Winning Poker Network PLAGUED by Technical Issues
The Winning Poker Network (WPN) serves multiple recommended online poker sites, including ACR Poker and Black Chip Poker. And while normally this would be a highly efficient poker network, over the past few days, the WPN has suffered from some terrible technical problems. These issues have caused tournaments to crash and then be cancelled, games to freeze up and disappear, and several other problems that have led to the WPN opting for emergency downtime in order to fix them.
Tournament Cancelled for Basic Maintenance?
The first reports of the recent bad occurrences on the WPN came on Thursday, April 16 when players experienced the cancellation of a tournament. One gamer noted that he had been playing for 10 hours and was one of the final three competitors out of around 1,700 entrants. He then went on to say that after he lost a big hand, the poker network chose to cancel that tournament altogether. While not being specifically noted as such, the number of entrants suggests that this may have been a part of The High Five $10 Million Guaranteed tournament series, which is currently underway on the WPN.
Just slightly prior to this, another user posted that all the games had disappeared from the lobby before inquiring as to whether or not the WPN was undergoing maintenance. As it happens, ACR Poker in specific had posted on its Twitter feed that maintenance was scheduled for 6:00am to 8:00am ET on that day. Yet, not many people expected the network to begin with this until after the tournament had come to a conclusion.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the maintenance that was undertaken by the WPN wasn’t enough to stop other problems from arising, considering that later the same evening, players began having issues with the cashier page. It's possible too that these cashier woes were an unintended byproduct of whatever maintenance tasks WPN staff had performed.
Cashier Page Down, Real Money Transactions Delayed
Anyone visiting the cashier page on ACR Poker or other WPN platforms then ended up seeing error messages, including “page under maintenance,” and were instructed to “contact customer support.” With this being the case, players weren’t able to make deposits into their accounts or request withdrawals either.
These issues escalated as the evening of the 16th became the early morning of the 17th with one user reporting that he had been waiting four-and-a-half hours to receive a Person-to-Person Transfer. He had also had the maintenance message on the cashier page ever since, and while he did try contacting customer support via email regarding it – which had proven to be swift and concise for him in times prior – he got no response. He then went on to call the customer support phone number, only to hear the message, “I’m sorry. An error has occurred with call forwarding.”
Tournaments Cancelled for Whole Day
It didn’t take long after this for the WPN to address the problems that had been occurring. In a tweet to all its followers, ACR Poker said that it had suffered a technical issue during the evening of April 16, and this delayed the credit of some real money transactions. However, it said that it was working hard on crediting all of the missing ones throughout the day of the 17th. For that reason, it had chosen to cancel all tournaments for the day ahead until everything was rectified to a satisfactory level.
One hour later, the poker room posted a follow-up to this that said it was still experiencing technical issues, but that these were being worked on to try and get everything properly back on track. Therefore, for the remainder of the 17th, members of the site could access cash games, Jackpot Poker, Sit and Gos, and On Demands. Yet, all regular multi-table tournaments were completely closed down until the problems with real money transactions were fixed.
All tournaments that were cancelled for the 17th should have refunded buy-ins to players who had already entered them. Yet, it seems as though certain ones did not proceed with fulfilling this successfully. The events that did not refund players properly included:
- 19001824 $100,000 GTD - 8-Max $100.00 + $9.00 Late Reg
- 19001399 $60,000 GTD $200 + $15 Late Reg
- 19002661 $8,000 GTD $50.00 + $5.00 Late Reg
- 19003280 $250 GTD $0.25 + $0.02 Late Reg
- 19003377 $3,000 GTD - 2HR LR 6-Max $15.00 + $1.50 Late Reg
- 19011098 x7 $55 Value Tickets GTD $6.00 + $0.60 Late Reg
In order to tackle these issues, ACR Poker went into a swift downtime period, noting that it would last for about 30 minutes. However, one hour or so later, another tweet was sent out stating that it would take another 30 minutes before things were back up and running.
Final Transaction Count and Action Undertaken
In a bid to ensure that all necessary refunds and transactions were registered and action taken on them, ACR Poker displayed various statistics regarding the snafus. Some of the corrections had already been completed in full while others were still pending. They included the following:
- 825 Lost Deposits
- 1,166 Transactions in the Casino section
- 7 Cash Outs
- 303 Lost P2P Transactions
While it’s true that at times, players may experience technical issues or crashes due to their own system failings (for which there are various quick fixes and more to utilize), this was a big let-down on the part of ACR Poker – or rather, the WPN on the bigger scale of things. There’s little that players can do when the faults are all to do with the poker network and/or online poker room. So, for most, it was just a matter of sitting and waiting until the developers came up with a solution and fix.
The last update via Twitter from ACR Poker came on Saturday, Apr. 18, and this simply gave details of the most recent figures relating to issues experienced and actions undertaken on them. All casino cases were still being worked on throughout the day, and the site said it would process these as soon as possible. Deposits were also under review since the 17th although the site did express that where withdrawals are concerned, there is a standard processing time frame of 24 hours to wait on as well. It also reiterated that these transactions could take up to 15 business days to completely be processed and arrive back in players’ accounts.
P2Ps were confirmed to be up to date as far as the data that they had while the majority of tourney refunds had been processed completely as well. Some were still being worked on though, and the poker room reminded players once again that these can take up to 72 hours to complete.
Winning Poker Network Sites + Other Leading Poker Rooms
The Winning Poker Network bases itself out of Costa Rica, and not only does it cater to the aforementioned ACR Poker and Black Chip Poker, but a few other rooms utilize its poker network too. These include True Poker and Ya Poker. The former of these accepts U.S. players. Ya Poker, on the other hand, is much more focused on the Spanish and Latin community with its default language being Spanish. Therefore, it doesn’t allow registrations from Americans but still uses the WPN and maintains shared liquidity on it.
Of all the Winning Network skins, ACR Poker is the best for most players. Not only does it include all the same games and tables as the rest of the network, but also ACR has special 7 Day No Rathole tables that are unavailable on the rest of the network's sites. Furthermore, you can get a $10 free no deposit bonus by entering in our exclusive PRB10FREE code. Find out more by reading our detail-rich ACR Poker review.
If you're disenchanted by the WPN's technical woes, which are by no means uncommon, then you might prefer to read about your other options for U.S.A. online poker. Browse through a list of the leading internet poker sites for Americans for assistance in making your choice.