Bodog Poker cancels guaranteed tournament

Bodog Pokers flagship poker tournament, the Sunday $100,000 guaranteed tournament was cancelled just before it was scheduled to start, frustrating many online poker players. Bodog Poker cancelled the guaranteed tournament claiming that technical difficulties caused their site to crash but sceptics have a different view.

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Bodog Pokers $100,000 Guaranteed begins at 4:00pm ET each Sunday and has a buy-in of $162. The previous week, on the 18th of October just 469 players entered the tournament leaving a huge deficit of nearly $30,000 between the buy-ins and the guaranteed prize pool.

Within a short time of Bodog Pokers site apparently running into difficulties a representative from Bodog, Rebecca Liggero posted a message on PocketFives.com’s forum stating “Tonight, Sunday, October 25th, Bodog Poker had to cancel all tournaments because many players were experiencing disconnection problems. Players will be compensated according to Bodog Poker rules, i.e. players will be paid a percentage of the prize pool based on their stack size when the tournament was canceled.” However, this appears to be somewhat of a cop-out as the payout was then based on the prize pool composed of buy-ins only, as stated in Bodog Pokers terms and conditions.

This isn’t the first time that Bodog Poker has had issues with their guaranteed Sunday tournament. Back in September about 90% of players in the online poker tournament were disconnected and blinded out. That time they said that they had to restart their servers due to high traffic.

These hiccups cannot be doing Bodog Poker or their licensees any favours. Online poker players often plan their weekend around these guaranteed tournaments and will certainly have a bad taste in their mouths after this recent mess.

Guaranteed online poker tournaments are commonplace on Sundays with poker sites like Full Tilt, PokerStars and Party Poker hosting guaranteed tournaments with prize pools much bigger than that of Bodog Poker, but due to the higher traffic levels at these poker sites the kind of prize pool deficits that Bodog Poker face don’t become an issue.

25/05/2010 15:17:17

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