SharePatrick Leonard’s honesty has cost him the chance of winning the SCOOP Player of the Year title after he pointed out that he had some points added in error. The British tournament star tweeted that he suspected 30 points had been incorrectly added from a 13th place finish in a $1,050 event. It turned out that there was much more to it.
Embarrassing Error by PokerStars
It’s undeniable that Patrick Leonard loves poker and wants the best for it regardless of how that affects him. He was quick to point out Pokerstars’ mistake even though if he was right about the error it would cost him tens of thousands of dollars.The Spring Championship of Online Poker (SCOOP) is one of the most popular festivals on the calendar. With live poker still dead in the water it was particularly looked forward to this year.
PokerStars runs four leaderboards alongside these events—low, mid and high stakes, and overall. Leonard—known in the poker community as Pads—was in contention for both the high stakes and overall Player of the Year titles.
After the dust had settled Pads noticed that “ZapahZamazki”, from Russia, was trailing him by 20 points but something didn’t look right. Pads had bubbled a $1,050 event in 13th place and received 30 points which looked like an obvious error.
PokerStars was quick to investigate to avoid any embarrassment from letting this situation drag on. Pads updated his Twitter followers with this message:
“Update. I’ve had 95 points (!) removed from high and now 2nd there, but stay 1st in main, not sure what’s happening. Pretty big sweat for everybody involved haha”
Unfortunately for Pads, only minutes later he got the news that, in fact, he wasn’t winning the overall leaderboard battle any longer.
“Very sad update. After tweeting stars realised they didn’t have a box ticked for the leaderboard. I rightfully lose 100 points (from earlier in the series) meaning Zapa wins both the overall and the high leaderboard. I /we/ everybody played very different based on the standings”
Too Little Too Late
Pads is right when he points out that everyone would have played differently had they known the true standings. For PokerStars not to spot this in time makes a bit of mockery of the whole leaderboard competition.“Taking points away from 3 weeks ago just changes everything though, like we would have played so different strategies. Below is video of how Into it Zapa was, you can see him searching me before all the big decisions, changing everything etc”
To make up for this embarrassing mistake PokerStars awarded Pads the $45,000 he would have won if everything stayed as it finished, which he has already pledged to a good cause.
