This happened to me on Stars.FR also.

Here is a screenshot of this happening about 5 minutes ago:


I am BoysDontCRAI. I did NOT have TableNinja running, had HEM but I've also had the same problem without HEM so this can't be blamed on anything else but Stars software.

Stars are still being ignorant. I sent them this email over 24 hours ago and no one has responded (they usually respond within 2 hours):


I am also pretty sure that NeilJ or BryanPS have viewed this thread but they aren't commenting on it either, exactly like EVERY TIME when they screw me over $$$. I've been keeping count how often this happens lately, and it seems to happen about 1-2 times per session which is like 20 tournaments on Stars.fr for me. So if it happens once every 15 tournaments or so (depends on how deep I got etc, but on average), with my $60 abi over a sample of 200-300 tournaments I suspect this has been going on, that's a truckload of money this has been costing me (especially with icm considered, this has been happening late in tournaments also).

Seriously Stars, it won't be far off to claim that you have ****ed me over 10 000 usd over the course of the last 9 months, and the amount of responses I have got from you in any of these three threads in ZERO. If you think I'm wrong in any of my cases please feel free to state it, but I think I'm entitled to a ****ing response.

Sorry about curse language, I'm really tilted about this, read all these three threads and I can assure you that you would be too.


edit: just happened again in the very same tournament when i changed tables again

So there's a glitch when you move tables and the next table doesn't pop up? Ever get any tournaments that just never popped up at all? I don't think the glitches are limited to the stars.fr client...

Exactly, and it seems to happen a lot. One irl friend who plays on Stars also reported the same problem just now.


Honestly it's impossible for me to say whether that's happened too. I can't recall ever thinking that one of my new tournaments might not have popped up at all, but in the light of all this and with the amount of tables I play that's very much possible too. It'd be almost impossible for me to notice if one of them didn't pop up when it's supposed to.

I just received a very helpful email from Stars, this is a reply to the long email quoted above:




Now that is awesome and totally changes everything! Let's contact Hold'em manager support because the root of the problem here is exactly that HEM can't make sense of the 60k hand histories you sent to me in a random order. And who cares about the problem persisting, let's just ask hold'em manager! Seriously how clueless can you be??



Pokerstars Steve, Bryan, NeilJ, whoever, I know you are reading this thread. I have sent you (by you I mean Stars) a screenshot of this happening, hand histories from two different tournaments where this is happening, I just sent the two exact hand histories in between this happened just today, I've sent you the log files, I've done everything I possibly can to help you figure it out. What I'm getting back is the above email. No one from your company has expressed any kind of interest in refunding me or even looking at this problem. The last time I had this happen was just a few hours ago, and there are a lot of other people who've had this happen too. People are potentially losing money over it the very minute I write this.

Can one of you for once step up and say "Hi Miikka, we are looking into this, and if we find out anything is wrong, we will compensate you fully. And by fully we don't mean crediting the buy-ins back like our stupid French customer service, but crediting based on ICM".

I seriously don't know what else I can do except to keep posting ITT so that everyone sees it until you either do something about it or I get banned for clotting the forum. Your customer service reps have failed so miserably that I find it pointless to try contacting them again.

I've got the same problem with pokerstars.FR, hopefully they will fix it soon!!!

Very glad someone is aggressively pushing for a response, ty Chuck.

Maybe mention my problem as well when you chat with the higher-ups? :]

I promise to do that if I ever get to chat with anyone at all.

Interesting response from AceMuncher in the Francais forum thread:

Chuck i would like to PM you but cant because i'm a new member. Can you please send me your email address? Thanks. triplemerged@yahoo.com

Triple, I'll get back to you if/when I hear back from Stars. Honestly I think they must have some tech person who can figure this out. If not, I'm going to get someone to at least promise to cover your fee because it's pretty absurd I would have to pay this by myself.

Two days and no further reply now, nice going Stars.

Yeah sure, no problem. Good luck with Stars. I dont mind helping you write a script to sort the data/ analyse the data/ calculate your lost buying & ICM equity/ plot some graphs/ & submit a quantitative claim report to Stars.

