PartyPoker New Jersey has had a week they would rather forget as the Garden State Super Series (GSSS) Main Event that was to take place on Sunday suffered a premature ending after the poker room experienced an unrecoverable error that didn’t just impact players involved in the GSSS Main Event but it affected all of the running tournaments on nj.partypoker.com and BorgataPoker.com.
The server problem was specific to a key component that manages and schedules tournaments on the server, hence the reason that tournaments and not cash games or SNGs were impacted by the issue. PartyPoker’s technical team have been working around the clock to try and provide a permanent fix for the problem and they are confident that a recurrence of the same problem won’t occur in future tournaments, but due to the nature of the server glitch, unfortunately a solution couldn’t be resolved at the time of the $200,000 Guaranteed GSSS Main Event.
More than 700 players in the $200k GTD main event were affected by the server issue, which was extremely unfortunate for them as there was a huge overlay in the tournament. However, to PartyPoker’s credit, they tried to make the best of what was a bad situation. After failing to fix the server glitch, they reached out to all the remaining players in the tournament that had been affected by posting an explanation of the incident on Two Plus Two forum:
“We experienced some serious technical difficulties with the Garden State Super Series and some other tournaments this evening which resulted in some of this evening’s GSSS events, including the main event, crashing and their cancellation. Numerous attempts to resume these tournaments failed.”
Players that were affected by the $200,000 Guaranteed GSSS Main Event cancellation as well as any of the other tournaments that were impacted by this were also e-mailed the same information. As confirmed by players who are participating in the same 2+2 forum thread, players that had not yet been eliminated at the time of the cancellation had been issued with refunds as compensation.
Players were refunded the amount that the next player eliminated from the tournament would have received. Of the remaining prize pool, 50% was distributed equally between the remaining players, and 50% was distributed on a percentage basis according to the remaining player’s chip counts. The entry fee for the tournament was also returned to the remaining players at the time of the cancellation.
Unfortunately, as per the cancellation policy, players that had been eliminated prior to the cancellation of the tournament didn’t receive any compensation, which doesn’t sound too unreasonable. More information about PartyPoker NJ’s cancellation policy can be viewed here: http://nj.partypoker.com/how-to-play/software/tournaments/rules.html
Long time online poker players can understand that server crashes can happen but with rumours that PokerStars could be set to join the regulated New Jersey poker market, and with the GSSS Main Event seeing New Jersey Devils hockey star Ken Daneyko debut as an ambassador for PartyPoker in New Jersey, makes this is especially bad timing for the online gaming brand.
The main events that were never completed were the biggest Guaranteed Tournaments offered by PartyPoker New Jersey to date. They will not be replayed so players on the site will have to make do with the compensations that all affected players should have received by now. Admittedly, they haven’t used this as an opportunity to profit off of the server crash, as all of the remaining players refunds totalled the full guaranteed prize pool of $200,000.