Another million dollar guaranteed tournament, another Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the Winning Poker Network (WPN). On Sunday, September 13th, the network held the first of five fall Million Dollar Sunday tournaments, which guaranteed a million dollar prize pool and at least $200,000 to the winner. But, as has happened when WPN has attempted this in the past, unscrupulous cyber bullies tried to ruin the proceedings.
In a DDoS attack, the culprits flood the target’s machines with communications requests, overwhelming it and preventing it from handling legitimate requests. In the case of the Winning Poker Network, it causes tables to freeze and players to timeout. WPN had to cancel a million dollar tournament in December because of DDoS attacks, though another one earlier this year was able to run despite yet more attacks.
During this weekend’s tournament, WPN CEO Phil Nagy went on Twitch to explain what was going on:
In the beginning of the tournament we had to pause the tournament for five minutes and then we resumed the tournament…and we’re getting some extortion messages where they want us to send Bitcoins to stop the attacks. Well, um…no. Not gonna do that. I just can’t imagine paying the terrorists to stop. That’s just the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.
He went on to explain that it is possible that players could experience some pauses in the tournament, but that the technical staff was monitoring everything to make sure things went as smoothly as possible.
“What I really want to say is eff these guys SO much and there’s no possible way that I’m paying you or I’m giving in,” he said.
Nagy said that the connectivity problems and pauses were keeping players away and that the tournament was going to have significant overlay. He repeated a number of times that it was going to hurt his pocketbook. He refused, though, to cancel the tournament as he did in December 2014. While he and his staff had to pause the event this weekend a number of times, it was different than in December, when they were unable to get the attacks under control. At that time, he felt the best decision was to cancel the tournament and refund players’ money because he could not offer a fair game. This time, though, WPN was able to keep order, so Nagy kept the tournament running.
“I literally had some people in my office that said this tournament is going to overlay so much that you have a great opportunity to bow out of it and blame it on DDoS,” Nagy admitted. “And I said, ‘Well what’s the point of having a guarantee when it’s not really a guarantee?’”
As it turned out, the overlay was significant. A total of 1,549 people participated in the tournament, creating a $775,500 prize pool and a $224,500 overlay.