And once we have the template we could easily run other players HH through and determine how much they lost.

It sounds like a fun project tbh. I'm not looking to make a ton of money out of your misfortune.

Like you said though, Stars must have some tech guy who can easily help you. So good luck with that!

[x] in before Stars activate my doomswitch =)

No comments other then to maybe help with the hand-sorting issue. If you request a full tournament audit from support they'll send you a list of all the tournaments (along with the tournament number) that you've played. From there you can request the individual tournament hand histories be emailed to you through the client. Then just go through the history at the end and see if you were sitting out. If you were you found one of the messed up tournaments and you'll know the exact buy-in where you busted and what hand you started sitting out. It might take a little doing but if it's only 300 tournaments you should be able to knock that out in a day at the most.

Yes, absolutely. I have multiple times had tournaments/S&Gs that have not opened when they started. There have been a few where I did not catch the problem until after I had blinded completely out of the tournament without ever seeing a table open. This has happened when I have been actively playing in other tournaments/S&Gs with no other poker related software running on my machine. This is on pokerstars.com.

I first reported this to PS support on, or before, 09-18-2010. I have had multiple email exchanges with them including sending log files multiple times. They stated that they had received similar reports from other people and that it would be fixed in an update to the client. At one point they requested I uninstall and re-install the client. I did so. It was certainly not fixed by 10-27-2010 when I reported it again after having it happen multiple times in a row.

Frankly, I have no idea if it has been completely fixed, or not. It was something that happened often enough such that I developed a habit of making sure each tournament/S&G opened. This cost them money, and me volume, because I have not been registering for tournaments/S&Gs unless I know I can take the time to verify that they are opening. I definitely would have registered for more tournaments/S&Gs if I was certain they would actually open. I appear to recall that the problem happened at least once in January.


Chuck Bass, as to sorting your hand histories:
The following command line under linux/cygwin will take hand history file(s) and output a sorted list of hands. They will be sorted by tournament (ascending order) then by hand (ascending order):

grep -h -A 12 "PokerStars Game" {{YOUR HH FILE}} | grep -B 2 ^Seat | grep -v ^-- | colrm 52 | sed -e s/\'\ \[\ -z]\*/\'\;/ -e '/PokerStars/ s/$/;/' -e 's/:/;/' | sed '/PokerStars/ N;s/\n//' | sed -e 's/ (/;/' -e 's/ in chips)/;/' -e '/^Seat/ s/$/;/' | grep -e PokerStars -e {{YOUR USER ID}} | sed -e '/PokerStars/ N' -e '/PokerStars/ s/\n//' | sed -e 's/#//g' | sed -e 's/Poker/Poker\nPoker/' | sed -e 's/Game /Game; /' -e 's/Tournament /Tournament; /' -e s/\ \'/\;\ / -e s/\'\;/\;/ | grep Game | sort -k 5,5n -k 3,3n > {{../your output file.txt}}

Yes, that is all one line.
Replace {{YOUR HH FILE}} with the name of the hand history file(s) (e.g. "HH*\ T[0-9]*.txt" should pick up all the tournament hand histories in the current directory).
Replace {{YOUR USER ID}} with your PokerStars ID.
Replace {{../your output file.txt}} with the file that you want to have as the output. If you are using HH*.txt as the input then you should put the output in a different directory (e.g. ../output.txt).
You should not leave the {{ }} characters when substituting.
I have not optimized the command line. It just grew as I modified it to get to where I wanted.
Perl, or other scripting language, could easily be used to make a much more robust implementation and actually perform the checks for you. However, my goal was a command line only implementation relying only on basic, standard, text-manipulation commands.

This was not intended to handle cash game hands. It probably needs some tweaking to be 100% robust on generic input. However, it handled all the tournament hand history files, stored by the PS client, on which I tried it. Output is a single line per hand which is formatted such that you can import them to Excel using ";" as a separator.

