Finnish Ray.FI €100k Tournament Fails to Finish

Finland’s only centrally licensed online poker room, Ray.FI, attempted a two day €100,000 guaranteed tournament at the weekend—and it ended in disaster.

The tournament was supposed to break at the end of play on Saturday to resume on Sunday, but the break never happened.

The tournament organizers halted the event, citing the fact that many players had left expecting the break to run over night.

There were around 170 players left in the event when it stopped.

A notice on the website blames the problem on a third party technology partner. The poker client is provided by Playtech, but they have not been named as responsible.

Payouts

Even though the event had an overlay, Ray has decided to pay out the guaranteed prize pool amount in full rather than simply reimbursing buy ins. Entry fees were also refunded.

The remainder of the €100,000 guarantee—€48k—was split into two halves—half was divided equally among the remaining players, and half was allocated according to the number of chips a player had in his stack when the tournament was stopped.

The refund methodology at least paid some notice to the expected value that players’ chip stacks represented.

When the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) ruled on the Borgata chipgate scandal, no notice was take of this aspect of the game and the remaining players were compensated equally.

The Finnish solution may not have met with the approval of all players, but it makes a more financially logical distribution—and showed more understanding of the nature of poker—than that mandated by the DGE.