You’ve got to give the Winning Poker Network (WPN) credit. The guys who run the show over there are persistent. Less than a year after having its aggressive million dollar guaranteed tournament scuttled by Distributing Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, the network is set to make that very same type of tourney a regular thing, not just special event.
The Winning Poker Network, populated by the likes of America’s Cardroom, BetCRIS, and Poker Host, recently announced that it has scheduled five separate million dollar guaranteed tournaments this fall. Each will have a $500 + $40 buy-in (satellites will be available) and at least $200,000 guaranteed for first place. The schedule for this tournaments is:
• September 13th at 3:00pm ET
• October 4th at 3:00pm ET
• October 11th at 3:00pm ET
• October 18th at 3:00pm ET
• October 25th at 3:00pm ET
The network just hosted a million dollar tournament this weekend, drawing 1,939 players. Thus, with a $500 buy-in ($40 is the house fee), the prize pool only made it to $969,500 naturally, meaning that the network had to chip-in the extra money to get it up to a million bucks. The network also held million dollar guarantees in February and April.
Despite the overlay this past weekend, the Winning Poker Network and its member rooms must feel that they can pull this off, as drawing enough players to avoid an overlay (or at least not miss the guarantee by much) is no easy task for a network that is not exactly imposing in size. It is not the smallest of networks, as it has a seven-day average of 500 cash game players according to PokerScout, but that sort of traffic is not generally of the levels that will have one’s tables bursting at the seams (true, those are cash game numbers and we’re talking about a tournament, but these figures should be fairly strong indicators of tournament traffic).
And as mentioned, this all comes not long after WPN was victimized by a DDoS attack. In mid-December 2014, the network tried to host a million dollar tournament, only to have the DDoS attack cause all sorts of problems for the poker rooms and their players. Tables froze, players timed out, lag slowed everything down, etc. The network paused the tournament a couple times so its technicians could get things back under control, but it was to no avail. The decision was made to cancel the tournament after about four and a half hours of play. All buy-ins and fees were refunded.
The network had been subjected to the same attack a week before the tournament, but because the attacks stopped, management thought they were in the clear. In a video apology, WPN CEO Phil Nagy said, “Whoever was causing the Internet disconnections was waiting for the million [dollar guaranteed tournament]. The second that it started, it [the attack] started.”
He was very distraught about the whole thing and tried to explain why the DDoS attack affected things the way it did. “When you have these internet connectivity issues, you have to filter out the bad traffic that’s coming in, that’s causing the internet connectivity issues, and with that, you filter out some good traffic. Hence, players get disconnected, but the site stays online,” he said.
The Winning Poker Network is one of the few networks that still accepts customers from the United States.
