Quoted from metalguy:I guess its the handicap for first player (better player is player 2)
No, it's simply that they want to offer the potential of adding more players until ZB kicks in. This behavior is only seen on multi-player games. There are some edge cases that they didn't feel were worth covering.
Scoring only 1000s was one of the edge cases. They left out that switch to reduce the BOM cost.
.................David Marston