But then how could you ever know in the future whether to try and reconnect or not?
How will you know beforehand if it's going to be temporary & continue, or if they will pause it an hour later & cancel?

Of course, but then they'd have to pay everyone. This way they only refund the ones who realize their rights and bother to contact support.

From Poker stars

We are aware that not all tournaments were rolled forward correctly. We are currently working hard to review the situation in order to provide everyone with a fair and just compensation.

As you will certainly understand, issues of this magnitude generate a very high number of contacts from players. At this point, we are not able to provide you with an exact timeline to when this review will be completed and we kindly ask for your patience. While we understand that it is tempting to contact us again after a few days, we ask you not to as this may slow down the review process.

That's cute we screwed you but would appreciate it if you don't bother us again.

I am a computer programmer and know how easy it is to build a rollback within the software based on what was the position when the software was paused and what it was when a connection went down. I do it all the time.

On to 888 I b guess.

If that's true then there are either going to be a lot of unhappy Romanians or PS has to cough up a lot of money.

The latter... Cash outs have not been restricted for those from affected countries(I live in CZ and can confirm), so the romanian guy has most likely bought all the hookers in Bucharest by now

It is 2nd not 3rd. It is easy to search it...
And as I said before some time ago .bg and other local eu sites had problems like this and we were payed by their TOS and lost EV of our chips. I do not see difference and that case so I expect that PS wil not take some of the money from players that were connected, as per their TOS.

Yesterday someone mentioned in the mtt thread that romanian cashouts are blocked. And even if they were able to cashout (something like two years salary) they will just put your account on the negative side. Just like two (?) years ago when the whole site crashed and players money got stuck on the tabels for few days. And after they returned them some of the players received double of the money they had on the tables and if you managed to cashout they emailed you saying basically you owe us money.

- lol at those hating on romanians and belgians, you all would have done the same if you were in their shoes ( and yes im belgian). Hate on pokerstars instead, they made mistakes that cost 95% of their customers money while they kept the rake from the all those mtt... Its their mistake and it should cost them money.

- its pretty clear that the 50/50 refund policy is garbage, i dont know how they can justify some players receiving more than 1st place money as a result of it. Look like that rule was made before people knew of ICM and it should be changed asap.

- Can somebody tell why they didnt refund from when the disconections happened instead of when they paused the games 50 min later?
Is it technically too difficult for them, or do they think that refunding the way they did is less -EV than doing what would be fair?

- Im pretty sure something similar happened in the past but on a smaller scale, can somebody tell how it was resolved or post a link to the thread about it?

Do you really think someone that just cashed out 2 years salary cares if he owes some crappy D-rated poker site some money if they don't sue? He's just never going to play there again and take the money home.

ACR, PArty, and now Stars, looks like a very well played DDOS guy got his first triple crown.

lookout winimax!

I would love to see the logic behind : some crappy D-rated poker site. And obv I WAS JUST JOKING for focks sake. What's the matter with you people?

Not sure how credible that source is, I took part in the tourneys yesterday, even earned some insignificant amount of money due to cancellation and still were able to cash out to Skrill today

Learn to become funny then.

In other (non-)related news, Stars Group shares down 8,7% today as of this moment.

Well if it is a coordinated attack against 3 major poker sites, if that isn't NVG-worthy, then I don't know what is.

I am really not quite sure what universe you are living in. Ok let's try it again; quote the piece where you find yourself very funny, and that also has a low chance of being taken at face value.

I asked you twice and no answers. Thank god I can ignore people here.

What do you mean with 'as per their TOS'? Their TOS basically mean they can do what they deem fair. Deducting funds from players that won after others disconnected wouldn't be against their TOS at all.

Drugs are bad hmkay.

Has that penny reached the ground yet?

Hardly gross incompetence - this was a new type of DoS attack that they had not seen before and therefore they did not react quickly enough. They have tough decisions going forward, because this is certain to be tried again.

No, the problem is that if you were disconnected, and others at your table weren't, then they were able to steal blinds uncontested - your stack went down, and you ended up with less than your fair share of compensation.


I was lucky. I was playing two games and realised what was happening. I was occasionally connected in one of them, and was able to pick up enough blinds myself so that I probably made a small profit. On the table where I was disconnected, a Romanian player stole most of the chips.

There are some fairly idiotic comments in the thread that speak as if this was carried out "by a country". It is pretty clear that a few individuals carried it out, and waited until they were on tables with lots of chips, and with lots of players in the regions that they planned to cripple.

It will be tough for Stars to implement improvements to their protocols quickly and accurately, and if they continue to run large tournaments before they have fully addressed it they will build up a backlog of disgruntled customers.

FWIW, I experienced a similar issue with stars a year or two ago; that time I was partially a beneficiary as I was able to get connected back sooner than most other people; this meant that i did steal some blinds for some minutes; but then IIRC, the tournaments were paused soon after and I think we got refunds based on the time of disconnection.

That's the issue today. Not the DoS attack which has happened plenty of times since I was playing at Stars (which is a lot of years) not their refund policy which is fine, but the fact that they aren't refunding based on the proper time.

Also, their communications are ****. Where are the site representatives on 2+2?

Sure it's not Stars fault it was carried out by few individuals. Seems very plausible. Definitively it isn't major incompetence on Stars side who didn't pause tournaments and weren't willing to inform players.

And people blaming Bulgarians and others instead of Stars are solidly brainwashed.

There isn't really a second world anymore, that was just a term used for the soviet bloc.

Was about to write this.

Now terms used is developed, developing and underdeveloped countries.