Out of interest I decided to play in one of the freerolls at PartyPoker that was geared towards the Drive the Dream promotion just to see what level the folks were playing at. What a mistake that was! Read on for details on why I believe PartyPoker is one of the worst online poker rooms around at the moment.

Basically PartyPoker ran 2 or 3 qualifiers in order to get through to the final $15,000 Guaranteed Drive the Dream Final Satellite that was to be played on 12th September. Anyway, I played in one of the freerolls which was so soft that I qualified for the 12th September 2010 tourney straightaway. Fair enough I thought, I might check out the action on 12th September as there are a couple of places on offer for the Drive a Dream Final in London. So I was sat in front of my laptop on 12th September at 14:00ET ready for the off along with 800 odd other players. The tourney kicked off at the scheduled time and we got about 2 hands in and that where things started to go wrong… After 2 hands were played our table was “paused” for a few minutes, this pattern then carried on for about 10 minutes after which we were then placed on a paused status for much longer. 5 minutes passed, then 10, the 20, then 30, during which time the other participants were getting restless and one even commented that is was a regular occurrence for PartyPoker to mess up monthly finals. I waited (foolishly) for 30 minutes on hold after which time I gave up and emailed PartyPoker support.

I won’t go into details with regards to the level of support offered by PartyPoker suffice to say that they couldn’t find me on their systems, and only accepted I was a player once I provided a screenshot. It went even further downhill from there. Additional attempts at resolution were even less satisfactory from the hapless support staff there.

So essentially, I am none the wiser as to why the tourney didn’t progress and there is no opportunity to re-play that I can see. The PartyPoker support staff are worse than useless and there has been no official communication to players that were due to play in the tourney so I guess that’s it! Serves you right for playing in a freeroll I hear you say. Fair comment. I won’t be doing it again, certainly not at PartyPoker.