UltimateBet Software Error Mistakenly Awards Pot to HellmuthError Took Place Dec. 20 |
|
Tokwiro’s new CEREUS network experienced a glitch on Dec. 20 that awarded the player with a losing hand the pot on Ultimate Bet. That player with the losing hand happened to be Phil Hellmuth, the face of the poker site.
This software SNAFU comes at a time that Tokwiro is doing its best to prove that its new CEREUS poker network, which combined the player’s pool of UltimateBet and Absolute Poker, is safe and secure since both sites were hit with massive cheating schemes the last several years.
On Dec. 20, Phil Hellmuth, playing under his real name, got involved in a hand with a player named DOUBLEBALLER on a $200/$400 table. Hellmuth held one pair while DOUBLEBALLER hit trips, but the new software shipped the pot to Hellmuth anyway.
Tokwiro, which owns both Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, released a statement explaining the software error this way: “We have concluded that the malfunction occurred because the winning player disconnected from the table at the precise millisecond when the software was awarding the pot, in conjunction with the ‘player’s state’ data being cleared from the memory cache.”
Hellmuth, who shills for UltimateBet, also was included in this release.
“The only time in my life where I’ve had one pair beat three of a kind is when I made a big bluff in a poker tournament and now because of a software malfunction in online poker,” he said. “I am one of the most watched players on the Internet, and all I can say is that it is pretty obvious that there was no malicious intent and even more obvious that UB handled this problem well. Sometimes these things happen on the Internet. The important thing here is that I continue to have a ton of trust in UB’s software and new management team.”
Also, Tokwiro said that while fixing this software error, “we introduced a new defect that caused 36 hands to award incorrect payouts. All players have been reimbursed for these hands as well.”
Paul Leggett, the COO of Tokwiro, wrote about the problems the new network is experiencing. Leggett talked to Card Player a few weeks ago about the CEREUS Network. Here’s what he had to say about the software problems through his blog published Dec. 23:
The Issue:
As we explained in our press release, the incorrect payout was caused by a software malfunction. The software malfunction occurred when the winning player was disconnected from the hand at the precise millisecond the software was determining whom to award the prize. This in conjunction with the “player’s state” data being cleared from memory caused this extremely improbable incident to occur.
Originally we were unable to reproduce the error in our test environment, until we programmatically forced a disconnect to happen at the precise millisecond the hand was being awarded.
We have never had an issue like this reported previously and we have reviewed all of our database and application logs for December and November and have been unable to find any historical occurrences. We are continuing to go back further into the historical data to ensure no hands from the past need to be corrected. Analyzing this data takes time but we will continue to go back further and further into our history to ensure no one else was affected.
The second, related issue:
During the weekend we released an update to our game servers which included new business logic to prevent the first incident from ever happening again. The new update unfortunately created a new logic issue resulting in 36 hands with incorrect payouts. The 36 hands affected were lower limit razz, stud, and hold’em hands. Upon learning of this problem, we were able to address it quickly and the affected players were refunded immediately. We are extremely confident that everything has been corrected and order has been restored but we’re continuing to monitor the system and are performing extensive tests to ensure there are no incorrect payouts or disconnect issues in the future.
An unrelated issue:
Another player made a comment on our blog (Mark) and emailed our support team about a tourney (2120428) where 700 chips were mysteriously deducted from his stack mid tourney. What happened was his chip stack was reset to his starting chip amount (3000 chips). This happened because he won a satellite into the very tourney he was already playing in. This uncovered the unrelated problem, where the system reset his chip stack to the starting amount. This software issue was addressed immediately and Mark’s account was refunded.
Our company takes a lot of pride in our work and I think it’s safe to say we are embarrassed by these issues. We have an amazing software development team who have accomplished so much this year. I assure you they take this very seriously and I’m confident they have dealt with these issues professionally and I do not expect anymore problems to occur.
Our company is committed to being the most transparent site on the net and to providing our players with a personal touch that other sites do not. I speak to many players myself, I grant a lot of interviews, we offer phone support and our security team speaks with players on a daily basis. We hope that you start to notice the improvements we are continually making to improve our service and transparency.
Copyright © 2001-2025
CardPlayer.com. All rights reserved.
