Pii's Journal: The problem with online Poker...

I've been playing Poker for about 3 years now, and I'd like to think I'm pretty good. I do very well in live games, and online.

Tonight, for the first time ever, I got quad Aces, and wouldn't you know it, I failed to get paid.

Here's the story...

I'm playing over at ESPN, trying to qualify for their big tournament, the winner of which gets a seat in the main event of the World Series this June.

I bust out three players in the first hand of this single table tourney, so I'm sitting at around $4000 in chips, and the remaining 6 players are around $1000 each.

I'm dealt "Big Chick," As Qs, in late position. It's raised twice before my turn to act, and I limp in, just calling.

Flop comes Ac 4c Ad, so I've got a set, and I'm sitting pretty. Everybody checks it around, and I check too, slow playing it, making sure not to scare anybody off.

The Turn comes: 8s. First guy bets at it, two guys fold, another guy raises it, and I call. Initial raiser calls as well.

The River: Ah.

I've got AAAAQ!

First guy makes a bet twice the size of the pot. The guy to my right raises him. I'm thinking they've each made boats. I raise it again.

First guy goes all in. Guy to my right goes all in.

I'm waiting for my action dialog to pop up on the screen so I can crush these guys with my Quads... And waiting... Waiting... The dialog never comes.

About 30 seconds later, my client reconnects with the server, and I see my hand auto-folded by the computer due to my delay, and the winner has AAA88, beating AAA44.

I totally owned those guys.

It would have been a great story.

I guess I'll forever be telling the even better poker story about the time I held 4 Aces and a Queen, and folded the hand.

Bad break...

[TopShelf]

That's a horrible story! I've been playing for almost a year now online, and have only had problems like that with the new ESPN poker app. Never had a problem with Party Poker or 7 Sultans, but the ESPN program hasn't run for more than 30 minutes for me without crashing. Glad it's not for real money...

Re:Bad break...

[Pii]

I've had similar experiences...

I usually play at PokerRoom.com, and I've never had issues there.

It seems that ESPN dramatically underestimated the load that they were going to face. The weekend after they opened, they added to their environment to at least triple the initial capacity on the backend, but it still doesn't appear to be sufficient.

There was a client update not long ago, and since then, I haven't had any more app crashes.