With the money he's spent 'buying' first prize, he won't have much left to spend anyway...
It's a ridiculous concept of a tournament, 999 continues. All it does it attract people who have the time and funds to play and spend a 4-figure sum chasing a relatively small profit. The only reason Vinyl sees it as low risk is that there are but a few others who choose to do the same as him - therefore guaranteeing him at least most of his money back if not a profit.
Should there be say 10 people who all copied him, he'd never do it again as there would be far less chance of a placing which would pay a profit.
This is actually true. It may also be the case that if only 100 continues were allowed, there would be many more players willing to go all the way.
In this one, first and second place guarantees a profit for 999 continues, so where no one else feels it's worth the bother, it really is an easy £1500 "earnings".
However, where is Lion? He also tends to "go for it".
On a more serious note, there has been a new bug introduced by Microgaming, two in fact.
1) When attempting to purchase a continue when there is insufficient cash available, the client freezes up with the "failed to purchase....due to unknown error". It is impossible to close the error window, close the tournament, visit the bank, or exit the client. It's a task manager only exit. Before this, running out of cash was handled properly. The rebuy or continue button would be greyed out, and the player told they had insufficient funds. It also used to be possible to mouse over the left bottom corner of the tournament screen and see the balance cash/bonus popup. This now no longer works.
2) Quite often, I get a "double purchase", in that instead of receiving 12000 coins, I receive 24000. I only receive the standard amount of time though. I have checked, and I am properly charged for both continues, and they also deduct two continues from what I have left. However, for someone else who is playing, they just see 24000 coins instead of 12000 showing up after I have run down to zero and purchased a continue. This makes it look as though I am getting double the coins for one continue, and leads to the impression that I would be unbeatable due to the bug allowing me many more coins than should be allowed in total.
I am sure that if this was raised with Microgaming, they would check my stats and say (quite rightly) that there was "nothing wrong" and that I was receiving the correct number of coins for the number of continues purchased.
I have noticed that this error seems to be related to the amount of lag on the tournament (an ever present problem that MGS simply fail to address). If the purchase is quick (no lag) I get 12000 coins, but where there is more significant lag, I seem to end up with 24000 coins a fair bit. It has never given more than 24000, not even on one occasion where the lag was SO bad that the purchase hung for a couple of minutes, and then I was booted with "connection to casino server has been lost".
MGS have at least fixed the earlier bug where it was impossible to launch a tournament from the lobby, however just in case,
32Red have put a permanent launch link to this in the lobby.