PartyPoker Outage - problem and questions

[ted_newgent]

PartyPoker went down again yesterday. They refused to give me a refund. Did anyone else have the same problem?

I was in a tournament, and doing relatively well after the break. Then everything locked up. I tried to re-start the game, but was unable to get a connection for quite a while. When it did finally let me back into the game, I had lost quite a few chips to the blinds, but I was still okay. There were only two players on the table who were active, and they were taking turns pulling the blinds from all the dead seats. I slammed them for a couple of decent pots before they woke up and started playing again. At that point I was much more than just alive in the tourney.

Then I got moved to another table. Only the game would not open up the new table window. So I sat there in the lobby, watching my chips go down by the amount of the blinds every few minutes. I also watched the other tables. There were a few players whose stacks were increasing. All the others were just going down by the amount of the blinds.

I am an I/T director for a fairly large company. I was playing on a full T-1 Internet connection, and I did a thorough job of confirming that my connection was not the problem. I uninstalled and re-installed the software. I repeatedly disconnected from the site and re-connected. The results were always the same. I don't know why a small group of players remained active. (Although it does raise some interesting possibilities.) But I do know that roughly 70-80% of the players were inactive and simply got blinded out of the tournament. Obviously most of those would have gone out anyway, but that is not the point - they did not get the opportunity to play due to technical problems with PartyPoker.

Some time in the afternoon, PartyPoker announced that they had problems, and that all their tournaments had been cancelled. First the message said that all refunds had been processed, but later they changed it to say that the refunds were being processed. I had not received a refund. I wrote an e-mail, but decided to be patient.

This morning, the message said that all refunds had been processed. I still had not received a refund, so I called. I spoke with a customer service rep, who put me in touch with another customer service rep. She explained that there had been 397 (+/-.. I don't remember exactly) entries in the tournament, and that I had finished at #102, and that the tournament was cancelled after I was already out. Therefore, no refund was due. I asked her what time, precisely, the tournament had been cancelled. She would never answer.

This is the second time that this EXACT same thing has happened to me. And both times PartyPoker refused to refund my entry. For the record, I have only played tournaments on PartyPoker for a short time. I have finished in the money often, made the final table a few times, and won one of them last week. I don't feel like it is out of the question that I was denied an opportunity to make money by the technical problems that the site had. I fully understand their cancellation policy. But it is of no value if they allow a broken tourney to continue, and permit a few players to profit by default. Of course, if they cancel the whole tourney, they have to refund the entry fees as well. If they allow it to continue (broken) until it gets down to the money, they they can fall back on the cancellation policy, and no one has the right to complain - theoretically.

I am curious if anyone else has had similar problems? The amount of money in question is not really significant. But my loss of confidence is very significant. And I suppose that part of it is "the principal of the thing". Their cancellation policy states that the remaining prize pool is distributed to the players that are still alive. Which means that my money was just given to someone else. That is bad enough... but my newfound lack of confidence makes me want to find out if it simply got distributed to PartyPoker.

I have also read that PartyPoker is located in Costa Rica. Does anyone know if that is true? In March, I am going there for two weeks. I would like to drop by and see the operation for myself. I find that my discussions are much more productive when conducted face-to-face. Especially as compared to talking to a service center in Bangalore India.

[Dave B]

I am pretty sure that they are owned by a Canadian Indian casino. It says somewhere on their website.

I have had multis cancelled and recd refunds. I have had several S&G tourneys where I get disconnected and cannot get back in. If the tourney continued, I recd my entrance fee back. If the tourney was cancelled, I recd 50% based on remaining players and 50% based on chip count.

It is real frustrating when this happens. I wish they would just send out a global alert to everyone online explaining what is happening and shut things down to everyone. Having certain players in and others out is not a good way to handle things.

[iloveholdem]

I'm not surprised at all, I personally dont like Party Poker Customer Support, when I was trying to get answer from one about a dispute the repersentive never replied an email to me, just left me there like got tired of me and never said anything.

About you game, if that happened to a lot of players on the tournament ( which sounded like it did from your statement ) than I dont know how they didnt refund the majority of players who were knocked out. I'm sure everyone else would of complained and refunds would of went out. But if noone complained besides you than their not going to refund.

I've always had to watch my back on Party Poker, I really get suspicious at the ' Random Number Generator ' and their Tech Support.

I dont think anyone can say when they first make a depoist on Party Poker that they constantly win nice hands for about an hour. To me something doesnt seem right about that.