UltimateBet Owners Release Results of Hellmuth Hand Investigation

This past Tuesday Tokwire Enterprises, the owner of UltimateBet, released the findings of an investigation into the poker hand that took place between Doubleballer and Phil Hellmuth on the UltimateBet website. The poker hand had caused much controversy this past week as Hellmuth was awarded the pot even though he held the losing hand.

The statement released held comments by Paul Leggett, the CEO of Tokwire; Leggett stated that the hand in question #1162170993 was won by Doubleballer. The software suffered a malfunction and the pot was awarded to Hellmuth by mistake.

Leggett said that after the company learned of the incident they credited the player the correct amount due to him and then began an investigation into the malfunction. They have now completed the preliminary investigation and found that the malfunction occurred because Doubleballer disconnected from the table at the exact millisecond the software was awarding the winning pot. This happened at the same moment the “player’s state” data was being cleared from the memory cache.

Hellmuth commented on the incident saying: "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."

The statement also commented that there is a prevention system in place that is supposed to protect results from disconnections but analysis of the source code revealed logic in the code that UltimateBet has now enhanced to make sure the malfunction will not happen again.

Leggett commented that they were able to reproduce the error on the testing systems by forcing a hand to disconnect its winning player at the precise millisecond the hand was awarded the pot and at the same time flushing the “players state” data. Leggett then commented that if the disconnection had happened a second before or after the time it did happen the malfunction would not have occurred.