One hand tournament in $100,000 guaranteed Super High Roller - cheating or not?

Partypoker's $2,600 buy-in, $100k guaranteed tournament kicked off with three players and each player went all-in in the first hand, check out the details below.

On Sunday an interesting situation happened in Partypoker's weekly Super High Roller tournament. The $2,600 buy-in MTT boasts a $100,000 guarantee and the tournament usually starts with a small number of entrants and with many players joining in the late registration period.

There were just three players there at the start, all of them top regulars: veeea, the current 4th place holder on the online tournament leaderboards (deepsee on Partypoker), hello_totti (29th on the leaderboard), who plays as nicecallLOL on Partypoker and Biack.

In the first hand, 250 big blinds deep all three players got their stack in the middle. Veeea shoved with A9 offsuit on the button, small blind hello_totti called with Queens and Biack called it off with K3 offsuit. Veeea hit an Ace to win the pot and thus the $100,000 prize (with 3 players the structure was winner-takes-all).

Many players believed that the players must have colluded and that they should be banned while other players claimed this was Partypoker's fault. Given the circumstances, all three players played their hand correctly and in a legitimate way.

Partypoker hasn't paid out the winnings yet and rescheduled the tournament without the 3 original players at a later time.

Patrick Leonard, who posts on the 2+2 forums as OurSurveySays and is also a Partypoker pro has stated that the all-in was against the rules accepted in the Terms and Conditions because it aims to defraud the room. He stated that Super High Roller never overlays and the minimal number of 3 players is an industry standard and that the only reason the players don't do these kinds of all-ins is because they know that it's against the rules.

UPDATE: The three players have since been unbanned and their buy-ins were paid back aswell. Meanwhile the poker community learned of an interesting situation and now they are aware of the rules if such an instance should arise.

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