Thwarted By Technology

Another week, another near-miss story, another rant!

Oh, and another couple of runner-up finishes to boot:

$999 – 2/833 in iPoker’s $7,000 Freezeout
$470 – 2/47 in $1,500 Double Stack Turbo
$421 – 3/120 in PKR’s Late Night 6 seater

As if the usual day-to-day variance of poker were not hard enough to stomach, it seems my gambling efforts are to be continually thwarted by technical problems too. I think I’m going mad...

The problems are manifold:

• Software glitches. On Sunday the iPoker client failed to open a new window when I was moved from one table to another. As a result I was blinded away just a few spots away from the money. :( I was multi-tabling and failed to notice that game window was ‘frozen’, until I glanced at the lobby and saw I had been eliminated – even though the ‘old’ table was still on-screen and indicated that I had chips!
• Server-side problems. Over the last couple of weeks, PartyPoker have suffered [to quote customer services] from a number of ‘technical difficulties’ with their servers, causing large numbers of players to be disconnected mid-tournament. This might be forgivable if they immediately took action by pausing the tournaments until the problems were rectified. However in several cases, a minority of players were able to carry on playing and stole all the chips from the disconnected players for periods of 1.5 hours or more! Party have apologised by email, but I’m still waiting to see whether they will refund me for my lost chips. In one tournament, I’m furious because I was blinded down from over 50k (200bb – second in chips) to just 17k – a mere 17bb at the point I was finally reconnected. Sickening.
  
• Yet more ADSL problems. It’s bad enough that I lost my BT broadband connection again at the end of October. Well, it would seem I’m not the only mug with lame internet. Earlier this week I had a late-night poker session at my girlfriend’s house and she lost her internet connection at 2am for over three hours. THREE HOURS! And wait for it... my T-Mobile broadband stick – which I had tested just two days before – failed to work...
• For some reason the ‘Internet Manager’ software decided not to appear when I clicked the desktop icon. No joy even after I rebooted the computer. I’m losing the will to live!! As a result I was blinded away in a $70 game on Party and a large-field rebuy on bwin. By the time I’d given up trying to get the dongle working on my own laptop, installed the T-Mobile software on my girlfriend’s laptop, purchased my day of internet usage, and booted up bwin in a browser, it was too late.
• In the latter tourney, thanks to six minute blind levels I had descended from being a top-five stack (in the money) to a pitiful 1bb. I shoved a bit and won a couple of showdowns, but promptly busted near the final table for a paltry $115 payout ($2.3k for the win), my K4s beaten, to add insult to injury, by 84o. Grrrr.
• Problems with my new ‘3’ broadband stick. I can’t get it to work for toffee! The software installs ok, but I get no connection, anywhere, ever. They are sending a replacement USB stick, so let’s hope it was just faulty or something?!

It seems that almost everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong. I may have to take more extreme measures to minimise future risk. I’m thinking of configuring a dedicated PC as a backup, testing it daily to ensure the mobile broadband stick still works and can connect to the 3G network, and never installing anything on the PC except for the poker clients and critical updates. It sounds like overkill but it can be devastating when technology lets you down.

For what it’s worth, I’ve written a stern letter to BT Broadband to complain about our home ADSL outages.

(Somewhat) Super Tuesday

On the plus side, I final-tabled a $100 rebuy for the first time last Tuesday. In iPoker’s $30,000 GP Super Tuesday I had the chip lead from before the money, and arrived at the final table still chip leader.

Excitingly, if I shipped the tourney I could win back all my recent losses in one go: first place paid a cool $9.8k!

Alas, the poker gods take no prisoners and two suck-outs later I was on the rail...


Sigh!

On the cards for tomorrow: the GUKPT.

I’ll be cruising along to Blackpool to play the £1k main event. I’m expecting it to be tough, but I’m excited and it should be a good experience. I’ll post an update if I make it to the end of day one.

Fingers, toes and miscellaneous body parts crossed.