
– Requests. To a certain extent, we replace the support services of the rooms, we take over 99% of the work. In some places we also help with withdrawals/deposits, we act as tellers. In applications, of course, we do everything ourselves, but in terms of rooms, we also help to make/withdraw money. That is requests like “Hi guys, I want to deposit money in a poker room such and such” or “I want to withdraw from here and deposit there."
Is this service for everyone or just GT+ players?
– This is not technically possible in all rooms, but in general, any player can apply and we will try to help. It's just that some rooms have limitations. If the registration is not from GT (directly or from another affiliate), then we cannot make a transfer to the account, the room technically does not allow this. But sometimes it will be possible to transfer the account to us, and then it will be possible to deposit or withdraw money.
In general, I would recommend writing to affiliates more often, even if everything suits you now. On many issues, we are very competent and can knock out additional bonuses, help with exchanges, provide poker software, etc. Even if you created an account in the room 10 years ago and you don’t remember from whom: we can often link an account to GT and thus offer an additional service. Well, just get small nice gifts for the New Year and birthday.
– Complaints about unreasonable freezes or blocking in the rooms often appear on the forum. Can you share your experience on what to do in such cases?
First, write as correctly as possible. I have been in situations where very significant money was frozen for me – simply because the room is closed or transferred to another network or something else. It is important to always communicate correctly because people also work on the other side. And when you write on emotions that you are all bad (or even more sharply), this will definitely not help your chances, and it will not become better for anyone. It is necessary to communicate as correctly and calmly as possible.
Second: find out the exact reason and wording of the block, and what exactly it was issued for (although often rooms cannot give specifics due to internal rules). Just writing to us saying “my account was illegally blocked” is rather strange: they will look there, send a request to the room, and the room will write that they have legally blocked and that’s it, the conversation is over.
Third: send documents that meet the requirements of the room. We often help to restore justice and it turns out that the player sends a document without printing or in Russian for two months, and the support does not accept it and cannot really explain what the problem is.
The support of the room, unfortunately, cannot help much. This is a rather low link in the company's hierarchy, there are no decision-makers there. Our task is to break through as high as possible, to reach management. I would advise you to actively use social networks, go to LinkedIn, find contacts, and write: hello, I am such and such a player, I have such and such a problem, the support service is ignoring me, help me figure it out. Ready to pass any checks and provide all the information.
Further, it is necessary to write on all mails. For example, security @partypoker, support@partypoker, and so on, write in detail everywhere: I was blocked for such and such a case, I never broke the rules, I always played by myself, I didn’t use programs, I didn’t cheat, I ask you to conduct additional checks, attach maximum evidence. By the way, if you need documents in English, they can be translated using online services.
And only then it is already worth going to the public, to us, and to 2+2. There are representatives of rooms on the forums ... Here I will remind you once again about politeness. So, write the same big and detailed message in the topic of the room, write down all the proofs, and restore the chronology of events. When you are open and have nothing to hide, the chances of success are much higher. It's good to have a reputation in the community.
And, of course, write to us. We have an employee who deals with such cases. It doesn't matter if you play from us or not, we will try to help.
– Complaint to the gambling commission?
– As practice shows, supervision by the commission is, let's call a spade a spade, a convention. Communication can last for months: they receive your request, process it slowly (there are obviously few employees working there), and send an official request to the room. The security service of the room sends a protocol response with some proof. And most often this is not a trial in essence, but about compliance with formalities: the commission asks on what grounds it is possible to block an account, and the room answers – yes, we can, here is the paragraph of the rules with which the player agreed. And that's it. In very rare cases, the commission says that the room is wrong. But all the same, they need to write, because each action adds a few (or many) percent to the successful resolution of the case.
Unfortunately, people often do break the rules. I came across situations when familiar people convinced me: dude, I didn’t violate anything, everything is clear. I spent a lot of time talking with managers, and then through other acquaintances I found out that he was as unclean as possible and you fit in the wrong way.
