Safe all-ins in tournaments

[kamrann]

Okay, this has probably been discussed a fair bit before but I haven't found anything myself so I'm going to bring it up anyway.
I was playing in a tourney at UltimateBet. The buyin was tiny (1 + 0). There were 35 players.
Down to the last 15, I had a below average stack (about my starting chips) and decided I needed to get some chips soon if I wanted to win - I was only playing it for practice and to try and win, and didn't care about hanging on for about $2 or something.
A short stack a couple to my left had just gone out, and the three players to my left now all had bigger stacks than me, but not huge, so I figured they wouldn't want to call an all-in from me unless they really had something big. I was in the cutoff. There were a couple of callers to my right, so there were 3 big blinds worth in the pot (about 2/3 of my stack). I had K7o, not much but I felt it was very likely I could make the BB and two callers fold, and if I did get a caller I still had a chance anyway.
So I went all-in.

Anyway, this post isn't about whether I did the right thing. The big blind wasn't responding, obviously disconnected, and after a wait he was put all-in in the online sense - he was considered all-in for the chips he already had in the pot. As I expected the two callers folded, he had K8 and took the pot.

My question is, is this really fair? I know there are reasons for it, to protect people being disconnected in the middle of a big pot, and also that most sites have limits on the number of safe all-ins allowed. But it seems to me that even one such all-in per tournament can give a big advantage - in my example if he'd been folded I would have had more than double the number of chips I ended up with. While in this case I'm sure it wasn't intentional, theres no doubt this mechanism could be used on purpose to ones advantage.

Any thoughts on this from anyone?

Cheers
Cameron

What if he was already disconnected and someone raised him just to take advantage of that fact? Would that be fair to the disconnected player? Of course not so you need to look at all possible circunstances and accept that it is done in the fairest way possible. It is unlikely this player disconnected intentionally to protect his powerhouse K8 hand.

Jimbo

[Glenn]

UB's tournament policies are a joke and they refuse to change them. I just boycott their tournies and play on stars. Not only is there all-in abuse (which, even if reported goes unpunished from my experience), but the stalling is ridiculous as well due to the huge amount of time to act every turn. They refuse to improve things despite tons of emails from their regular players. I like UB, but I will not play their tournies until they deal with these issues. They have good software and promotions, but they don't listen to their players; they won't even improve the format of the hand histories (which should be fairly trivial).