Monday Rant (Aren't These Supposed to Come on Tuesdays?)

Yeah, well, this week the week in rants is starting off early. And for once it's not another blogger or any kind of a recockulous, unbelievable beat that has me going. But it is a poker site -- Full Tilt. My favorite poker site. By far. But what they did last night is so egregious, so extreme and so illogical, I still don't really believe the information I have so far about the whole thing.

Those of you who played late Sunday night on full tilt will know that at almost exactly midnight ET, full tilt's servers experienced an unplanned shutdown. The shutdown last for at least an hour plus, because I finally gave up and went to bed at around 1:15am ET after waiting and waiting for the shit to come back online. Why was I so eager, you may be wondering? Well, because I was right in the middle of the weekly 20k HORSE guarantee tournament.

What's that, you ask? Is that 20k a typo? Isn't this always a 30k guarantee? Yes. This is the first of my many complaints in what I basically view as a comedy of errors from full tilt yesterday. First of all, obviously full tilt has the right to guarantee whatever they want to for their tournaments. That is listed clearly on their tournament rules on their website, and it makes sense in general. I don't get to decide what amount they guarantee for these things, and nobody else does either. Obviously. But, when I played my satellite into this event on Thursday, it was listed as a satellite into the 30k guaranteed tournament. Now, if you think full tilt should be able to get people to pay $75 to qualify into a 30k tournament, and only afterwards change the guarantee to only 2/3 of that amount, then that's where you and I differ. And you would be wrong.

There isn't even a possible justification for this move, so don't bother trying it with me. I'm just too rational and fair-minded to believe any of that silliness. Once they run satellites and qualify people for a 30k guarantee, the only fair outcome is that the tournament is a 30k guarantee. Nobody made full tilt run those satellites and advertise them as for a 30k tournament. Full tilt did that on their own. Then they ought to be men and take responsibility for their actions. Which they did not this weekend, as once they realized this was going to be smaller than they expected, they charged us -- the 25 or so players who had already qualified for the 30k when it was still a 30k -- by deducting a full 10 phucking thousand dollars from the prize pool. Just like that. No warning, no notice, and no opportunity for us to object. They didn't even offer us our money back, the $216 buyin, or even the $75 buyin I had paid to satellite into this thing. Nothing. Instead they just stole 10 grand from the prize pool of a tournament that I go into expecting to win -- I won it a month ago and I was doing great last night again. 10 grand, down the drain, all because full tilt would not take responsibility for their overestimate of traffic on Sunday night.

But little did I know, this was just the beginning.

Again, for those of you who are regularly nightly players on full tilt, but who maybe did not play last night due to the Superbowl going on, you would literally not have believed what I saw last night on full tilt. Across the board, the site had the biggest overlays I have ever seen, in almost every single tournament. I don't know if it was the Superbowl, the payment processor business, or probably some combination of both, but traffic last night on full tilt was far and away the lowest I've seen it in over a year. No other night was even close to last night. Let me give you some examples.

The 20k guaranteed HORSE tournament I played in at 9:30: 84 runners. At $200 a pop, that is a prize pool of $16,800. With a 20k guarantee, that means $3200 of pure overlay from full tilt. And of course, this was really a 30k guarantee until full tilt pulled their recockulous shenanigans late yesterday, for a more accurate overlay of $13,200. Even worse was the Sunday night 35k guaranteed mtt at 10pm ET. This one has a $24 buyin -- I've played it a million times as I know many of you have as well -- which yesterday attracted exactly 960 runners. 960! This thing usually has somewhere over 1700 or so on a Sunday night, even lately since Neteller stole our funds that they'll never return to us U.S. players. Yesterday, 960. 960 players at $24 a pop equals $23,040 in tournament buyins. In other words, a whopping $11,960 in overlay for this bad boy as well. Now I know for a stone cold fact that full tilt has never seen anything even remotely close to last night's situation before, because I've been on on every Sunday night for as long as I can remember, and definitely since long before they turned Sunday night into a 35k guarantee. They've never had a dime of overlay in this thing until just the last few weeks, and even then it hasn't been more than a couple bucks here or there. Yesterday, every single multi-table tournament they ran after, say, 8pm ET, with literally zero exceptions, had a big overlay. Again, full tilt simply grossly overestimated the traffic they would have last night, and as a result they were guaranteeing way WAY more money for their mtt's than was actually bought in by players in the events. It was so bad that I was playing 4 tournaments at once for most of the night, just to make sure I could take advantage of the ridiculous overlay. I mean shit I never usually play. Satellites to the Monday 1k guarantee, with 33 runners at $24 a pop for about 40% of the prize pool in overlay. The 35k which I haven't been playing at all lately, again with about a full 40% of the prize pool in the form of overlay being paid by full tilt.

