In the midst of the poker boom last decade, the partypoker MILLION was the most popular weekly poker tournament in the online poker industry. The tournament has been gone for 13 years, coinciding with the UIGEA and partypoker’s exit from the United States market. For the last few weeks, though, partypoker has been hyping up the return of the MILLION, billing it as the “most player friendly” $1 million guaranteed tournament of all time. Everything was set for the big day this past Sunday when disaster occurred and a technical problem resulting in the poker room having to cancel the tournament.
Players got lost in the shuffle
The issues stemmed from the structuring of the $215 buy-in partypoker MILLION as a multi-flight tournament. There were four starting flights in total: three last week and one this past Sunday shortly before the final day of the MILLION.
This is where the “player friendly” things comes in. The massive problem with the partypoker MILLION of old was that the players who made it deep in the tournament had to play for more hours than the typical person is awake during the day. 18, 19, 20 hours at times. Players at the World Series of Poker don’t even normally have to do that.
Thus, the four starting flights, which split up the tournament to make the days more manageable.
Everything was fine until Sunday, November 3rd. For whatever reason, be it a problem with partypoker’s automated system or a human error, the survivors from Day 1D, the flight that began four hours before Day 2, were not inserted into the Day 2 field.
Day 2 started without the Day 1D players. Once the problem was noticed by partypoker (thanks to players contacting the site), the tournament was paused in an effort to fix it. But after a while, partypoker realized that there was no good way to remedy the situation, so the tournament was cancelled.
Shortly thereafter, partypoker issued a public apology on Twitter and laid out how it will try to make good by the players.
Nothing says “I’m sorry” better than money
Those that made it to Day 2 and then busted out will keep the money they already got for their finishing spot. Everyone else including those from Day 1D, will split the rest of the $1 million guaranteed prize pool. Half of that prize pool – $500,000 – will be divided equally among everyone remaining in the tournament. The other half will be split based on chip equity at the moment the event was paused.
On top of this, everyone who was still alive in the tournament will receive prize money equal to whatever the next prize rank was. Additionally, all Day 2 players are also being given a $215 ticket for a future partypoker MILLION.
Partypoker concluded by apologizing again, saying, “Please accept our sincerest apologies for the inconvenience. We remain committed to hosting the partypoker MILLION and it will run next week.”
The poker room also tweeted on Tuesday a promo for the next partypoker MILLION, saying that it paid out $1.8 million to players on Sunday and that “Players come first, whatever happens.”
