You enter the payment pending state when you leave Heavy Athlete and move to Stripe when signing up for a game. We save your waiver signature, t-shirt size and selected class while we wait for Stripe to send us a payment confirmation. If you pay with a credit card this should happen before you are even redirected to Heavy Athlete.
Heavy Athlete has no issues with people hanging out in payment pending as it is a normal part of the signup process. ADs tend to hate it though. The AD can see everyone in the payment pending group would really like you to finish signing up. You are not reserving your spot in the game by sitting here.
Navigate to the game in question and scroll to the very bottom of the page. You should see yourself. Click the appropriate link and READ all the instructions on the page it takes you to. If you have not paid on Stripe yet it is fine to remove yourself. If you have paid and the payment hasn't completed yet DO NOT remove yourself from the game. As the site admin I can check your payment status on Stripe and help resolve any issues, but this is painfully manual. You usually don't need to confirm your payment status as you already know if you paid or not.
That's not how this works. I don't know who told you that or why you think that. I literally wrote the code for this and that feature is not available. Until you have been flagged as paid you are NOT signed up for a game. Your scores do NOT matter and the ADs DO get frustrated at this. The only way this excuse is valid is if you have already paid the money simply hasn't arrived yet that is the entire reason for this state.