Poker News

So, Easter Sunday was fun in Gibraltar. At around 1:00pm local time April 20th, an explosion rocked a power station on the north end of the British territory, shutting down power to most of the territory’s residents. Many had power back within a couple hours and the vast majority saw it restored by 9:00pm, but its effects were felt way beyond Gibraltar’s 2.3 square miles.

The offices of several online gaming firms, including partypoker, William Hill, BetFred, and Ladbrokes are located in Gibraltar. William Hill in fact, is located directly next to the Waterport Power Station, source of the explosion and subsequent fire, and had to evacuate its staffers from the buildings. The loss of power to those gaming companies also resulted in the loss of gaming services, which includes their poker rooms.

Players were understandably perturbed that they couldn’t play poker or place sports wagers, but most were understanding that the situation was beyond the control of the gambling companies (though there was a comment or two in the poker community about the apparent lack of generators). William Hill got their operations back up and running in about two and a half hours. In what looks to be a response to the inevitable gripes from the customers that they couldn’t make bets on winners during the outage, William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe told AFP.com, “It is just one of those freak events nobody could have predicted. There will be those who will claim they would have backed a winner but there will be others who have been saved from backing a loser.”

BetFred was not so fortunate. The company was fairly quick to inform customers about what was going on over Twitter at about twenty minutes to two, but it was unable to restore all of its services until the next morning. It did get its mobile site up and running on Sunday, though, so all was not lost.

The company that frustrated the most people, though, was partypoker, which needed about 13 hours to get back online. While William Hill, BetFred, and Ladbrokes do offer poker on the iPoker Network, they are more popular for their sportsbooks, so their customers had plenty of other options while the sites were down. partypoker, on the other hand, while not the only poker room on the internet, has a number of popular Sunday tournaments, including the Sunday $200K, which had to be cancelled. Nobody’s funds were lost, but it was still upsetting to many partypoker players around the world.

The outage’s effects on partypoker could be seen in its player traffic statistics. According to PokerScout.com, partypoker hit a peak on Sunday of 1,763 cash game players. A week earlier, there were over 3,500 players at peak levels and for the few days prior to Easter, those numbers ranged from about 3,400 to 3,700.

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