Every poker site experiences bugs and glitches from time to time. When it happens, online poker operators often handle it quietly and issue refunds to impacted players.
Recent glitches on Americas Cardroom, however, receive more attention than most because it is based offshore. Some are skeptical of the ethics at ACR – and at the Winning Poker Network as a whole – and try to point to glitches as evidence of intentional wrongdoing. However, CEO Phil Nagy consistently points to software issues for problems, which seems to pan out every time.
The glitches are annoying, especially considering the new ACR software is barely one year old, but Nagy attributes problems of late to exceptionally high traffic on the site in March and April.
A recent, serious, and complicated glitch inspired new rumors of problems at ACR. Nagy and his staff took a great deal of time to address this issue and explain what happened. As it turned out, much of this issue was due to an employee error.
Issues of April 26
It was a Sunday, the peak day for online poker traffic, even more so during the coronavirus pandemic. One of the game servers was overloaded, and when ACR staff tried to move hundreds of players from their tables to another server, they moved all but 10 players of those at the 733 tables.
Those 10 players had these screennames:
Though these players appeared to be seated at tables, they were not dealt in to hands. Some of them were in the High Five Main Event and the Beast at the time, and all were in tournaments of some kind. The staff realized what was happening at the time and brought the development team in on the problem.
The case of each player was handled separately due to unique situations for all of them.
https://twitter.com/WPN_CEO/status/1256344293922557953?s=20
Where Were They?
Six of the 10 players involved in the glitch were in the Beast tournament at the time with a $100K guarantee on the line. All were seated at the same table but obviously impacted other players and tables as well. Thus, the event was cancelled and all players issued a refund.
Two players were at different tables in the $8K GTD Daily event. Those two players and one other made it to the final three. Those two accounts were disqualified, and all other players moved up two spots in the payouts.
One player in question was in the $50K GTD event. Again, ACR decided to let this play down to two players, reward the legitimate one as the winner, and move all other players up one spot. And the same happened for the last player in the High Five Main Event.
Traced Back to April 17
Nagy and his team determined that the problem dated back to Friday, April 17. A surge of traffic overloaded the servers and forced the cancellation of some tournaments.
When the crash happened, a staff member cancelled those events but also cancelled every event in “registration” status in the future. Management realized the problem and reregistered the players in their respective events, but this was done by username instead of player nickname.
Problems ensued.
Transparency
Many players feel that all online poker sites should be this transparent when an issue occurs. It would limit conspiracy theories and show openness on the part of the operator. ACR did that in this situation.
Other players take issue with the fact that the servers and new software cannot seem to handle the recent traffic surges. This is concerning to many, though Nagy and others are attentive and working constantly to fix issues.
https://twitter.com/ACR_POKER/status/1251304262329647104?s=20
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