Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Blah Blah Poker Blah Blah Poker Blah

First things first, Spaceman's normal gig writing tournament coverage of the upcoming WSOP circuit event for Bluff is getting picked up by Harrah's and is going to be featured over at the official WSOP site. So make with the clicky-clicky and check out the coverage, as I'm sure more clickage might result in more opportunities for Spaceman in the future. And for every time you don't click, a kitten is fed to ravenous, kitten-eating sloths in Madagascar. It's true. So click.

Despite knowing better, I broke the cardinal rule of Positive Poker Results Club and blogged about it, which means that things will immediately turn south. Sunday was pretty ugly, as I dumped back a good chunk of my gains, and yesterday wasn't much better. I managed to grind back to the point where I was only down $300 or so on the day, when the following lovely situation arose.

I was playing my last set of 4 SnGs on Full Tilt, and was heads-up in one (about even stacked) and four/five handed in the other three, third in chips in all three of them. No one was monstrously ahead so I'm was likely looking at a nice finish to the day, maybe even pulling even if I could score a couple of 1sts. So I was feeling pretty good, right up until the point where I lose connection to Full Tilt. I quickly close out the client, re-open it, nada. Can't connect to the site. My internet connection in general is fine, PokerStars is fine, other sites are fine, I just can't connect to Full Tilt. I manage to get on for about ten seconds once, then it kicks me off again.

When I finally am able to connect about fifteen minutes later, I discover that I finished 2nd in the one I was heads-up in, and 4th/4th/5th in the other three. So I'm assuming that the entire site wasn't down and that it was a broader network traffic issue for a subset of people playing on the site. Okay, that sucks. But, you know, shit happens. Most of my irritation was due to it coming at the end of a couple of junk-kicking days, but it did raise an issue I hadn't encountered before, as far as how sites handle SnGs in progress if the site goes down. Cancel it and refund the entries? Split up the prize money for remaining players and pay it out based on ranking when the site went down? Pay out the top three as of the time when the site crashed?

So I shot off an email before bed, briefly outlining what happened and asking what their policy was in situations like that. Still haven't gotten a response back, which is a little disappointing, as I'd heard decent things about Full Tilt support in the past. I was mainly venting and curious about their policy for handling SnGs when/if the site went down, but even Party managed to at least respond to me, even if it was gibberish and less than helpful, instead of completely ignoring queries to support.

Feeling empty of nuggets of dubious SnG wisdom, based on the last few days, but I'm still fairly encouraged and motivated. I had to fight the tendency to tighten up, though, especially in steal situations on the bubble, as I was far too willing to limp into third towards the worst of the downswing, just to stop the bleeding. I'm splitting time between Stars and Full Tilt at the moment, and it's odd as it seems impossible for me to run well on both, or run poorly on both, as my results are of the polar opposite variety so far in the SnG grindy experiment.

Still steadily chipping away at painting the living room/dining room. Very happy with the results so far, but the trim is going to be less than fun, especially when I get to the bank of casement windows, as I'm probably going to bite the bullet and refurbish them, in addition to chipping away a couple of decades worth of paint that's currently keeping them painted shut.

Not sure what project is up next, as I tempted to save a lot of the painting for the winter, and maybe try to cram in some more outdoor projects now while the weather is so nice. Then again, "winter" is a pretty relative term in central Texas, so it's likely pointless to worry too much about such things. I need to stay motivated and knock out a goodly amount of projects over the next few months, as the current plan is to buy another fixer-upper early next year, thus starting the cycle once again.

3 comments:

mookie99 said...

I had the same issue last night while connected to both Full Tilt and Stars.

I ended up rebooting my laptop and just logged into FT and played. (I found that as soon as I launched Stars both clients hung).

WillWonka said...

I've had similar experiences with FTP... not in conjuction with Stars though. I usually have Absolute up but doesn't need to be.

I do get hung up in Absolute occassionally but that seems totally dependent on PAHUD as when I shut that down, Absoulute starts working again.

But FTP.. I can' figure out any rhyme or reason. It is pretty disturbing as one time while playng 4 tables, I had AK, AQ, KK and AA on the four tables.

Please let us know what you find out. I need to get back to SNG playing.

ScurvyDog said...

I've gotten use to the occasional hiccups from Full Tilt, but I've always been able to quickly close out the client (usually generating the "Program not responding" error, then the prompt to let Bill Gates know about it, etc.), restart it, then reconnect fine.

Last night was different as it was definitely a connectivity issue and not a client issue. No errors or locking up from the client, I just couldn't connect to the Full Tilt site for 15-20 minutes, while I was playing at Stars and browsing assorted Internet tubes with no problems whatsoever.

The site as a whole didn't appear to go down, so my non-techy self would guess that there was a break-down somewhere in the network upstream of Full Tilt that was affecting users from certain regions, etc. Or, you know, the tubes broke, because they got too jammed up or something.