Party Poker cancels multiple Pokerfest III tournaments

Posted by Steve Ruddock on Apr 22, 2013 Posted in Poker News | No Comments »

partypoker-laptopWithout warning Party Poker cancelled the four of the first five tournaments on the Pokerfest III schedule on Sunday, causing the poker community to lash out at the site on social media and poker forums. Players already registered for these tournaments did have their buy-ins refunded, and according to some people on 2+2, the site is running a special freeroll tournament for affected players. No reason was given by the site for the cancellation, other than reps in live chat saying it was due to “unknown technical problems”.

According to the forums, the $108 tournament was paused after it had begun, and players were unable to Late Register for the tournament before Party Poker cancelled the event. The second event on the schedule, a 20 Party Point tournament, was played, and seems to have concluded without any complications.

One “real” Pokerfest event did go off yesterday too, the $530 buy-in tournament which managed to exceed its guaranteed prize-pool after the late registration period ended. It doesn’t appear that any other Pokerfest tournaments have been cancelled or are scheduled to be cancelled at this time.

Still, the $530 event did have its own problems, as the tournament’s start time was pushed back some 45 minutes, so perhaps the site was simply experiencing some type of technical problems, but all other tournaments and games on the site seemed to be running smoothly. Some players have stated that Party Poker cancelled these events because they were not going to reach their guarantees, but with Event #1, a $108 tournament boasting a guarantee of $75,000, having over 800 players registered it doesn’t seem like overlays were a concern of any kind.

My best guess for the cancellation was some fear of overloading the servers and the site not being able to handle the traffic influx, but considering the site’s traffic numbers now compared to its peak numbers back in 2006 it doesn’t seem like Party Poker should have any trouble with a massive boost to network traffic.

There are four tournaments on today’s Pokerfest schedule, which should give us a good indication if the problems that caused yesterday’s cancellations have been sorted out:

Event Time (CET) Gtd Game Buy-in
Monday
7 20:00 $500 NLH Speed 5 Points
8 20:30 $2,500 NLH Speed Rebuy $0.50
9 20:30 $25,000 NLH Speed Rebuy $6
10 21:00 $80,000 NLH Speed Rebuy $54

 

Of course, these early issues could come back to bite Party Poker; one of their chief rivals, iPoker, is running their own tournament series concurrently with Pokerfest, the iPOPS. While iPOPS events are much smaller, with smaller prize-pools and guarantees, technical difficulties can be more than enough reason for players to jump ship and forego the unreliable Pokerfest tournaments in favor of the smaller, but reliable, iPOPS events.

 



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