You have now found evidence that these different tournament players are linked. Now, not only are names similar, ending in the "np" which initially aroused your suspicions, but they ALL manage to use all their coins up. This points to them being at the very least a group of friends who "know their onions", colluding together to beat the tournaments. The evidence also points to faster than average gameplay, which would take a fast PC, perhaps the SAME fast PC
, for all of them. They may also have found a cheat. I recall mention of errors in these tournaments very occasionally resetting a player's time to the full amount, but letting them continue from where they left off. If these (this?) player has found a way to trigger this "bug" reliably, then they could guarantee being able to use their coins simply by using this time reset.
I have never seen it myself, but it has been the constant problems with these tournaments booting players off the system in mid game that lead to these VERY odd "bugs" revealing themselves. Once you have seen it, and understood it's advantages, you might wonder if it could be triggered deliberately, perhaps by closing the casino during tournament play in a certain manner (not a normal exit, but a "crash" exit).
I HAVE noticed that the clock sometimes "counts funny", where it will count down two seconds TOO QUICKLY during play, and then revert to normal speed. These are "stolen" fractions of seconds, that can add up over the length of a tournament, but would signify that there HAS to be a vulnerability somewhere, and it could be an advantage to get it to err in the opposite direction, to reset to the full starting time, stop counting, or count down too slowly.
One suggestion has been that the LOCAL PC clock runs the countdown during play, occasionally getting corrective instruction from the server. If you can convince the client application that the clock has not yet reached zero, can you still play more coins, even though the server has counted the full length of playing time.