The Tournaments

The network already has one of the more impressive tournament schedules in not only the US online poker market, but in the world, sporting $7,000,000 worth of guaranteed poker tournaments each month. However, once each quarter all of the skins on the Merge Gaming Network get together and put on one of the largest tournament series available for US poker players, often exceeding an extra two million dollars in guarantees in the prize pool.  This quarterly poker series, formerly called the "Poker Maximus," is now simply dubbed, "The Online Poker Series" or "OPS" for short.

Everything was going great with this iteration of the Online Poker Series.  There were very few overlays, a few tournaments exceeded their guarantees by a fair margin, the press was good and everything was shaping up to be another successful run.  So its Sunday night, November 24th, 2014, the main events (a $530 buy in 75k GTD and a $215 buy in $250,000 GTD) are in full swing,  then what was the problem?

The Crash

The problem was that Merge turned into a pumpkin at midnight!  Shortly after midnight players began contacting Professional Rakeback via Skype support asking what was wrong with Merge.  The public forums immediately began filling up with complaints of being kicked out of games.  The timing on this was quite poor the two largest multi-table tournament events of the OPS were deep in the money, as were several other 5 figure guaranteed tournaments. The $215 buy-in $250,000 guaranteed main event was at the final two tables while the $530 buy-in $75,000 GTD was at the final table!

As if this was not bad enough, strange reports began to surface in the forums, on twitter, and directly from our clients.  These disturbing reports were from players claiming to have logged back into the gaming servers, but on other people's accounts!  Sure enough, one of our clients quickly provided us with a screenshot of another player's account, screen name, and balance as he attempted to buy into a cash game!

The Panic

Naturally a full scale panic began on the forums and Twitter as this information hit the digital streets.  Players were frantically attempting to log back in, not only to resume their positions in ongoing tournaments, but to check the status of and take control of their accounts before someone else did!

Initially someone on the 2+2 forums reported being shorted money in her account upon re-logging, though she later recanted. It appears that at least two players actually played on other people's accounts before realizing what had happened upon their subsequent re-login.  Though for one of them it was actually a good thing as he came back with more chips than he had when initially disconnected.