It was to be the biggest thing in New Jersey online poker since…ever. The Garden State Super Series, hosted by the Party Borgata Network, was the biggest tournament series to hit New Jersey. It started last Sunday, was to run for two weeks, and consisted of 20 events, each split into three tournaments with different buy-ins.
It was to be the biggest thing in New Jersey. Until it wasn’t.
On Sunday, all three buy-in tiers of both events, including the Main Event, suddenly froze. Shortly thereafter, they were cancelled. Players took to internet message boards such as Two Plus Two wondering if they were the only ones affected. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the poker community as a whole, they weren’t.
Though most players had been reimbursed according to the site’s tournament cancellation policy, frustrations continued into Monday. On Monday night, Jeffrey Haas, bwin.party’s Group Poker Director, let everybody on Two Plus Two know what had happened:
We experienced a major system failure last night between 6:50pm to 7:40pm EST on nj.partypoker.com and BorgataPoker.com that affected all running tournaments. This resulted in all running tournaments firstly pausing, but then, eventually leading to them all being cancelled. The technical team did all they could to resume play from the paused state, but unfortunately, due to the nature of this specific bug, there was no way to resume the tournaments.
The system failure was on a key component that manages and schedules tournaments, hence why cash games, fastforward, SNG and casino games were not impacted. The technical teams across partypoker have worked non-stop since it occurred last night to identify and provide a permanent fix for the issue. This has now been deployed today, and the technical teams are confident that we should not experience a recurrence of this very unfortunate event in the future.
He apologized profusely, saying, “We have been humbled by this experience and appreciate the inconvenience and lack of confidence experienced by our players, and are so sorry. Our goal now is to fix our systems (a patch was just deployed), and make it up to our players.”
As a way to make up for it, the site is adding a total of $50,000 to the prize pools of this coming Sunday’s tournaments.
As mentioned, players who were in the tournament when it was cancelled were paid according to Party Borgata’s tournament cancellation policy. Each was given the amount of money that would have been paid to the next player eliminated. After that, half the remaining prize pool was divided amongst all remaining players equally. The other half was divided amongst those same players based on chip counts. Anyone who had been eliminated before the technical difficulties brought the Garden State Super Series to its knees were not reimbursed.
It does appear that the problems have been fixed, as the Series has been continuing this week.
