UltimateBet Cereus Poker Respond to Hellmuth Payout Error

Tokwiro Enterprises ("Tokwiro") issued the following statement today, concerning the correction of a winning hand played on the CEREUS Poker Network on Saturday, December 20, 2008.  
 
Paul Leggett, Tokwiro's Chief Operations Officer stated:
 
On Saturday, December 20, 2008, two players DOUBLEBALLER and PHILHELLMUTH were playing heads up at a 200/400 table on UltimateBet.com.  DOUBLEBALLER won hand #1162170993.  The software malfunctioned and awarded the losing player PHILHELLMUTH the pot, instead of the actual winner DOUBLEBALLER.  After learning of the incident, we credited the player the correct prize to his account.  We then began an investigation into the malfunction.  We have now completed our preliminary investigation into the software malfunction regarding an incorrect payout in hand #1162170993 on the CEREUS Poker Network.

We have concluded that the malfunction occurred because the winning player disconnected from the table at the precise millisecond when the software was awarding the pot, in conjunction with the "player's state" data being cleared from the memory cache.

 

Phil Hellmuth, who was involved in this incident, said, "The only time in my life where I've had one pair beat three of a kind is when I made a big bluff in a poker tournament and now because of a software malfunction in online poker.  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.  Sometimes these things happen on the Internet.  The important thing here is that I continue to have a ton of trust in UB's software and new management team."

 

There is a prevention system in place designed to protect hand results against disconnections.  However, after conducting an extensive source code analysis, we found logic in our code that we have enhanced to further ensure this malfunction cannot reoccur.