PartyPoker New Jersey recently held their Garden State Super Series (GSSS) – a $1 million guaranteed tournament series that was set to run from September 7th to September 21st. This was the biggest online poker event in United States regulated iGaming history, however, technical difficulties brought it to a screeching halt.
What’s sad is that over $400,000 worth of guaranteed tournaments were left on the schedule when Partypoker had to shut the GSSS down. This includes three Main Events in the Low Buy-in ($25,000 prize pool), Mid Buy-in ($50,000) and High Buy-in ($200,000) categories. The $200k Guaranteed High Buy-in Main Event attracted over 700 players and was halfway finished when Party decided to stop running everything.
What were the technical difficulties?
Jeffrey Haas, Party’s Group Director of Poker, recently issued a statement on why the GSSS was cut short. As you can see from the following statement, the tech team did all they could to get the event running again, only to be forced to give up:
We experienced a major system failure last night between 6:50pm to 7:40pm EST on nj,partypoker.com and BorgataPoker.com that affected all running tournaments. This resulted in all running tournaments firstly pausing, but then, eventually leading to them all being cancelled.
The technical team did all they could to resume play from the paused state, but unfortunately, due to the nature of this specific bug, there was no way to resume the tournaments.
Player Compensation
There’s never an easy, one-size-fits-all way to make everybody happy after failed poker tournaments. But Party did their best to try and make things right here for those who participated in the failed events.
Everybody who was still alive in a running GSSS tourney received 50% of the prize pool (equal shares), with the remaining 50% distributed based on stack sizes. Tournament fees were also returned to players who were left at the time of technical difficulties.
Not everybody was happy
Again, there’s never a perfect way to satisfy everybody who takes part in a cancelled tournament. And some players jumped on both TwoPlusTwo and Twitter to discuss their dissatisfaction with the results. Below you can see the main complaints:
- The biggest problem was that players who started on time in a tourney and were eliminated received no compensation at all. However, those who registered late got their buy-in back plus a share of the prize pool – even if they didn’t have time for a single hand.
- Eliminated players failed to even receive their tournament fees back. Many argued that Partypoker didn’t deserve these fees after their GSSS tourneys crashed.
- It took a full day for Partypoker to address what happened in the GSSS. This, coupled with inept customer service, left players in the dark about what was going on.
Overall, just the fact that these tournaments crashed bodes poorly for Partypoker NJ. It’s commendable how they worked out a largely fair arrangement for those affected. However, this incident may still have New Jersey players looking for other options – namely PokerStars when they enter the market soon.