In light of what happened over a year ago at Ultimate Bet, where Phil Hellmuth won a pot he wasn’t entitled to, a similar issue popped up on Cake Poker earlier this afternoon. Per usual, a post came to the 2+2 poker forum with all the details, along with a confirmation in the thread from Lee Jones, card room manager of Cake Poker:
Hi folks –
Unfortunately, at the moment, this appears to be real. What’s bizarre is how it happened this one time out of the tens of millions of hands we’ve dealt. Needless to say, our software people have dropped everything else to track this down. I’ll update you as soon as we understand what happened.
A later post from Jones mentioned they would shut down the servers for a brief period of time to see if the issue reappears, more details and information as they become available.
On December 31, Ultimate COO Paul Leggett issued an update on previous software issues that happened earlier in December. It’s linked here, or you can click on the button below to read it in full:
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Ultimate COO Paul Leggett has given an update to the blog at Ultimate Bet about the Phil Hellmuth v DOUBLEBALLER hand that caused all sorts of controversy in the online community since Saturday morning, a portion of that comment is excerpted below:
As we explained in our press release, the incorrect payout was caused by a software malfunction. The software malfunction occurred when the winning player was disconnected from the hand at the precise millisecond the software was determining whom to award the prize. This in conjunction with the “player’s state†data being cleared from memory caused this extremely improbable incident to occur.
Originally we were unable to reproduce the error in our test environment, until we programatically forced a disconnect to happen at the precise millisecond the hand was being awarded.
We have never had an issue like this reported previously and we have reviewed all of our database and application logs for December and November and have been unable to find any historical occurrences. We are continuing to go back further into the historical data to ensure no hands from the past need to be corrected. Analyzing this data takes time but we will continue to go back further and further into our history to ensure no one else was affected.
Leggett’s entire statement can be found at the Ultimate Bet blog.
Tokwiro Enterprises, who own Ultimate Bet and Absolute Poker, issued their own statement on the matter, after the jump:
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The software problems at UB appear to continue, here’s a hand posted on 2+2 from this afternoon. It doesn’t involve a name player, but it does show a player winning a pot with no hand at all, literally:
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The hot topic at 2+2 at the moment involves everyone’s favorite whipping boys: Ultimate Bet and Phil Hellmuth. Seems a player by the name of DOUBLEBALLER was playing $200/400 limit holdem with Hellmuth this morning when the following hand comes up:
Hellmuth wins hand without showing cards at showdown.
According to the hand history, Hellmuth has 10-2, while Doubleballer has KQ.
As you can imagine, all sorts of heck breaks loose on the Internet when a glitch like this happens. The person who was affected by this would post on 2+2, saying he contacted UB support, who would only credit $2300 for now (he would later post in the thread that he had to make another call to support to get the rest of what he lost).
While it was supposedly a software glitch (that UB support says has already been fixed), it’s peculiar that the problem happened with the player most synonymous with UB in the hand in question. More details on the situation as things happen.
Update: COO Paul Leggett blogged briefly about the incident over at the Ultimate Bet blog.
There seem to be 100 polls coming out each day pertaining to the presidential race, so a poker-related poll has been released to take your minds off the pesky politics that will decide who will run the U.S. for the next four years.
Poker Software, a cleverly named online site dedicated to information about poker software and other related tools, has been conducting some polls for its members to rank (with five being the best and zero the worst, obv) various software programs and online poker sites. Though voting is ongoing, some of the most recent results have been released:
Poker software programs:
1. Hold’em Manager – 4.63
2. SharkScope.com – 4.50
3. PokerHand.org – 4.50
4. Popopop Hand Replayer – 4.50
5. Smart Buddy – 4.37
6. PokerGrapher – 4.20
7. Sixth Sense – 4.20
8. Sharkscope HUD – 4.20
9. Poker 4H Calculator – 4.20
10. SpadeEye – 4.10
Online poker sites:
1. PokerStars – 4.93
2. Full Tilt Poker – 4.55
3. Party Poker – 4.00
4. Titan Poker – 3.90
5. Doyles Room – 3.90
6. Bodog – 3.90
7. Cake Poker – 3.85
8. Ultimate Bet – 3.85
9. Carbon Poker – 3.80
10. Absolute Poker – 1.08
