major glitch on poker stars last night

[lolita21 0]

Hello all,I am new to this forum, though have posted to two plus two and have been playing poker for quite some time now. I have kept my regular job through the years mostly out of lack of desire to play poker a great majority of the time. In the past couple of years, I have become facinated with no limit holdem due to the psychological aspect of the game.I have started playing the online satellites to the WPT events online, and played in the Sept 05, Aruba event through UB.My question deals with a situation that occurred in two tourneys late evening (EST) on Poker Stars. As it happened, I found myself with a monster stack (80K) in the $11, rebuy tourney, with approx 150 people left (1300 started; first was 13K), at the same time there were 40 or so left in the satellite to the Caribbean adventure (200 approx started), and I had an average stack. First place in this event was a trip, second was $1000, and I believe third and fourth were $650... basically a winner take all event. My computer completely froze on stars, though all my other programs were functional. I checked my internet connection... fine. After closing and attempting to reopen stars, and several ugly words, I finally rebooted. I got the program to come up for one hand on one table, and all but one player was having a major problem.While I realize this is a risk of internet play, I am not happy with the way poker stars handled the matter. (I never got back on after the one hand and was blinded off in both tourneys, winding up in the money in the $11 one as due to the huge stack it took a while to blind off). Though they refunded my buy in for the satellite, I feel robbed of the chance possibly win a trip to the Bahamas (a long shot granted, but a shot), and of a real shot of making the final table of the smaller tourney that had a sizeable prize pool due to the huge number of entrants. My feeling is that the tourney should have been stopped, the problem fixed, then resumed or rescheduled at the point we were at for another day.Other's opinions would be appreciated. Note; they have removed all data from all tourneys that day, so I have no way of checking and giving you more specific data.Thanks for your thoughts,lolita21

[Spademan 94]

The answer is yes.

[Petoria 0]

I was in tourneys on Full Tilt and UB, and they went down as well....Apparently there was a routing problem in Seattle, that caused all the poker sites to go down for a while. Full Tilt is considering refunding money to those who had problems, while Stars are just being douchebags and are refunding nothing.

[kouta43 0]

The answer is yes.

incorrect.sin-1(0.78)

[cardcore 0]

For some reason, I got 1000 extra FPP on stars and my reload bonus was cleared early. That was interesting, this might explain it!

[Golden 2]

Rigged.

[kouta43 0]

stop lying, we could all see this about too happen.

[Abbaddabba 0]

In the past when party poker has had server problems in a tournament, they pay everyone out the portion of the prize pool that their percentage of the chips left in play represent.They _dont_ do this for you if it was your computer that was causing the problem.I dont know how pokerstars handles these situations. You should call the help line, because if it was their server that caused the problem, you got seriously ****ed. Im thinking your statement that it was "all but one player" who was having problems is a bit of an overstatement. If not, though, make sure they hear from you.

[brad44 0]

I have run into problems like you describe. I try my dialup connection when connectivity problems arise, some times changing the internet backbone you are on can make a world of difference.

[Suited_Up 2]

The problem wasn't stars. It was the internet. Happened 2 nights ago too. All the sites had issues. Hard to figure out how to handle that.

[lolita21 0]

Forthose who posted nonsensical answers, please find another post inwhich to respond to. For abba, brad, and suited, here is a copy/paste of the response I got back after stating that getting my buy in back in the $11 tourney was almost a slap in the face in that my expected value when down to that number of players with the stack size that I had was obviously MUCH higher than the buy in. (Note: they did refund my caribbean adventure buy in though again we were down to 20% of the original players.) In my statement of all but one player was having problems, I should have more correctly stated, all but one player AT MY TABLE, stated they were having problems. My concern obviously was getting back into my game. Some of the other tables may not have had any problems. Stars claims this only affected 10% of the players in the tourney which I find difficult to believe.Here's their reply:

Thank you for your email. In this particular instance the problem was  related to a problem with one particular major internet backbone  ("Level  3") rather than a problem with our site.You say "there are many sites to choose from" but when some piece of  internet infrastructure fails way beyond our realm of control there is  obviously nothing we can do to remedy that. There is no way for us to  "get  our tech people on it" when it's something that's happening hundreds of  miles away from us and with a company completely unrelated to us.  This problem only affected a very small minority of players - less than  10% in fact. In situations like that it's not really fair to the other  90%  of players to put their tournament on hold for what is an indefinite  amount of time. Especially when it could take many hours for the  problems  to be resolved.  The best alternative is to simply refund the players who were affected.  Please also be aware that the money you paid to enter the event was  still  given out as prizes in the event. Even though this problem was not our  fault in any way whatsoever we have still refunded your buyin (and  indeed  the buyins of many other players across many events) out of our own  pockets.We obviously can't refund a players EV. An EV is just that - expected.  There's no guarantee you would've even made the final table had you  remained in the event. When a player disconnects from an event and the  problem is not caused by us in any way, the best we can offer is a full  refund as you received.