Just checking on this since I'm not familiar with IJ rules. At a tournament yesterday I drained out the left outlane on IJ after a short ball that was mostly posts. After the game didn't count my bonus, we figured out the game put the ball back into the plunger lane and my score was flashing as if I had done a playfield validation exploit. Unfortunately I can't remember what switches I hit or if the ball saver was ever active, but the ball scored <4m points (since that's what I needed to win!). I definitely went through the top rollovers however the pops weren't active so it's possible that I didn't get any pop bumper activity.

My bonus was ~550,000 x4 if that can be relevant.

Is it possible that I never validated the playfield, or was this simply a game error? I'd like to know for next time since it was ruled an error and knocked me out of the tournament. I agreed with the ruling but I'm curious.