CoinPoker Pauses Tournaments on Day 1 of $50 Million Championship

CoinPoker paused tournaments across its poker client on Aug. 23 after what it called widespread issues affecting users, hours into opening day of its $50 million Global Online Poker Championship.

The championship is the crypto poker room's biggest event of 2026, a 37-day series of more than 700 tournaments running through Sept. 28. Opening day carried the $1 million guaranteed Global Main, one of three main events anchoring the series.

Operator Reboots Paused Tournaments in Batches

We're aware of widespread issues currently affecting CoinPoker users and are actively investigating. For any affected gameplay, our standard cancellation procedures will apply.

CoinPoker posted that statement to X at 9:23 p.m. UTC, saying it was still investigating.

An update 88 minutes later said paused tournaments were being rebooted and would come back online in batches. Players who were seated when the pause hit were told to stay online and wait for their tournament to restart.

The operator has not said what broke, and it has not published a count of the tournaments or players affected.

Refunds Decide What Opening Day Costs Players

Pointing to standard cancellation procedures leaves entry fees, bounties and part-played chip stacks to be settled under a policy CoinPoker has not restated in public since the failures began.

The site has stumbled at scale before. On Feb. 28, 2025, it canceled every upcoming tournament through 6:30 p.m. UTC after server problems locked players out of the client, and promised compensation within three business days.

FairGambling covered a comparable launch-week failure when Housebets delayed withdrawals after its $25 million giveaway rollout in July.

The published schedule runs the championship through Sept. 28, with four $1 million CoinMillion events starting Sept. 6. CoinPoker has not promised a post-mortem, leaving the treatment of paused opening-day events as the first thing players can measure.