Updated on 23 Feb 26 by
Barry carter
Poker Expert

Honesty costs pleno1 the SCOOP Player of the Year

Patrick Leonard has earned himself a lifetime supply of karma from the poker gods after pointing out he had too many leaderboard points.

It was a good SCOOP for Patrick 'pleno1' Leonard after he bagged two titles and a lot of deep runs, which was enough to secure him both the overall leaderboard title as well as the High title. 

If you know Patrick you know he perhaps has more passion for the game as anybody in poker. So much so that he had no intention of winning those titles unless he really deserved them. 

So he took to Twitter to point out that by his calculations, he had been awarded too many points. If true, that would cost him both leaderboard titles:

Unfortunately for him, PokerStars confirmed that an error did indeed mean that he moved to 3rd place in the overall leaderboard and 2nd place in the High leaderboard. 

Not only did the error cost him those titles, had the error been corrected during the series he could have changed his strategy to win it. He revealed he had played a more conservative strategy to protect his lead in the final days.

The story does have a nice twist, however. PokerStars recognised that Patrick made a huge sacrifice and awarded him $45,000 which is what he would have won if he had taken down the titles. He has already pledged that money to charity, further cementing his legacy as one of the good guys in poker. 

The whole story has shades of the infamous 2019 WSOP Player of the Year race where Daniel Negreanu won but a 2+2 user discovered an error in the scoring. That meant that Rob Campbell won instead and Shaun Deeb could have won by changing to a more conservative strategy on the final days of the series, if the scoring had been correct at the time. The difference there is that Negreanu did not report scoring issue like Patrick did, despite some players believing he knew about it. 

Amazingly, Rob Campbell was live on the latest episode of The Chip Race: Lock In when Patrick tweeted, so he got to chime in on the story in real time:

Would you have gone public with the error? Let us know in the comments:

Barry carter
Poker Expert

Barry Carter is the editor of PokerStrategy.com and the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker 1 & 2, Poker Satellite Strategy, PKO Poker Strategy, Endgame Poker Strategy, GTO Poker Simplified, Mystery Bounty Poker Strategy and Beyond GTO. In 2025, he won the Global Poker Awards for Best Book and Twitter Personality of the Year.