I normally just skip past the popup when the 'Stars client starts, but I read it today.

Apparently they have a deal with Royal Bank of Scotland (a very well respected bank here in Europe) where they keep a tranche of their cash equal to their entire player base's buyin in escrow, so should the site go bust, get shutdown or whatever, you get your money back.

Good to know, eh?

I would definitely hope that all the major sites learned from Dutch Boyd's mistakes.

What happened with him?

Well, you may remember from last year's WSOP they introduced him as an "internet entrepreneur." They didn't mention that his first venture was an online poker site (pokerspot.com I think), which ended up going belly-up.

They basically were depending on incoming deposits in order to make payouts, and their credit card processing company went out of business/absconded with funds, so pokerspot didn't get the latest round of deposits and couldn't make payouts. And obviously everyone tried to get out and it all collapsed.

There was a good deal of acrimony on RGP about it, since Dutch wasn't quite forthcoming about the reason people couldn't withdraw funds as he scrambled to try to get funding to save his business. You can search RGP for "Russ Boyd" if you care to know more about it (it's basically one giant flamewar though).

Search RGP for Dutch. There is a long thread about the whole thing. I didn't lose a dime to him but I know it is one of the main reasons I don't like the crew are anything else he is involved in.