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.