PokerStars Mess Up Means Jaime Staples Can’t Play Poker In Romania

It’s a screw-up of pretty epic proportions and has left popular poker streamer Jaime Staples and his family crew almost lost for words as they set up their latest home-from-home in Bucharest, Romania - only to find out that they simply can’t play poker in the country, despite PokerStars telling them it would be fine.

Staples, a Team PokerStars online pro, has been traveling Europe with his brothers Matty and Chris and grinding out his games and streams from a variety of locations; Vienna in Austria was followed by a month in Split, Croatia – but when they arrived in Romania after a 21-hour journey and set up their mobile streamhouse, disaster struck.

In his latest vlogentitled ‘I can’t believe this happened’, it’s an absolutely shell-shocked Jaime who turns to the camera and says:

“I cannot believe this. This is the most insane news you will ever get.“

He goes on to explain that his contact at PokerStars had assured him before moving to the Romanian capital city that playing on his own sponsors site wouldn’t be a problem. However, when he tried to log in to play… he wasn’t allowed to!

“We get here, we try to register, we contact the contact” explains Jaime and the answer is not what one wants to hear when, as brother Matty tweeted a couple of days ago, you’ve made serious plans…

“Hi Jaime, there’s a problem,” replied his contact.

‘We cannot play in Romania as Canadians’, Jaime revealed - a stunning blow to their dreams of continuing their European streaming tour in Bucharest.

“What? What… the… fuck?” was Matty’s reply, Jaime looking as though he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the bizarre development.

It’s a strange and highly troubling turn of events for the group, especially considering what they had been told by their PokerStars contact and in light of last summer’s announcement that the Amaya group had been awarded a full license for the provision of gambling options within Romania’s borders.

Casinonewsdaily.com explained at the time that:

"Visitors to Romania will be allowed to use their domestic software to play on both PokerStars and BetStars while temporarily being in the country."

“We can’t play? Why?” asks Matty, big brother Jaime explaining that:

"It’s a .eu account we need and we have .com accounts, basically. So when she sent the email it was ‘yes, there’s global liquidity’ but she didn’t understand…there was just a mix-up basically.”

A mix-up which has thrown the streamers’ plans into disarray and will almost certainly force them to relocate to another country – a very expensive and time-consuming business, and through no fault of the Staples brothers at all.

“But, there’s some… some, ok news,” Jaime offers. “They recognize it was a mix-up, a problem, they’re gonna help us fix it… get to where we need to get to,” adding, “They gave us an answer… and at our own expense we came to this place, used all of our time, so, like, they’re gonna fix it basically. But we can’t stay and play here – we need to move.”

“I’m speechless… I can’t believe it,” says a stunned Matty.

Of course, when news spread of their predicament on social media, there were plenty of offers to help. When a friend suggested they try ACR or 888 poker-rooms Jaime replied:

“Nah I am a Team Online member with PokerStars. I only play there.”

Other destinations were soon proposed for the Staples crew; Prague, Budapest, the Baltic states – all were offered up as solutions, but it seems that many people are just as confused by the whole .eu tag as PokerStars are themselves. Basically not all Schengen countries use the .eu client, and not all non-Schengen countries use the .com version.

Hopefully Pokerstars sort out their favorite team of streamers/vloggers with some decent advice and finance, and get them settled somewhere nice where they can get back to doing what they do best!