PokerStars has made a publicity campaign out of awarding prizes for whoever wins a big milestone hand on the site. This started with 50 billionth hand or something like that. It’s become difficult to keep up because the site is so big that they seem to turn over another billionth milestone every couple of months. The latest being the 70 billionth hand with a $70,000 prize plus to the winner. Which isn’t even hitting the big News these days. (Give them a couple of weeks and they’ll probably tell us what’s going to happen for the 100^th Billionth Hand.)

But the problem with consistent promotions is that they often lead to someone trying to figure out ways to turn the promotion to their advantage. This isn’t just for gambling promotions, but the more money involved, the more likely someone is to want to figure out a better way to win the money. And some players are claiming that’s what happened with the PokerStars 70 Billionth Hand Promotion.

Players have gone back and check the hand history of the winning table and have claimed that the overall history of the hands played shows that players at the table weren’t really focused on playing each hand but on playing as many hands as possible to give everyone at the table a better chance of hitting the 70^th billionth hand. And if they were, it seems to have worked. Of course, no one seems to be checking the hand history of the tables that didn’t win to see if they were playing the same way.

PokerStars has reviewed the issue and determined that the “fast folding” going on at the table wasn’t a violation of the rules of the promotion. But they will be looking into the way they run the billionth hand promotions going forward or else everyone on that site is going to be fast folding as they get nearer and nearer to those milestone hands.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.