More Problems at UltimateBet - Oh Brother !

Early Saturday morning, DOUBLEBALLER
and Ultimate Bet front man PHIL HELLMUTH
were playing heads up on a $200/$400 limit
table on Ultimate Bet. However, when the hand
was over, Hellmuth scooped the pot with a
pair of deuces, despite DOUBLEBALLER
holding THREE KINGS ! Ultimate Bet issued a
press release explaining the fluke late
Tuesday afternoon.

The Tokwiro-owned online poker site
blamed the abnormality on DOUBLEBALLER
being disconnected at the exact moment
in time as the payout in the hand was
being awarded. Ultimate Bet added that
this happened “in conjunction with the
‘player’s state’ data being cleared from
the memory cache.” In essence, it appears
as if the Ultimate Bet software did not
recognize DOUBLEBALLER being seated
at the table, thus incorrectly awarding the
pot to his opponent.

Chat posted on 2+2 is in line with the story.
DOUBLEBALLER returned from being
disconnected and confronted Hellmuth
about the incident. Curiously, upon
DOUBLEBALLER’s return, Hellmuth was
seen typing phrases in the chat such as
“I play U limit, right now” and “miracle U
beat me.” Hellmuth stated in the Tokwiro
press release, “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. The important thing here
is that I continue to have a ton of trust
in UB’s software and new management team.”

In the process of fixing the disconnection
issue, Ultimate Bet introduced a new error
onto its servers which resulted in 36 pots
being awarded erroneously. The statement
read, “All players have been reimbursed
for these hands as well.” The game types
that were adversely affected as part of
the 36 hands were in low-limit Razz, Stud,
and Hold’em.

Meanwhile, the online poker room’s
technical staff is busy combing through
past hands dealt on Ultimate Bet’s
virtual felts looking for other potential
instances where the same error that
affected DOUBLEBALLER may have
occurred. So far, no such problems
have been found from hand histories
in November and December.

The hand in question was number
1162170993. It kicked off at 4:15am ET
early Saturday morning. The final board
read K-K-J-2-9. Hellmuth held the Doyle
Brunson hand, 10-2, for a pair of twos.
DOUBLEBALLER held K-Q for trip kings.
In the end, Hellmuth scooped a $5,599
pot with his inferior hand. In chat posted
between the two players, Hellmuth
suggested that DOUBLEBALLER may
have been “booted,” which turned out
to be the root cause of the problem.
Hellmuth entered the hand with $4,495,
shy of DOUBLEBALLER’s stack of $7,494.

Ultimate Bet recently merged with
Absolute Poker to form the CEREUS
poker network. The two sites are both
run by Tokwiro Enterprises, which is
owned by Joe Norton. They were recently
the subjects of a feature piece by CBS
News program “60 Minutes,” which
focused on the cheating scandals on
each of the two sites. Ultimate Bet claimed
that the simultaneous occurrence of the
pot being awarded and DOUBLEBALLER’s
disconnect was the primary cause.
It added, “Had the disconnection happened
literally a millisecond sooner or later, the error
would not have transpired.”







**Official Statement From UltimateBet**

--------------------------------------

Tuesday, December 23, 2008 - COO

On Saturday, December 20, 2008 we were alerted to a problem with a hand involving PHILHELLMUTH and DOUBLEBALLER.
We realize that this issue is of great concern to UB’ers and the poker community. Since we learned of the problem we have worked tirelessly investigating and fixing the software issue that was responsible for the incorrect payout. We have now released an official statement, which you can read it on our corporate site tokwiro.com.

I became aware of the problem on Saturday evening, shortly before I made my original post on this blog. I must admit that the information on twoplustwo was very helpful to me in getting up to speed right away.

I know many of you wanted information immediately after the incident happened. I did make a post on the UB blog to let everyone know we were aware of the problem and the seriousness of it. At the time I did not comment further because I wanted to make sure that we had all the facts before we made any public statements. I would hate to say something that is inaccurate or even false because I rushed it out before understanding the problem completely.

The problem is truly and honestly just a software malfunction. I do realize this issue caused a great deal of concern because Phil Hellmuth, a spokesperson for the site, benefited from the malfunction and that is quite the coincidence. For this reason we are providing the public with as much information as possible and hope that by doing so, and answering as many of your questions as possible, you will be reassured that our site is a safe place to play.

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 programatically 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 addressed 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 payout 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 (212042 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.

I will try to blog and respond to your comments/questions the best I can over the holidays.

Happy holidays everyone!
Cheers,
Paul Leggett