Party Dallas Mavericks Freeroll fiasco

[AleoMagus]

This past weekend, I was sitting on my couch watching TV, when all of a sudden I see a poker table pop up on my computer. To my surprise, it seems that I was entered into the Dallas Mavericks Freeroll which gave away $19200 in Mavericks prize packages.

I think to myself "this makes no sense. I never entered this. I don't live anywhere near Texas."

Anyways, I look around at a few of the tourney tables, and it seems that the tourney, which has about 610 entrants, is almost all folding every hand. They are all Away! Now I know something strange is going on. Clearly, it is just by chance that I am logged on and have noticed this tourney, but the vast majority of other players in this tourney have not.

So I do what anybody would probably do here. I start min raising every hand. My table is all away so I figure I'll just see where this little party screw up goes. Well, about 45 minutes later, i have increased my 1000 starting stack to almost 10,000 and I'm about to finally bust a player. I've been watching many of the other tables, and out of 610, I count about 40 active players. Most of them are doing exactly what I am doing.

Finally, my table breaks up as players start to bust and I am not lucky enough to land on a second ghost table. From here on out, I am faced with a real opponent or two on in the midst of all the dead money. After a bit of table talk, many of us start to put the puzzle together. We all use the same affilliate - PSO. Well, all but about 3 or 4 others from Dallas who actually are Mavericks fans.

Around this same time, A lot of spectators start showing up in chat complaining that they couldn't register for this tourney and asking how we managed to get into this thing.

Well, it's starting to become clear to me. This tourney was for Mavericks fans who used a special promo code in their sign up, or in their last deposit, or even just as a password. Party has somehow taken that list and swapped it with the PSO customer list, or maybe the registration list for the last PSO freroll. Somehow a few actual Dallas entries have made it also who had never heard of PSO.

But here I am, and the field was getting down to almost all real players. Basically I've got a 1/50 shot at this prize pool which paid the top ten finishers as follows:

1st - Season tickets to 2006 Mavericks games, 4 luxury suite tickets to 2005 playoff game, Autographed Mavericks Jersey, and dinner with billionaire owner Mark Cuban before the game ($4200 value)
2nd - 4 luxury suite tickets to playoff game, and autographed jersey ($2900 value)
3rd to 7th - 2 luxury suite tickets to playoff game and autographed jersey ($1700 value)
8th to 10th - 2 tickets to playoff game and autographed jersey ($1200 value)

And so I play...

And I finish 3rd! In what I suppose is some justice, the top two finishers are both legitimate entries who have no knowledge of PSO. They know something was messed up, but they are big Dallas Mav fans and can both use the prizes.

Great, right? A $1700 prize for playing in a tourney that I never expected to play and which pretty much took me by surprise anyways.

But there are a few issues here.

Party said that they would announce prize details on monday and then postponed that to today. It still hasn't happened. In my phone conversations with them, it's still not clear to me that they have any idea anything went wrong. I'm sure there are a lot of angry players from Dallas who have also talked to them so maybe this is the nature of the delay and maybe they know full well that they screwed up and are just trying to figure out what to do. Then again, in the tourney chat a few angry texans reported being told by Party's support "tough luck".

What can Party do here? Will they run this tourney again? Can they not award prizes because of the mix up? As I see it, I'm not exactly entitled to anything, but I'd still be very sorry to get nothing. It also wouldn't surprise me if it ended up being something that would be very hard for me to claim. After all, I'm probably going to have to ebay these tickets and if I don't get a lot of notice, that could be difficult.

Has anybody heard about this? Any news on what's going to happen?

Opinions? Anybody want cheap playoff tickets or a autographed Mavericks Jersey?
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Regards
Brad S