To celebrate Annie Duke‘s victory at the 2010 National Heads-Up Poker Championship, UB.com introduced a new high-stakes tournament last weekend, the $1,000 Annie Duke Heads-Up Challenge. Unfortunately, the tournament was rife with technical difficulties, eventually forcing its cancellation.
First, the tournament details. The Annie Duke Heads-Up Challenge will be held on the last Sunday of each month at 1:00pm ET with a buy-in of $1,000 + $50 and a guaranteed prize pool of $128,000. In addition to the prize money, there will be a bounty on Duke’s head.
There are lower buy-in qualifiers for the Challenge starting as low as $8 + .80. In addition, UB will hold two freerolls and two $1 buy-in tournaments in April and May to award four seats in each month’s Challenge tournament. If one of the qualifiers from those tournaments eliminates Duke, they will receive the usual bounty plus $1,500 in tournament dollars.
“I am thrilled that UB is introducing this new monthly Heads-Up event,” said Duke in a press release. “The higher buy-in events on UB have been so successful and the market for them continues to grow. Adding this exciting heads-up format to the high-limit mix is a great sign that UB continues to tweak the tournament schedule to give players what they want.”
What players did not want, however, was an inaugural Heads-Up Challenge that had to be canceled mid-stream. The inaugural tournament on March 28th started with 109 players, which meant some were randomly selected to receive byes to the second round. The problems began when UB’s software allowed late entries in numbers that eclipsed the 128-player limit.
Then, as players won their matches, they found that somehow they often did not start with the same size chip stack as their opponent in the next round. Everybody started with 3,000 chips in the opening round, but those who advanced to the second round ended up with 6,000 (theirs plus their ousted opponent’s), while those who were waiting in the second round because of byes still started with 3,000. To make matters worse, some first round winners were required to play that same round over again in order to accommodate the late entrants. Just like the second round problems, those who repeated the first round started with 6,000 chips versus the late entrant’s 3,000. In extreme cases, a late entrant would defeat a repeat first rounder (or vice versa) and begin the second round with all 9,000 chips, only to be pitted against someone on a bye with 3,000 chips.
As a result of the technical difficulties, UB refunded everyone’s $1,050 buy-in. In an attempt to make up for the inconvenience, UB held a freeroll on Monday and will hold another on Wednesday for those who had registered for the Heads-Up Challenge. The top five finishers in Monday’s freeroll received entries into Monday’s $75,000 Guaranteed, while the top ten in Wednesday’s freeroll will receive entries into Wednesday’s Canada Poker Pro SS tournament.
UB.com has not made any further announcements about the canceled event. Future Annie Duke Heads-Up Challenges have not been posted in the UB.com poker client, although the next two are scheduled for April 25th and May 30th.
So lame and unprofessional, so UB.