PokerStars Offering Freerolls To DDoS Attack Victims

PokerStars is reaching out to their players who were recently affected by the DDoS attacks. The incident was well documented with hundreds of players expressing their frustration on social media.

To make up for the breach, PokerStars announced they will be giving away over $650,000 worth of free tournament tickets in a series of freerolls.

PokerStars has not yet made an official announcement but the Player Freerolls are already listed in the poker clients that can access the global player pool. They can also be found in the Southern European network and the separate Italian client.

There will be five freerolls offered every day between August 22nd and August 26th in the global player pool. Each of these tournaments will award $100,000 in prizes. Those in the shared European player pool can enter freerolls that offer €20,000 in prizes and Italian players can compete for €10,000. However, this offer comes with conditions.

These freeroll tournaments are only available to players who were involved in real-money games during the period between August 12th and August 14th. These players will have 3 tournament tickets credited to their PokerStars accounts.

The tickets that will be awarded to winners of the upcoming freerolls will be for major events such as the World Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP). Those in Europe have a shot at winning a seat at the Galactic Series while Italian players will compete for tournament tickets for daily tournaments. Every tournament on the global player pool will see 5,840 players from different buy-in levels win seats at the WSOOP. First-place finishers will receive a $5,200 entry into a WCOOP Main Event.

The DDoS Attacks

The problems started on August 12th when numerous real-money players were suddenly disconnected forcing the cancellation of the tournaments in progress.

PokerStars suffered another DDoS attack on the morning of August 13th which once again led to tournament cancellations. These attacks continued to happen over the next two days. PokerStars officially confirmed the DDoS attacks on August 15th. PokerStars has since remedied the problem and the majority of the affected players were given refunds.

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It wasn’t just PokerStars and their customers who were greatly inconvenienced by these attacks. Other poker sites were the targets as well including America’s Card Room which was reportedly the first to plagued with a series of DDoS-induced outages as early as August 5th . Partypoker also found themselves under attack a short while later.