The Winning Poker Network (WPN) finally won. On Sunday, April 24th, the network hosted its eighth Million Dollar Sunday tournament and for the first time, the guaranteed prize pool was covered.
The U.S.-facing network, which includes sites such as America’s Cardroom, Poker Host, and True Poker, launched its ambitious million-dollar guaranteed tournament back in December 2014. It was a bold move, as the network did not seem nearly big enough to guarantee that kind of money, but as one of the few networks that is not licensed in the United States but still accepts American customers, it wanted to make a splash.
WPN ran into serious problems just as the first Million Dollar Sunday began, though, as the network was hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which caused disconnections, table freezes, and registration problems. The network’s IT staff scrambled to try to stop the attack, but they couldn’t do it; the tournament was eventually cancelled and all buy-ins and fees were refunded.
The tournament was rescheduled for February 2015 and ran just fine, so WPN scheduled five more for the fall of last year. The DDoS attacks returned for the next two tournaments, though the network was ready for them. While the attacks caused some problems, the issues were kept to a minimum and the events proceeded as planned. WPN CEO Phil Nagy even went on Twitch to let people know that he had received a ransom demand from the attackers, a demand which he refused to pay.
But even though WPN seemed to have solved the DDoS problem, it still had the problem of attendance. The network simply did not have enough players willing to pay the $500 + $40 entry to allow the million dollar guarantee to be hit. The network had to pay out over half a million dollars in overlay for those first three fall tournaments combined. As such, for the remaining fall tournaments, the guarantee was cut in half, though to make up for it, two more tournaments were added.
In the seven total Million Dollar Sundays leading up to this weekend, WPN had paid out a million dollars in overlay.
But finally, this past Sunday, the Winning Poker Network attracted 2,118 entrants to its $500 + $40 Million Dollar Sunday, creating a prize pool of $1,059,000. Player “OIDA!!!” took the $211,800 first prize.
At least $200,000 was guaranteed to the winner and in a nice gesture, the members of the final table were given a free bank wire in order to allow them to receive their winnings quickly, if they wanted to withdraw them.
The network also added a special bounty for the Million Dollar Sunday tournament to celebrate the new season of “Game of Thrones,” which debuted Sunday night. Whoever knocked out a player by the name “King-Joffrey,” named after the whiny, evil, boy-king from the show, received $500.
