WCOOP Main Event Cancelled on PokerStars

This Sunday did not go well for the online poker room giant, PokerStars. All main events, plus a number of other tournaments that were scheduled for the day, all part of the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) had to be canceled due to serious technical difficulties. Tournaments that were already underway were also impacted by the unexpected crash, however, players would be compensated by PokerStars according to their regulations. Despite the company's best efforts, a lot of users vented their anger on social media, with some even threatening to delete their accounts.

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All currently running tournaments have been canceled this Sunday, according to the PokerStars team, who had previously paused them to address technical difficulties. These included player log-in issues and client crashes.

"We are extremely sorry, but we have had to cancel all tournaments currently running, with prizes awarded in accordance with our tournament cancellation policy." (PokerStars, on its official Twitter account).

Numerous poker players, including well-known pros like recent WCOOP champion Stefan Huber, were impacted by the cancellation. It's inevitable that such a significant issue during what was meant to be one of the year's highlights will have an adverse effect. Although PokerStars has not yet disclosed the reason for the surprise outage, theories range from server problems to deliberate attacks.

Participants in the Competition Will Be Refunded

In such events, players who have already registered for the impacted tournaments are eligible for compensation in accordance with guidelines pre-established by PokerStars. The page containing this information is no longer available on the official PokerStars website, however, an archived copy of the content discloses that there are three ways that participants may be compensated.

All active players will split 50% of the prize pool if the tournament has already begun but the players have not yet earned any money. The remaining half will be distributed based on the number of chips.

Each player is guaranteed to receive the minimum amount of the prize pool if they have already won money when the tournament was canceled. Any money that is left over will be allocated in accordance with the number of chips.

Players have already raised worry about situations that aren't covered by the official conditions, like any games that are still in progress at the PokerStars casino, which crashed at the same moment. The business answered that the technical staff was attempting to fix the problems and urged customers to wait.

Affected players flooded the operator's official Twitter account after the cancellation of such a hotly anticipated series of tournaments left a bad taste in the PokerStars community. Many users felt duped in spite of PokerStars' assurances that the matter would be resolved quickly and that a new event may be added once things had calmed down.

A sizable portion of commentators announced their plans to switch to a rival service. More people flooded the platform in regard to the refunds and voiced their displeasure with it. PokerStars is currently trying to contain the damage as the situation fast threatens to turn into a PR catastrophe. The operator will have to put in a lot of effort to regain the faith of the players, and with competition increasing, things may start to get tough for the giant.

Author: Charles F Jr is a poker and crypto enthusiast who writes about online poker since 2020, also a translator for Portuguese & Spanish.