nugloker

Evidently there was a glitch on Poker Stars heads up Sit-and-Go's
that enabled players to start a new game using the "Rematch" button
even if they did not have sufficient funds in their accounts. What you
see here is a small stakes grinder who figured this out and hit up the
5K's. Clearly the guy's a thief, but still, it takes some stones for a
$100 player to put up $5000 (pretty sure he did have to pay his first
buy-in) in the hopes that the glitch exists in the higher stakes games
as well.

Scotty from Poker Stars support is supposed to be on next week's 2+2
Pokercast to explain how Stars is handling the issue, which I'm quite
curious to hear. Several 5K SNG regulars have posted e-mails purported
to be from Stars explaining that money they won from people abusing
this bug has been confiscated. I haven't yet seen an e-mail confirming
that money lost to these players was refunded, though if that happened
(and if you think about the optimal strategy for someone abusing this
glitch, it's actually quite unlikely that anyone playing a number of
games with them would lose in the long run) I'd be very surprised if
Stars didn't handle it properly. They have far and away the best
customer support in the business.

According to Stars security, posting in the 2+2 thread,

Pokerstars became aware of a system glitch which allowed
users to accept a rematch in heads-up SNGs despite having insufficient
funds in their account. Once we became aware of this we suspended the
rematch feature.

We have carefully reviewed each account which played in a SNG where
the glitch occurred, and have taken action as appropriate in each case.
We did not simply take action against everyone who received a financial
gain as a result of this glitch. We carefully investigated each
instance, and suspended player accounts only in cases where there was a
clear violation of PokerStars' terms and conditions, such as collusion
or chip dumping to exploit this glitch.

During the course of our investigation we initially suspended a
small number of accounts, however further investigations proved that
some of the accounts in question did not breach our terms and
conditions. Those accounts have been re-instated, and we regret any
inconvenience caused by the temporary suspension.

It should be noted that only a very small number of accounts have
been suspended for abusing this glitch for their financial gain. The
majority of affected players have aided us in resolving this problem in
a timely manner, and we would like to thank them for their continued
support and custom.

We will reactivate the rematch feature as soon as possible, but
we're not sure at this point when that will be. We apologise for any
inconvenience that this issue may have caused to our valued customers,
and thank those who helped to bring the issue to our attention.


I understand that they can't keep their winnings, but at the very
least, I think anyone who played these guys ought to get some sort of
compensation for the time they wasted as a result of this glitch. As
you can imagine, the time of a winning 5K SNG player, and if a flaw in
the Poker Stars client resulted in time wasted in games where they
wouldn't be allowed to keep their winnings, they ought to be
compensated.

Reminds me of how sometimes on the local news you'll see a story
about an ATM that's spitting out 100's instead of 20's and there's a
line of people waiting to use it. I always wondered: why is there a
line? Why would the first person ever leave?

(Presumably, the answer is that one can't withdraw more than 5x
one's account balance or daily withdrawal limit, since the machine
still thinks it's giving 20's).