From the start of the WSOP, GGPoker seemed to be creaking under the weight of its sudden popularity.
Heavy is the hand that doles out the bracelets. Heavier still is the traffic on that hand's servers. GGPoker didn’t seem to have done enough market research to know just how great that traffic was going to be.
The result was player connection trouble from day one. Throughout the series, the GGPoker customer service lines must have been dealing with red lights across the switchboard as players struggled to log on and stay logged on.
Meanwhile, on a larger scale, whole tournaments have been delayed or been forced to restart. When this happens, GGPoker refunds buy-ins and, to keep players happy, they throw in a voucher for another tournament of the same price.
We knew that would be costly. And now we know just how costly it was. A new report by pokerfuse has revealed that for just one day of last month the cost was a little shy of $1 million.
Only connect
This isn’t the first time GGPoker has had to turn out its pockets and make up for screwing up.
When a “critical bug” shut events #32 and #33 back in July, most of us thought it was just teething troubles.
Event #32 cost them a $100 voucher per player, with 3,648 players still in. That’s $364,800 for not renting enough microchip real-estate.
They also doubled the charitable donations in Event #33 – the $1,111 Every 1 for COVID Relief. That set them back another $177,378.
Soon after these disasters, it became clear that this was a systemic issue.
Even GGPoker's own ambassadors couldn’t keep themselves from complaining about connection issues.
One million dollars isn’t cool
All this brings us to Sunday, August 23. GGPoker had four large tourneys on the go when another batch of catastrophic failures wracked their servers.
They canceled three tournaments outright. Meanwhile, the WSOP’s Big 50 had its Day 2 rescheduled after an hour and a half delay. Among the three canceled tourneys was the GGMasters, one of GG's flagship tourneys.
The price of fish this time around made July’s omnishambles look like whitebait. For the $84 Bounty Hunters Sunday Special GGPoker paid $35,448 in compensation. For the Big 50, they coughed up another $207,000. The price for the $210 Bounty Hunter’s Main Event came to $231,840. And for the GGMaster’s — with its 2,804 players still in with each one coming out at $150 a pop — GGPoker did themselves out of a further $420,600.
In the final tally, for the want of a server, $894,928 was lost.
On top of that, the accountants will have to find a way to make up the shortfall in rake generated by the canceled events.
That's a large number. Someone in GGPoker’s IT department must be worrying is gonna come out of his paycheck.
