Resolution of busted Sit&Go

So I was heads-up at about 14500 chips last night against an opponent with 3500 when…the tournament hung. Opponent and I could still chat with each other, the lobby showed blinds going up, but the game itself was not dealing any new hands.

(I’ve probably played 100K hands on several different poker sites over the last five years: this is the first time on any site I’ve ever had my poker experience outright break. Quite disappointing.)

The official resolution in this situation, which was eventually applied, is to unwind the tournament and give everyone back their registration. This seems obviously unreasonable to me. The folks who were knocked out are still knocked out. I can think of several fair and reasonable resolutions:

A: Chop the prize pool proportionally among the remaining players, with a cap of the amount the player could have won in their position. In my case, that would have been about 40K chips, which would have been quite a bit with my current 140K stack.

B: Chop the prize pool equally among the remaining players.

C: All remaining players get the top prize, courtesy of the House.

D: Restart the tournament between the remaining players at a mutually-agreed time in the near future.

I prefer (A) or (C), regardless of whether I’m in first or last when things break down. (D) seems hard to implement reasonably, although it’s probably the best simulation of what would happen if a real-life tournament were interrupted.

In no case should the House take their cut in a situation like this. (The current rule, while unfair, at least ensures that the House takes nothing for their busted effort.)

Honestly, I’m not likely to invest much more time in improving my stack on this site unless this policy is sorted out somehow. Encountering my first software bug after only a few weeks here is not encouraging, and the applied resolution is even less so.

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Hi @PO8
From my personal experience with this site, the issue you encountered is not common at all, and the staff members are always helpful when it comes to any technical and non-technical issues.
You might not have been happy with the solution that was provided (refund of the buy-in) because you were in a winning position, and that’s understandable, but don’t let that get in the way of you enjoying all the great things that this site has to offer.

It was quite unlucky for you to encounter that bug after a few weeks here, but there’s so much that you’ll be missing out on if you just give up on the site because of this 1 unfortunate event. This is one of the best online poker sites out there, and I’m sure if you look past that one technical problem, you will find that it was totally worth it.

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i think the fairest solution is to pay the remaining players based on ICM.
that way everyone literally gets what they actually earned in the tourney

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Yeah, you’re right. This is the way to do it.

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OK, so the RP staff got back to me today. Management is promising to compensate me generously for my trouble once they finally manage to shut down the still-running tournament. Ironically I got the “Two Smoking Barrels” Achievement for playing another MTT at the same time as the Zombie Tournament, so there’s that.

I feel like the right answer for the future is as @yiazmat suggested above: use some ICM method to close out borked or stuck tournaments. Hopefully this is something the site staff will consider as an enhancement going forward.

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