Or at least, it was supposed to be paid by full tilt.

Instead, at midnight ET, full tilt's servers mysteriously crash. They're off for at least a few hours, and you can log in this morning to see that every tournament that was active at that time was automatically voided, with no exceptions. Interesting, huh?

Even more interesting is what full tilt's obligations are in such a situation. From the "Tournament Rules" portion of the full tilt website:

"Occasionally, due to technical difficulties, a tournament may be cancelled. Depending on the tournament's status at the time of this cancellation, Full Tilt Poker will do the following:

31.2. If the tournament had not yet reached the money - All players still in the tournament at the time of the cancellation will be refunded their tournament buy-in and tournament fee. Players will have their buy-ins refunded in the same currency they used to enter the tournament (real money, tokens, etc.), unless they earned their entry through a satellite, in which case, they will be refunded the standard buy-in for the tournament. In addition, the buy-ins of players already eliminated from the tournament will be divided up and distributed to the remaining players, based on their chip counts. Guarantees and money added to the prize pool will not be included in the player payouts.

31.3. If the tournament had reached the money - All players still in the tournament at the time of the cancellation will be awarded with the next guaranteed payout and have their tournament fee returned. In addition, the remaining prize pool will be distributed amongst the surviving players based on their chip counts."

Very interesting (I added the emphasis up there btw, that's not in bold on the website). And even more coincidental. On the very night where the overlay on every single mtt on full tilt is larger by a significant factor than any other night in the history of the site as far as I know (and given the regularity with which I play there, I would know -- trust me on that one), the servers just happen to go down at midnight. Also interesting is the fact that our HORSE guarantee was down to 48 players from the original 84 runners (there are usually more like 150), with only the top 16 cashing. The 35k with the 12k of overlay also was nearing the money spots but not quite in there yet at 12 midnight, just about 25 spots away from ITM, when boom! The servers are down for "emergency maintenance" according to an email I received from full tilt support this morning.

Now take a look at those payout rules I just posted above. Interesting, isn't it, that in the case of a voided tournament due to technical difficulties where the ITM spots have not yet been reached, all tournament guarantees are voided, whereas if the tournament is already ITM, then the guaranteed payouts are all paid to the remaining players in the event. So let me get this straight, full tilt. You have by far your biggest night of overlay in history, you've grossly overestimated traffic for the night, and then at midnight, just slightly before your largest tournaments of the day are reaching the money, including the big fat 12k of overlay in the 35k, your servers magically go down and stay down. Hmmmmmm.

Anybody else think this is a little, uh, weird? Lucky, maybe, from full tilt's perspective? All I know is, I got a response email from full tilt this morning saying that all players (even those who had busted early in the tournament) are refunded their $216 buyin to the HORSE 20k last night. What the FUCK is that? Your fucking website says you will refund the buyins of the remaining players, but of course pay nothing to anyone who's already busted, since they of course are not the least bit affected by this outage. Why the FUCK would the busted players ever get their fucking buyin back? Especially when full tilt's own fucking website clearly states that the eliminated players' buyins will be redistributed to the remaining players in the tournament according to the chip stacks. At the time I was in 11th place in the tournament out of 48 players remaining, so I would stand to make probably about twice as much (maybe a bit more even) than just having my $216 buyin returned to me. Now can someone please tell me, how in the flying FUCK can full tilt only give me the $216 back, when their own fucking website says I will get paid more than that, and when they are instead refunding the $216 buyins to players who were fucking eliminated already from the tournament long before this "accidental" outage? What the FUCK is going on here, full tilt? You can't be that transparent, can you? Are you that sure that everyone will keep coming back to you and keep playing there, even when you're wilfully and willingly screwing your customers like this? I just don't get it.

