Day 1: Totally Borked
It’s never fun when technical difficulties disrupt online poker tournaments, but sometimes, things don’t go your way. The world is an imperfect place. But when it happens multiple times over the course of a week, players can and will get restless.
On Monday, GGPoker was forced to cancel the $5 million guaranteed, $150 buy-in GGMasters Anniversary event after multiple starts and stops that began the week before, causing players to lament their wasted time.
The drama kicked off last Sunday, February 23, the first day of the highly anticipated tournament with a puffed-up guaranteed prize pool. Early in the event, GGPoker crashed, resulting in players being kicked from their tables.
Once the poker room realized it was not going to be able to fix the problem in a reasonable amount of time, it announced that it would pause the tournament and resume it a week later, on March 2. All other tournaments were canceled, and players were refunded according to the site’s policy.
Undoubtedly, some players would not be available to participate at a later date, but GGPoker didn’t want to call off its big tournament completely, so the decision was made.
Delayed Day 2: FUBAR
Day 1 sounded like it resumed just fine on March 2, but Monday, March 3 was another story. A table balancing problem on Day 2 resulted in uneven tables (if that wasn’t obvious from the phrase “balancing problem”). Some tables were full, but some were heads-up. Others were short-handed. Just a mess and obviously not fair to anyone.
GGPoker paused the tournament again, announcing on social media that there was a table balancing issue. Less than an hour later, the GGMasters Anniversary Event revved up once more, but rather than continuing from where it left off, it was rolled back to the beginning of Day 2.
Cards had barely been back in the virtual air, though, when GGPoker realized that further technical problems were not going to allow the tournament to move forward:
As always happens in the poker world, some cried conspiracy. The tournament had about a $100,000 overlay, so some thought GGPoker created the technical problems in order to avoid paying the overlay, but that’s a fairly small amount of money for the poker room and the reputational damage that could come from this is likely larger than the dollar amount it was going to be on the hook for.
Per GGPoker’s cancellation policy, the remaining players in the tournament had their fees refunded (just the fee, not the entire buy-in). Each then received an equal share of 50% of the prize pool – just the portion generated by player buy-ins – and another share of the remaining 50%, based on chip counts.
The post GGPoker $5 Million Guaranteed GGMasters Anniversary Event Canceled After Litany of Technical Problems appeared first on Poker News Daily.
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