PartyPoker is not winning many fans these days. The latest in a series of missteps: the cancellation of several tournaments in its Pokerfest III tournament series.
Players were excited to get the festivities underway yesterday as six tournament were set to launch in the span of an hour and a half. But just when the first event – a $215 buy-in, $350,000 guaranteed prize pool No-Limit Hold’em tournament – started, it was paused. So players waited. And waited. And then waited some more. Finally, after about 45 minutes, the event was cancelled.
After that, four more events were cancelled before Event #6: $530 No-Limit Hold’em with a $250,000 guarantee, ran to completion. Even that, though, was rocky, as it was also paused at the beginning. According to reports, after Event #6 was held up, an announcement reminding people of the tournament was made throughout the PartyPoker software. Fifteen minutes later, the tournament resumed. Normally that wouldn’t be a very big deal, but participants who were already seated were disappointed to see the tourney’s overlay (the amount of money in the guarantee over and above the prize pool that was generated from actual buy-ins) had shrunk.
The first event also had a sizeable overlay which, of course, nobody ever saw since the tournament was cancelled. PartyPoker cited technical problems for the delays and subsequent cancellations, but skeptics believe the poker room did not want to honor the guarantees, as the prize pools created from real buy-ins did not make it up to the guarantee marks. Thus, PartyPoker would have been on the hook for some of the payouts. There is no evidence that this is the case, however, and technical difficulty is a reasonable explanation.
All told, PartyPoker cancelled tournaments with $482,500 in total guaranteed prize money. Everybody who had already bought-in had their money refunded.
On Two Plus Two, PartyPoker’s official representative posted the following apology:
We would like to sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused to players involved in Pokerfest events #1, #3, #4 and #5 yesterday evening. The tournaments faced technical difficulties which we were unable to resolve at the time.
We will run a $350,000 guaranteed event on Sunday May 12th which will replace the regular $250,000 guaranteed event to supplement for the cancellation of event 1.
To be clear, it appears that the representative did not mention Event #2 because the buy-in was for PartyPoints and not real money.
PartyPoker will also hold a freeroll tournament each of the next two Saturdays that will award a combined $15,000 in Pokerfest tickets to players.
Assuming there are no further hiccups, PokerFest III will run through May 5th and will feature 58 more events (counting all of Monday’s). The final event is the $640 Main Event, which will kick-off at 19:30 CET with a $1.5 million prize pool.
The complete schedule can be found here.