Output looks like:
PokerStars Game; xxxxxxx1000; Tournament; yyyyyyyyy;Table; yyyyyyyyy nn;Seat 2; yourname;1500; ;
PokerStars Game; xxxxxxx2000; Tournament; yyyyyyyyy;Table; yyyyyyyyy nn;Seat 2; yourname;1450; ;
PokerStars Game; xxxxxxx3000; Tournament; yyyyyyyyy;Table; yyyyyyyyy nn;Seat 2; yourname;1425; is sitting out;
PokerStars Game; xxxxxxx4000; Tournament; yyyyyyyyy;Table; yyyyyyyyy nn;Seat 2; yourname;1425; is sitting out;

[The above are each one line. The lines may wrap in this post but are very easy to scan through when not wrapped.]

You can then quickly glance through the file to see if you start sitting out when you change tables. Alternately you can import them to Excel using ; as the delimiter.

This check relies on the hands in which you sat out actually being in the hand histories. If using hand histories saved using the client: I have no idea if it will keep saving hand histories if it has gotten mucked up and did not open the new table.

A separate check should be made on your stored hand history files to see if there are ones that end without you going all-in. Note that hand history files do not reliably record that you actually "finished" the tournament. (i.e. some hand history files will not have the statement "yourname finished the tournament in xxxth place".

Frankly, a general audit should be made for multiple people that checks for, at least, the known problem of tables/tournaments not opening and the possible problem you have identified. It would have to be correlated against the list of entries paid contained in a Playing History Audit (requested from PokerStars through the client). Based on the results of the audit of a moderate sample of people, it could then be determined if ALL accounts should be audited.

First ever session on stars.fr, and it's just happened to me :/

Would be nice if stars acknowledged the problem

I've been in talks with them for some time now. So far they have suggested that this is due to using iTunes while playing and because of playing on Ladbrokes at the same time and other absurd ****. I think we found out a way to go through the hands though, I'm just waiting to get an email from them with the tournament #s and then I'll just request the hands individually. Once this is done it's probably going to take like a day of work to go through them all but I'm positive I'll be able to provide them a list of tournaments where I've blinded out because of this in the end.

EVERYONE WHO'S HAD THIS PROBLEM: Please email Stars about this. I pointed them at this thread and said there were others so there's no way this is somehow my fault (had this on two different computers anyway), they said they can't react to other people having this issue if people don't email them. They have 0 interest in looking into this problem and fixing it unless other people complain, one person's efforts aren't good enough.

Even if you haven't lost money because of it, just tell them that you're having this issue which makes multi-tabling annoying. You'll also do me a huge favour and I'll have a special place for you in my heart forever.

Yeah happened to me today and few times before on ps.fr, never on ps.com

this is seriously ****ed up stars

happened to me on .fr as well, il try and tweet them Chuck.

Had the same problem over and over. Will email Stars.

I lost a bunch of tables this way when I started playing there. Now I keep the "find a player" open all the time and check on a regular basis if the number of tables corresponds to the number of stacked tables I have on my screen. Then I check 'em all manually at every break.

Thought it might be a problem with TN as my TN works on .com only when I mix .fr and .com tables.

Obv. it isn't. Glad u pointed this out Chuck

Strange, I don't think I ever had that problem on .fr (never heard i from other people aswell)
I'll try to keep an eye on it.

But it seems that it only happens to non-french players?

Greets. K.

Thread leads me to believe BoysDoCRAI

sent them a quick email, hopefully they sort this

Thanks mickey, that's some impressive tweeting.

And thanks everyone else for emailing them / reporting itt.

sent an email

I've had that "this table has been closed" screen pop up in past, but like others have just assumed I busted even though often I have thought to myself "I don't remember shoving there?" thank you so much for bringing this to everyone's attention

I feel like an idiot

edit: does the screen on the left of post 27 happen when you bust a tournament and your tablemates all get moved after? Because I get that screen sometimes opposed to the standard popup "you busted 500 out of 2138" or whatever most of the time. But when I get the "this table has been closed" screen I don't get the popup that says my place. I only play .com and no one else seems to have had this problem on .com so I wonder if I'm just being paranoid