[Bond18]

Big thanks to FTPDoug for getting right on this and responding. Here's the PM he sent me:

Hi Bond,

I looked into your situation a bit, and I agree that the CSR's response was a little less than perfect. However, I have to disagree with you when you say that the problem was obviously on our end. There was definitely a small (in a global sense, obviously it affected a bunch of players) connection issue between some players and Full Tilt at that time, but these sorts of things occasionally happen. A hub or a router (or something, I'm not a network guy!) somewhere goes down (nowhere near FTP) and a bunch of people can't connect to a certain group of sites for a little while. That's what happened last week. Our servers were running just fine and the vast majority of players had no connection issues.

Having said all that, I totally agree you lost a bunch of equity in the tournament because of those connection issues, and while I can't just make up the difference (that sort of thing sets a bad precedent for something that wasn't either side's fault) I can give you a $500 bonus, which I hope you'll agree is better than nothing.

I just want to stress that I'm more than happy to take the blame for things when we actually screw up, but in this case I just can't, because it really wasn't us this time! On a personal note, I just want to mention that I read all of your trip reports from the WSOP and thought they were highly enjoyable (if more than a little brutal). I hope you get a chance to play as many events next year (if that's what you want!) and continue to write about it.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do. I'm sorry that tournament got tainted the way it did, that's extremely frustrating.

--
Doug