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