Deep into a $10,300 buy-in high roller tournament on Monday, GGPoker's software made what seemed like an uncharacteristically human error, awarding a 60 big blind pot to the wrong person. At showdown, the software seemed to misread the holecards, and ship the pot to the worse hand.
Benjamin Rolle posted a screenshot of the moment to Twitter. Around the same time, GGPoker issued a statement on their support Reddit saying:
"Due to a serious unforeseen issue, our tech team will be performing emergency maintenance. All tournaments will be canceled and/or refunded. Sorry for this inconvenience."
In the screenshot, you can see that Simon Mattson is all in with Q♠Q♦️ with their opponent Tom "Tom_Poker_NL" Talboom holding T❤️T♠.
The board reads K♠6♦️K♣7♣5♣, giving both players two pair with a seven kicker. Mattson's pair of queens is higher than Talboom's tens, but the software pushed the pot to Talboom. In what turned out to be a key clue to what happened, the hand history shows just one of Mattson's hole cards at showdown.
What went wrong?
What kind of banana skin could have caused GGPoker's immane and disinterested server banks to have come a cropper like that. In a $1 million guaranteed $10k buy-in event, no less.
According to the bug report, a banana skin suggests entirely the wrong sort of fruit. The culprit here was a pineapple.
GGPoker's Flip&Go tournaments are played in a pineapple format. This is the poker variant, where players get three hole cards at the deal. They thendiscard one of the cards before the flop. A contextual error seems to have read Mattson's hand as being part of a Flip&Go tourney and run the discard code on it, chucking one of Mattson's cards in the muck. As far as the digital dealer was concerned, Mattson was playing with one hole card.
GGPoker's sheepish follow-up on Reddit read: "There was a conditional bug that made the system recognize the game as Flip&Go, and discard one card. We have fixed this bug, and refunded all such cases."
So that should be that. At least until the next in GGPoker's long line of expensive bugs comes along.
Featured image source: Twitter
