888poker Raises Tournament Guarantees by $100,000 Across the Board
While 888poker continues to suffer sporadic connectivity issues, the poker room announced an increase of their combined tournament guarantees and added more than $100,000 to the guaranteed prizes tap every month.
Announced in a post published on the Two Plus Two poker forum, the decision to boost the guarantees of some events on the schedule was made "to mark the improved performance" of various tournaments and to bring more players to the platform.
Here's a look at the full list of the tournaments running on 888poker that have seen their guaranteed prize pool increased in August.
| Tournament | Buy-in | Previous guarantee | New Guarantee | % increase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sunday Breeze | $55 | $15,000 | $20,000 | 33.3% |
| Midweek Breeze | $55 | $7,000 | $8,000 | 14.3% |
| Tuesday Crocodile | $160 | $15,000 | $20,000 | 33.3% |
| Lightning 6-Max | $109 | $5,000 | $6,000 | 20% |
| The Quarterback | $215 | $25,000 | 30,000 | 20% |
| Deepstack (14:00 GMT) | $22 | $2,000 | 2,500 | 25% |
| $1 Snap (21:15 GMT) | $1 | $500 | $750 | 50% |
| Deepstack (15:15 GMT) | $5 | $800 | $1,000 | 25% |
The guaranteed prize pool increase come one month after 888poker chose to reduce the guaranteed prize pool in one of their flagship events, the Sunday's Challenge, which saw its guarantee lowered from $100,000 down to $75,000.
Bigger Guarantees and Stability to Increase the Player Base
The decision to increase guarantees is a sign that 888poker hopes their player base will grow after a slow summer month.
However, to attract more players to the tables, 888poker also needs to address the connectivity issues from the past weeks, and which are still being reported from poker players across the globe.
"We would like to assure you that resolving these issues is our top priority and we are working with our partners to ensure the interruptions come to an end," a representative from 888poker stated one week ago, when the poker room introduced a new feature called 'Pause Tournament’ to help when network disruptions put poker tournaments at risk.
"On top of recent connectivity enhancements to nullify this issue, we have activated a ‘pause tournament' feature that enables us to temporarily pause tournaments when our teams identify high levels of network disruptions."
Through the new feature, the poker room can now put the tournaments 'on hold' and decide to either resume the competition if the connectivity issue get solved or cancel the event and refund players.
"Tournament clocks will stand still during this pause – same as in the hourly break of tournaments," the representative continued. "We will resume activity once the network returns to normal behavior or cancel tournaments altogether, ensuring players are automatically refunded in accordance with 888's disconnection policy."
Connectivity issues, however, are not being suffered only by 888poker. Over the past weekend, a number of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks caused connectivity problems at partypoker, with the poker room reporting many players were disconnected during the play on Saturday, Aug. 1.
As an apology to the players whose games were ruined by the DDos attacks, partypoker juiced their prize pools on Sunday, Aug. 9, with an extra $20,000 in guarantees.
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