This is why we can’t have nice things. The Party/Borgata Garden State Super Series V (GSSS V), the most aggressive tournament series the network has offered to date, was scheduled to conclude this weekend. It did conclude, but not in the way management would have hoped.
The GSSS V was announced as the largest online poker tournament series in New Jersey history with 75 events and more than $1.1 million in guaranteed prize pools. It was edged out in guarantees by PokerStars’ New Jersey Championship of Online Poker (NJCOOP), but that’s beside the point – GSSS V was a big deal. On Sunday, though, around 8:00pm ET, players began having geolocation issues, forcing most players to sit out. In the meantime, those who were still active were just stealing the blinds of their absent tablemates.
For those unfamiliar, geolocation is the technology used to verify a player’s location. On the New Jersey poker rooms, players must be located within state borders to play. Typically, this is a reliable system – PokerStars and WSOP/888 were not having problems at the same time – but for some reason, it was going haywire at Party. Any player who could not be pinpointed via geolocation was not permitted to play, even if they had already started the tournaments.
At about 8:30pm, Party paused all tournaments, saying that it was working to “isolate the issue” so it could resume the game. Unfortunately, the issue did not get resolved and the tournaments were cancelled before 10:00pm, including the Main Event, which had started at 5:00pm.
Borgata issued the following statement on Twitter at about 4:00pm on Monday:
We experienced a failure on our geolocation service which impacted all active players on our network, the failure resulted in the player locations not being verified. As a regulated provider in NJ, we had to adhere to the regulations and not permit wagering while a player’s location could not be verified. The technical support team worked tirelessly to identify the root cause. The issue was finally resolved late in the evening.
PartyPoker later issued a longer explanation on PocketFives and Two Plus Two saying that even if a player had already begun playing, it would have been against New Jersey regulations to allow continued play when the player’s location could not be verified. The payout solution was laid out:
At this time we will be settling the affected tournaments per our cancellation policy. This will award the full guaranteed prize money to the remaining players in the events. Players still in the tournament will be refunded the amount that would have been awarded to the next player to be eliminated from the tournament. 50% of the remaining prize pool will be distributed equally between the remaining players, and 50% will be distributed on a percentage basis according to each player’s chip count. The remaining players will also be refunded their entry fee.
That generally works, even if it isn’t completely satisfying, but many players complained that the portion of the prize money awarded based on chip stacks was calculated from when the tournament was paused/cancelled, not from when the problems began. During the 30 minutes in between, players who were forced to sit out lost chips via the blinds. Players with payout concerns have been encouraged to contact Party customer service.
Party/Borgata ran into a similar problem two years ago with the first GSSS. The network also added $50,000 to the prize pools of the GSSS events that were to take place the next week. As this is weekend was the end of GSSS V, that customer friendly gesture won’t happen and the network has yet to announce if it will do anything else for its players.