Pretty presumptuous to think you're the smartest. If you really violated something, then most likely even with the involvement of managers, the punishment will not bypass. Poker is a tough business.
– In what percentage of cases do you manage to return bankrolls?
– I think that if there were no violations at all, then more than 80%. The main thing is to carefully approach the wording and do everything correctly.
– Can you tell us about the major successful cases?
– Support there works rather slowly, but through contacting managers it is stable to unlock accounts. There were a lot of cases at GGPoker, including with high rollers, who were tried to be blocked for bum hunt and other things not very respected by the room. There were cases when the players themselves acted very cool, creating a resonance, and we picked it up and turned to the room with a clear message. Again, on the other side, there are smart people who understand: public history, big money, and big transaction costs, and here the partner really asks to figure it out, to single out the best people, and so on. In the end, everything was resolved, and people were returned a lot of money, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Quite often, blocking occurs not because of the desire of the room to cash in, but because of the layering of strange rules and managerial decisions. It happens that they put their interests a little higher than the rest, they want to arrange some kind of public flogging for individual players ... As in any human activity, there is a place for emotions. But all this is fixed, the system is balanced.
There were many unlocks on Chico. At some point, we realized that the easiest way to unblock an account is by talking to a manager or support in voice. In the Russian-speaking environment, many do not speak English, and it happened that we called for the player and explained the problem to the support ourselves. And it worked! That is why it is important for them that the case is spoken with a voice, although this is not said anywhere. The brute force method is simple: you applied there, here, and then you call on Skype, where you suddenly come across a competent dude who is able to make decisions.
A similar story was with PokerStars. It would seem, well, how can it be more effective than live chat or mail? But they were super competent and responded quickly.
Have there been unusual cases?
I once called a taxi to a well-known player from Belarus on the forum. He was drunk at a party, and, apparently, just out of desperation, he wrote to us at two in the morning. And I used to get very tired at work, I sat with an open working telegram, especially at night they don’t write so often. And sometimes they write, you answer right away – and in the morning you won’t have to answer, you will solve the problem faster, you still can’t sleep.
So, I get a message: are you here? I say here. And he – yes, you probably can not help. I suggest trying. It turned out that the player was in Grodno, his phone was dead and he could not call a taxi (wrote from a laptop). I found the number of the taxi service and called him a car, he drove normally. He then offered $100 as a reward, of course, I refused.
There are very strange requests, some just cringy when some kind of intimacy is offered or invited to come to the bathhouse. But in general, the guys from the Caucasus are super nice in chat rooms. It happens that they are bombed and it's just terrible, they are very emotional. But if you do everything competently and respectfully, then they communicate cool. "Are you sleeping, brother? ..". We even have a few local memes with particularly expressive messages.
Sometimes we see a player tilt and give small gifts. For example, we offer to go for a massage, they say, if you want, we will help you find a spa in your city. Or we can order pizza. Just something small and human to ease the pain.
Are there any topics you shouldn't write about?
Hardly ever. It is clear that we cannot verify accounts in the rooms, there is no point in sending us passports. But in general, we are ready to answer any questions about poker and about poker. Of course, sometimes we are asked something odd, for example, what chips are best for live play. But even in this case, we turned to an employee who was looking for souvenir chips for the players for the New Year (there was such a gift from GT +), and as a result, they managed to give a substantive answer.
– What are your plans for the future?
Now we are moving to a “one-stop-shop” format, which will give users the opportunity to receive more competent answers, and it will be better for us to segment questions, do more analytics and further improve the quality of work. I think in the future we will be able to train a neural network, conditional ChatGPT, poker questions, and offer competent answers almost instantly. But at the same time, always leave a choice, communicate with a person or a machine. It seems that this is a foreseeable future that awaits us in other areas, not only in poker.
We are waiting for your questions! You can share your experience of communicating with support and rate it directly on the support page: