GGPoker player claims he was stiffed out of $220k after winning a $1,000,000 mystery bounty

[Dan Druff]

GGPoker is not having a good last two months.

First, they had an embarrassing superuser scandal, followed by an opaque and confusing response which raised more questions than it answered.

Then, earlier this month, the highly respected Jason Koon quit as GGPoker pro, and his outgoing post on Twitter did not seem like it was very friendly to GG.

Now they've got a bizarre situation where it's alleged they have refused to honor a $1,000,000 guaranteed top mystery bounty, only paying $780k to the winner, and redistributing the other $220k to everyone else in the prizepool.

Here's the post from "6betfold" on 2+2:

Good day everyone,

I am the one who won the top bounty in the event: Mystery Million Main Event ($1M top bounty GTD)

I received the letter from GG Poker (Natural 8) about the top bounty was 780k, instead of 1M as it is guaranteed. And their solution to keep the promise is to split $220k to everyone, which in my opinion is totally unfair. The promise is $1M for top bounty, so the one who is affected is me, not other 5000 players who in the money, because they have won more than they are supposed to. I am the only one who lost this amount.

Their tournament is $1M GTD for top bounty, surely that is the main reason many players joined and hunted it. I think that is the promise they should keep of gtd, not spliting money.
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They said due to a technical problem (server crash) the day prior to the event. And their solution after the event finished is to split $220k to 50000 players ($4 each), while $220k should belong to the top bounty winner as they promised ($1M GTD).

Source: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/2...m-gtd-1834555/


This technically occurred on Natural 8 Poker, a GGPoker skin marketed mostly to Asian customers. But it's all basically the same thing, and GGPoker itself made this decision.

According to this player, they confiscated 22% of his $1m "mystery bounty" win because of some kind of server crash "the day before the event". I don't understand why a server crash the day before matters for this event, but maybe the server was still having issues, and GGPoker decided that a lot of players didn't have a proper chance to win the mystery bounty. So maybe that's why they made the decision to redistribute 22% of the top bounty evenly among all 50,000 or so players ($4 each), as a way to refund those who couldn't play smoothly as they had expected.

But that's not fair. This $220k should come out of their own pocket. They're huge and make a ton of money. The $220k is a drop in the bucket. Besides, I have to imagine that most or all of that $220k was covered by the rake, as there were 50,000 players in the event!

Apparently GGPoker displayed the top bounty as $780k on the tournament screen from start to finish, rather than $1,000,000, but that's not the point. It was marketed as a $1m guarantee top bounty, and that's why a lot of people registered for it. What they display on the top of the screen -- something many won't notice until AFTER they start playing -- is irrelevant.

[Dan Druff]

Update:

Apparently this situation is even dumber than I first assumed.

GGPoker did not take $220k from the winner's $1m.

Instead, an error in their system caused the top bounty to be $780k instead of $1m, because somehow the system wasn't programmed correctly to force the top bounty as $1m.

Upon noticing this problem, instead of just giving the big bounty winner the difference ($220k), they bafflingly decided to just divide that money up between all 50,000 registered players.

Why? No clue.

[JeffDime]

The only motive I can see is spreading out the money and increasing rake. Pretty scummy. You end up with one pissed off player and 100s of happy ones. Fucked up.