Lee Jones, card room manager of Cake Poker, announced on the 2+2 forums that he would be leaving Cake Poker effective immediately. He posted the following in the Internet Poker forum:



“This is a brief announcement to let you know that, as of yesterday, I have resigned my position at Cake Poker and will not be making any further posts here. Their management has made some strategic decisions with which I'm not comfortable. Please direct any questions or concerns to the Cake support staff; they are top-notch people.

Best regards,

Lee Jones”

Cake Poker tournament director, Serge Ravitch, otherwise known as “adanthar,” immediately followed up Lee Jones’ announcement with one of his own saying that he would be leaving for the “same reasons” and that we could no longer be affiliated with Cake Poker in any way, including presumably a 1% share that he owned in the company through a tournament giveaway he won early in Cake’s history.

Normally, we aren’t going to get too excited about poker site management coming and going, but as you can imagine, speculation and prognostication about the future of Cake Poker has been ignited with these timed announcements. Specifically, the terse statement is made more ominous by Lee Jones’ line of management making “some strategic decisions with which I'm not comfortable.”



2010 has already been a bad year on the network. In mid-April, the Jazette family of sites – which includes Players Only and Sportsbook – moved from Cake to Merge Gaming. In June, PokerTableRatings uncovered a series of embarrassing security issues, leaving many to question how such an obvious flaw could happen, especially given that Cereus had suffered similar issues just a few months prior that were widely criticized. These developments have helped contribute to a traffic loss year-over-year of over 60%, according to PokerScout.

Yeah, the Lee Jones statement could mean anything, but when you combine it with Serge Ravitch’s simultaneous departure and Cake Poker’s very poor year, it’s probably not due to the pair being upset about their desks being tin-foiled or them being responsible for inappropriately spiking the eggnog at the office Christmas party.



I don’t want to get into too much of the speculation surrounding the announcement (although that is really only all we can do until we get clarification), but I think Lee Jones’ final days on the 2+2 forums are noteworthy. It is on these forums where Jones is most prominently seen as a Cake Poker representative, interacting with players as the face of Cake Poker. On December 9th, Jones came out with a somewhat surprising post regarding his backing of the Harry Reid poker bill. He mentioned a couple times that he was only speaking as a private individual and not as a Cake Poker representative. Still, it doesn’t take too much of a stretch to say management was perhaps not happy with the statement given that they don’t share the same viewpoint or that they felt the statement was unnecessary given the fact the scenario might not come to fruition. Needless to say, its possible discussions regarding the bill brought to light company stances that he was not comfortable with. Within a couple days of this post, Lee Jones made what was his final post as a Cake Poker rep on the 2+2 forums until his announcement on December 28th.