Is this reasonable? (topic: Stars refund policy)

[Che]

Am I being a jerk or is this worth pointing out?

----Original Message-----
From: PokerStars Support [mailto:support@pokerstars.com]
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 10:17 PM
Subject: PokerStars Tournament 9109850

PokerStars Tournament #9109850, No Limit Hold'em Super Satellite
Buy-In: $10.00/$1.00
1296 players
Total Prize Pool: $12960.00
Target Tournament #5966962 Buy-In: $10000.00
1 tickets to the target tournament

Tournament started - 2005/06/20 - 21:00:00 (ET)

Dear Glorfindel,

Tournament #9109850 has been cancelled due to technical reasons.

When a tournament is cancelled before players are in the money, we refund each player their tournament fee, and then divide up the prize pool based on the following formula:

- 50% of the award pool distributed evenly between remaining players
- 50% of the award pool distributed proportionally according to the chip count

At the time of cancellation there were 418 player remaining, and your chip count was 9,000. Total chips in play were 1,944,000.

Prize pool to be divided equally: $12,960.00/2 = $6,480.00 Prize pool to be divided based on chip count: $12,960.00/2 = $6,480.00

Your share in money equally divided: $6,480.00/418 = $15.50 Your share based on chip count: $6,480.00 x (9,000/1,944,000) = $30.00 Your entry fee refunded: $1.00 Total money refunded to your account: $46.51

We apologize for the inconvenience.

The PokerStars Team

My Reply

I think your system would be reasonable in a standard tourney, but the method outlined [above] is unfair in a shootout.

In a shootout, each table in the early round(s) is effectively a winner-take-all sit-n-go. Thus, having already won my table, I was entitled to $60 plus entry fee refund.

What you have done is distribute money from my table to other tables that had not yet finished play as if the value at stake at those tables was somehow greater because 2+ players were still alive rather than just 1 as was the case at my table.

It's not that big a deal in an $11 buyin, I suppose, but I would be pretty upset if this had been a double shootout OR if we were a couple of rounds into a quad shootout.

Later,
Glorfindel

[Lloyd]

Very reasonable.

[ononimo]

FWIW, i think you are spot on.

[Shorty35]

You are being very reasonable. They should allocate by table; and then allocate again among the players still at the table.

FWIW, I got treated worse (but for less $$). After losing my first DS to a one outer (I coudnt resist that gripe), we had not even started play in the second DS when the tables froze. Nevertheless, the system seated us (with me in the BB). When they refunded, they educted the BB from my chip count. So I lost $.50 [img]/images/graemlins/confused.gif[/img]

[TexTiger]

Fully agree. I was thinking the same thing when I got my email.

TT

[Matador225]

I was playing in a freeroll tournament on Stars when it froze with 41 people left. Because there was no actual money in the prize pool, it appears that i will end up getting nothing.

[Lee Jones]

[ QUOTE ]
I was playing in a freeroll tournament on Stars when it froze with 41 people left. Because there was no actual money in the prize pool, it appears that i will end up getting nothing.

[/ QUOTE ]

The exact opposite. We have a guy named Jeff who is the über-handler of problems such as we had last night. He figures out how we're going to handle the exception cases (such as with the quad-shootout), etc.

When it came time to deal with the freeroll with 41 players left, guess what Jeff did? He put on his HostSanta hat and put all 41 players into Sunday's event.

As I have said before, often I have the privilege of announcing the cool things that PokerStars does, but I really wasn't the one who made the decision. If you want to applaud (and that's a fine thing to do), applaud in Jeff's general direction.

Best regards,
Lee Jones

PokerStars Poker Room Manager

[durron597]

I was really happy with the decision to refund all the FPP in the 500 FPP satellite. I almost would have rather had the FPP than the 11 bucks even though they are about equal in value.

Thanks for not taking the value of my 3rd hand double up away from me!

[Matador225]

And your reply was very reasonable in my opinion. Hopefully Pokerstars will take special situations in consideration instead of blindly sticking to their policy.

[Chief911]

While your request is reasonable, from a programming standpoint, it creates problems. I dont think you'll be able to get anywhere, simply because of that.

Nick