Internet Problems

Playing online poker should be an easy thing to do.  I sit down to play, and if I'm good enough, I make a profit over a statistically significant sample size.  I wish that it was that simple.

Americas Cardroom is a disaster, as mentioned in earlier posts.  That knocks out one of my two options for playing online.  This month we had a big problem with our internet services.  It's been a problem for a while, especially when I'm playing or trying to study online around 0230.  Everything was so slow that I would type a few words, then wait for the letters to appear on the screen.

Until a few days ago poker had not been affected, but not only was poker affected, it was so bad that I would be unable to play for five or ten minutes at a time.  Every player knows what to do in a tournament when someone loses a connection or stops playing--you play faster.

When someone stops playing (in poker it's called "sitting out") players still have to post the blinds and antes once each orbit.  The faster that everyone plays, the more quickly you can grind down the stack of a player who is sitting out.  Other players get those chips, building their stacks while yours is shrinking.  That happened to me when the internet went down for several minutes at a time.  It cost me a couple tournaments and I skipped a few.

I talked to the people at Comcast, and things have been fine for a couple days.  It seems to be just a touch slow as I'm typing this, but maybe I'm paranoid.

I played last night, I didn't cash, and that one hurt.  I was playing a tournament that paid 12 players and I went out in 13th place.  It's never fun to be close to the money and miss, but that was especially true this time, because I was in the first place for a while.  Well, on to the next tournament.