So let's just say I wrote a "strongly worded" email back to full tilt support this morning. And the person who receives it will probably wish he or she hadn't gotten up in the morning today by the time they are through with it. I am flat out demanding to be paid more than just my fucking tournament buyin back. And if they refuse, I'll be doing a lot more than just stopping playing at full tilt. Take my word for it on that one. Say what you want about my position, but again I'm not the one who made full tilt's voided tournament payout policy, and I'm not the one who posted those rules on full tilt's website. The simple fact is that full tilt has no choice whatsoever other than to follow their own stated payout policy in this case. Period. I was going to win this fucking weekly HORSE guarantee for the second time in a month last night, and with it the nearly 5 grand first prize, and instead now I only get back my $216 buyin even though I was in 11th place when full tilt "coinicidentally" lost its servers, at a time when the overlays they were about to become obligated to pay were the biggest in the history of the site by far? Uh uh. I don't think so. You motherfuckers won't be pulling this shit with me. And if you persist with it, I will break your asses. These idiots at full tilt have no idea the shitstorm I will release upon them if they don't make this right. No fucking idea at all. I will make them so sorry, it will end up costing them way more than the 100k or so in overlays that they stole -- that's right, stole -- from their players last night who saw good opportunities and jumped in where the overlay was biggest.

And to those of you who believe the server outage at midnight, literally less than an hour before the biggest overlays in the history of full tilt were about to become obligated on them per their own tournament rules, was just accidental and pure coincidence, I have some swampland in Florida I'd love to sell to you. What a fucking joke.

Michael Craig and I were emailing last night, as he was at my table when the HORSE guarantee blew up at midnight, and he suggested to me that the rake the site lost last night way more than exceeds any overlays the site weaseled out of paying by the servers going down. Now, I have nothing but respect for Michael Craig. He just got his brand new gig writing for the full tilt poker blog, and nobody, nobody is more deserving of this honor than Michael in my opinion. I read his blog and I think his poker writing is literally the best of any poker blogger I know out there. And that's not something I would say lightly. Michael Craig is awesome, and full tilt's hiring of him this weekend is at least one decision that full tilt most definitely got right. But I call bullshit on Michael's explanation there. I don't believe this was an accident, and I'm going to guess that full tilt will save more money by not paying the tremendous, historic overlays just by shutting down the site for an hour last night, than they would ever give up in rake during that measly hour. And again, apparently full tilt believes we're all going to keep coming back to play there no matter how many times their servers go down, so they clearly aren't worried about long-term fallout from these alleged "technical difficulties" since they're one of the only 3 or 4 sites left that is willing to flaunt U.S. law enough to keep offering online poker to U.S. players.

All I know is, last night was fucking bullshit. Biggest overlays in the history of the site, with roughly 40% of every mtt prize pool being comprised solely of overlay that full tilt itself would have to put up, and then the servers go down at midnight, just before the tournaments with the biggest overlays are about to reach the money spots, where full tilt's own policy says they have to pay the guarantees. So by purposefully shutting down accidentally halting the servers for an hour, full tilt gets to get out of paying any of those overlays entirely. Very convenient, wouldn't you say? And let's not even get into their recockulous suggestion in email to me that they are simply refunding my $216 buyin and the buyins of even the players who had already been eliminated from these tournaments before the outage. Not only is that illogical, nonsensical and indefensible theft from their better players, but it is patently against the stated rules on full tilt's own website. So that shit ain't happening to me. I assure you of that. Dammit how I hate motherfuckers and the shit they try to pull.

Real quick, tonight is Mondays at the Hoy night, on my new favorite poker site, pokerstars!



So come on out and support the one poker site that cheats its players by bullshit cards and fake random number generators, instead of just baldfacedly stealing guaranteed money from its best customers. See you there for a night of suckouts and bad beats and big blind specials! But at least you know that when the tournament reports a $200 payout for first place at the beginning of the event, that's the amount you'll be getting if you win it.

Also, this weekend I won the second rebuy tournament I ever entered on full tilt, which happened to be a satellite into FTOPS Event #7 which takes place next Thursday, February 15th on the lying, cheating weasel site known as full tilt:



So I am now registered for FTOPS Event #7:



bringing my total FTOPS registrations so far to four -- Event #1 on this Friday, Feb. 9, next Tuesday, Feb. 13, the rebuy event next Thursday, Feb. 15, and then next Friday, Feb. 16. All this assuming, of course, that full tilt makes me whole and fairly compensates me for the dicking they are trying to foist on everyone who played the big-overlay guaranteed tournaments last night. Because if they haven't, I'll have this entire fucking site shut down long before this weekend. No way they're pulling that weasel shit on me.

Anybody else have an opinion as strong as mine on this?

See you tonight for Mondays at the Hoy!! Yay pokerstars!!!