What was Lodden Thinking!!! Huge Twitter Mistake!

One of the most popular online poker rooms, PartyPoker has experienced serious technical difficulties yesterday - the client completely shut down and tournaments had to be cancelled. One of their ambassadors tweeted erroneous information about the issue, which didn’t help either.

PartyPoker is currently ranked number 6 in terms of traffic by PokerScout, undeniably one of the major rooms in the world out there - they’re averaging around 1,500 active cash game players on their site at any given time.

They also run popular MTT’s such as their recently launched KO series, where the biggest events tend to be held on Sundays.

Yesterday, however, things did not run as smoothly as usual on PartyPoker - first, the players experienced severe lag while playing then eventually the software froze completely. Other users were unable to log in and the tables, that usually can be seen even when one’s not logged in, didn’t load in the lobby. During last year’s SCOOP, PokerStarshad to deal with similar technical difficulties, tournaments had to be cancelled then as well.

PartyPoker first acknowledged the problem on Twitter around 8 pm GMT.

Later they addressed the issue of MTT’s specifically - every tournament starting after 9 PM GMT were cancelled, players who already bought in for them are promised a complete refund. 

According to their “Disconnection and cancellation policy” they refer to in one of their later tweets, players who got eliminated before the cancellation of a running tournament will not be refunded. If the tournament is cancelled before the late registration period ends, all players remaining are refunded their buy-ins. If the cancellation happens after the late reg period, “players still in the tournament will be refunded the amount that would have been awarded to the next player to be eliminated from the tournament. 50% of the remaining prize pool will be distributed equally between the remaining players, and 50% will be distributed on a percentage basis according to each player's chip count. The remaining players will also be refunded their entry fee”.

You can read the full page here.

During the PartyPoker “crisis” one of the ambassadors, Johnny Lodden made a big error on Twitter: he tweeted that tables are running again and tournaments will restart in 20 minutes, when in reality cash tables were not restored until hours after he posted that and tournaments ended up being cancelled completely. 

After being called out for the misinformation, Lodden eventually deleted the tweet and stuck to retweeting the official PartyPoker account.

As of now, their latest update is this: