Trials of a Poker Apprentice: Justice delivered

Before this little issue gets lost in all the news coming out of the World Series of Poker, I should probably update everyone on the results of my complaint about the frozen tournament I played last week.

Briefly, I played a $5 tournament that had gotten down to 21 players when the server crashed and the tourney was cancelled. The top 20 were supposed to be paid, so we had already eliminated most of the field before the crash. However, afterwards, all I received was a $5 tournament ticket, and I was hopping mad because I was entitled to a bit more.

Anyway, I wrote a nasty complaint to the poker site where I was playing and didn't hear from them for several days. Saturday, after three days of waiting, I finally got a response. Essentially, they divided the $2,100 prize pool equally among the 21 players left, and I got $100. That was great for me, since I was pretty short-stacked at the time and had figured that, if they paid out according to stack size, I would have been due only around $35. Of course, I would probably feel differently about this resolution had I been one of the chip leaders at the time of the crash, but at least this was an attempt to resolve the situation. Anyway, if memory serves, the $100 payout was roughly equivalent to either a fifth- or sixth-place finish, and even an overwhelming chip leader at that point wouldn't have been guaranteed of finishing any higher than that, had the tournament played out, so this resolution was pretty fair, in my eyes.

Enough of that. It's time to get back to eagerly waiting for tidbits from the WSOP. In the meantime, here are the poker stories making headlines across the web: