The past two weeks or so have been a bit of a nightmare for the online poker industry. Why? Because it’s been hit with somewhat of a constant barrage of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoD) attacks. These have led to multiple poker rooms crashing and tournaments being cancelled in the process, obviously giving players a hard time trying to enter the websites, let alone the games.
One of the sites that was affected by this is the popular platform PokerStars. Being the world’s highest-standing and leading poker provider in the online environment, the downtime saw thousands of poker players have their gameplay interrupted on Sunday 12th August. Eventually, this led to the entire site going offline. Even the shared liquidity platform in Europe was sent spiralling off, as well as the Indian and Italian domains.
While the PokerStars site was quick to issue apologies for the downtime, more attacks would come at later periods in the following days, disrupting additional tournaments. Due to this, many players were left with disappointing experiences, with some only collecting partial pay-outs for their time gaming.
Time to Make Amends
Obviously, the DDoD wasn’t the fault of PokerStars, but the site remains apologetic and has promised to make reparations for the downtime and loss of tournaments. One thing that online poker players hold dear to their hearts is, of course, money. Therefore, being fully in-the-know over what its players want, PokerStars has taken action towards rectifying the outcome of the crashes.
Anyone who participated in poker games at the platform between August 12th and August 14th is eligible for a set of freerolls. These are scheduled to run between August 22nd to August 26th, with a total of $650,000 on offer in prize funds. A total of $500,000 of that amount is available for players from the site’s .com domain. Therefore, it’s imperative that you make your way to the site in order to enter, as there’s just two days left.
On the chosen dates, PokerStars is hosting a $100,000 freeroll on its .com client, while a €20,000 freeroll will take place on the PokerStars Europe site. To add to this, a €10,000 freeroll will be occurring on the Italian domain. The players who were active on the dates specified during downtime will be given three freeroll tickets to be used on any of the repayment dates.
As far as prizes are concerned for these tournaments, these range from tickets to the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP), the Galactic Series and additional selected tournaments within Italy. The overall top prize that players can win is a seat worth $5,200 at the WCOOP tournament.
Something else to mention here is that players from Portugal and the Czech Republic are excluded from these offers due to regulations within their own countries. All other players will need to locate the freeroll tickets in their accounts after logging in.
