Typically, every Sunday on GGPoker features one of the most attractive tournaments in online poker – the $150 GGMasters that typically boasts a $500,000 guarantee.
On February 23rd, GGPoker upped the ante for their 5th anniversary of the tournament by making their $150 Sunday GGMasters a $5 million guarantee.
With an overlay virtually guaranteed, just about anyone who knows how to play Texas Hold’em jumped into the tournament. However, it appears the extra traffic overloaded the servers and caused the entire site to crash mid-tournament.
After nearly two hours following the initial crash, GGPoker announced that they have rescheduled the event for Sunday, March 2nd.
While players will be refunded for other tournaments per the GGPoker cancellation policy, the majority of players have still not received any compensation as of Wednesday, February 26th.
On Monday, GGPoker released the following statement:
GGPoker has confirmed that stacks and blinds in the GGMasters Anniversary tournament will be rolled back to the point at which ‘it became unfair for all players’, which was 7:10pm UTC on February 23.
The tournament will resume at 5pm UTC on March 2, and all players who had registered prior to the outage and still had chips in play will be refunded their $12 tournament fee. Eliminated players will receive no compensation, and those who registered after the start of the outage will not receive a refund of their tournament fee. Tickets issued to take part in the event will be extended or re-issued.
Players unable to participate on March 2 will not be refunded, per the site’s published policy.
Further details can be found at GGPoker.
With over $1 million in existing overlay, there were concerns from the poker community that GGPoker would continue running satellites for the event, thus removing a great deal of value from the tournament itself. This essentially goes against common poker etiquette and is greatly frowned upon.
While no satellites were run on Monday, players were both disappointed and not surprised to see that GGPoker were not only running satellites but several “Mega” satellites that involve awarding a much larger number of seats than usual. It should be noted that these “Mega” satellites generally only run on the weekends.
Furthermore, GGPoker have also removed the tournament info page, which has critical information like the current amount of overlay as well as the tournament standings.
Restarting the $5 million tournament on the same day as the $100 million WSOP Online Super Circuit kicks off will also raise some eyebrows.