Unibet Poker Offers Refunds To Players After Technical Glitch

Unibet Poker is receiving a lot of praise for its handling of a technical glitch that affected players in one of its tournaments.

The Malta-based poker site recently held a €50,000 guaranteed tournament, the highest ever guarantee offered by it, to celebrate the dealing of 500 million real money hands. The event drew a great deal of interest from players. By the time registration ended for the event, the prize pool had reached an impressive €65,000.

Under the terms of the game, players entered the €100 buy-in event holding 5,000 in chips, and had the option of unlimited re-entries through to Level 13. At this level players had the opportunity to pay for an add-on of additional 10,000 chips. However an unexpected problem arose at this point.

Due to a technical issue, players were unable to buy the add-on to get additional 10,000 chips. According to some estimates, if the technical error hadn’t popped up the prize pool could have reached a staggering €80,000 or even more. Unibet has acknowledged the error and as a goodwill gesture announced that the initial buy-in of €90+€10 would be refunded to all those players who were still in the tournament at that point but did not finish in the money.

In a statement Unibet said,

There should have been an add-on break which didn’t come in the €50K GTD ‘Half Billion’ (we’re looking into the reasons why now) and we’ll refund the initial buy in (€90+€10) to every player who was still in at the point of the add-on break who did not finish in the money.Apologies for this definitely takes the gloss off what was otherwise a really exciting tournament for us.

The company said that the refunds would be sent out once the list of players affected was made available. According to some reports, refunds have already started hitting the affected players’ bank accounts. While technical issues disrupting play is not uncommon, the way a poker site deals with it shows its focus on customer service.

Owned by the Kindred Group, Unibet has been charting a unique course for itself. After exiting the Microgaming Poker Network in 2014, it moved to its own poker network. Since then the site has developed its own software from start and has brought in a number of innovative features in order to provide the best possible experience for its players. Its strategy is paying off with the parent company picking up the award for Innovation in Poker at the recent EGR Operator Marketing and Innovation Awards.