March 4 turned out to be likely an expensive day for PartyPoker after one of its servers crashed during the finale of the $10 million KO Poker Series.
The evening outage was confirmed by Party’s IT people using Twitter as tournaments were paused but problems persisted, eventually forcing the management team to cancel all MTTs scheduled to start at 9 pm GMT and issue refunds to those who had already registered. Prize pools in ongoing tournaments were distributed according to the running status and chip stacks.
PartyPoker m.d. Tom Waters said that rebates had been paid within 48 hours, but admitted the issue could have serious repercussions.
We will be adding additional MTTs and increased guarantees to next Sundays Power Series schedule to ensure players do not miss out on the headline KO Series MTTs that were running yesterday when the system crashed, he wrote on Tuesday’s PartyPoker blog, adding that PP will be adding $2 million to various prizepools, including an extra $1 million to the $5,200 buy-in Partypoker KO series main event as a gesture of goodwill.
I understand that some players may not immediately return to Partypoker given their experiences in the last 24 hours, Waters said. And I expect to see some sizeable overlays in the new Power Series MTTs that run from today.
On the positive side, PartyPoker was able to point to some successes this month, with its Latin American Poker Championships riding the crest of a wave as1,137 entrants busted the guarantee on the inaugural outing. Brazilians dominated the final table with five players, one of whom – Amauri Grutka – took home the $200,000 first prize.