Poker Perambulation

Cooper’s hero in the leatherstockings tales was able to outdo the Iroquois Confederation. The Mohawks are part of that. Kahnawake is the Canadian reservation for the Mohawks. It lies just outside Quebec. Most of the sites I play have servers there.

What do Ultimate Bet, FullTilt and Bodog have in common? A tracert to one or the other resolves to the mohawk.ca servers. There are any number of other sites that use their IP service.

Early in my poker play, I played a lot on PokerRoom. It is also one of the mohawk.ca family. They had a muli-day outage at one point that they blamed on Kahnawake servers. Seems then they had all their pipes with a single backbone provider and that provider went tits-up of several days and they had no alternative pipe. That is a poor business practice.

While you and I get a free lunch on the internet after paying for the basic service, people maintaining commercial sites – like here – have expenses based on how much access they buy. Few can emulate Googles massive server farms spread around the world. Outfits like Akamai can expand ones presence and capacity through sharing of data streams to offload part of the overhead. Whatever choices one makes there is an actual cost involved. It is foolish to buy more than you need; it is foolish to have less. That makes for a balancing act.

In computers, one debugs and trouble shoots by looking for commonality. Often a problem that appears to be a number of different problems is resolved to a common bit of code or hardware problem. It is the first thing one looks for.

What is common with all three of the sites I play and have mentioned? It is timeouts. You are playing and up pops the child window that tells you you’ve lost your connection and it is trying to reconnect. So we do a bit of troubleshooting. Is it a defect in our machine? Unlikely as we see it happening to other players at the table. Is it our service provider? Well, the traceroute I just ran to UB cam back at 43 milliseconds. That is pretty quick. (You can do a traceroute by selection the ‘RUN’ option from the Windows start button. You get a text session and at the prompt you type ‘TRACERT ULTIMATEBET.COM’ or the URL of the site you want to test. It cycles to each place along the path a number of times. You see the time it takes for your provider to reach the net. It takes for step for me to get beyond my provider. In Chicago – the nearest major hub for the net it take 4 more steps through servers to get to ALTER.NET which travels to the Mohawk servers and it the last backbone link before their servers are listed. That means the Mohawks are spending money with them as a provider. ALTER.NET got us there in 41 seconds so that doesn’t appear to be the problem.

So, what is the problem with all those disconnects? Well, we can’t say 100% — beyond laying it at the Mohawk’s doorstep. It could be their pipe to the too small for the traffic. It the old 10# of crap and a 5# bag story. Or it could be that their servers are overloaded. Or their routers aren’t able to process the data quickly. Or… Or… Or…

With all the sites having similar problems, it isn’t likely that their servers are the main problem.

You can go to this location and see how well the Internet as a whole operates. You can drill down to the North American backbones and see if ALTER.NET is having problems. Right now they aren’t. The N.A. Average is 85% and all their stuff is in the mid-90’s. So, it looks like they are providing everything a customer could expect. So, the fault stays on the reservation.

Most of the time, it isn’t a huge problem to be disconnected. The typical site gives us a time bank or a couple of all-in protections to try to prevent damage to our bankroll. But, when it happens when we have a ‘real hand’ it can smart. You get that once in a blue moon straight flush and get locked all-in to the pot at the antes or preflop and see a contested pot that gets huge go to the second best hand while you pick up chump change. Of course, other times you’ll get a darn nice hand that you’d have stuck with and see a better hand won the pot. But, we tend to remember the former rather than the latter.

It became a real problem for me at a Bodog table. There were a lot of disconnects that day. It kind of looked like one player was doing the disconnect angle shoot. That can be done fairly easily, if you want to operate that way. One player was in almost every pot disconnected. This went on and on at the table. Not only is he getting a free gamble but the hands you are playing get shown over and over. I wrote to Bodog about this and the response was there was no limit there for all-in protection. If you are going to angle shoot it is a great spot to do it. So, I play less and less there. And, I move the bulk of my bankroll elsewhere.

The UIGEA has put a lot of pressure on U.S. poker. We really don’t need server problems adding to our travails. The Mohawks need to get their act together.

The Internet is man’s creation. At our best we are 5-9’s in efficiency. That is the telco standard. It translates to 99.999% accuracy/up-time/whatever. The disconnect problems I’m seeing don’t seem to come close to that. You see it happen in your browser to sites too. You get a pregnant pause. That can be caused by a multitude of different errors. It is no biggy if you don’t quickly see the latest muff shot of some actress climbing out of her car. But, when the site is providing players with the ability to play multi-thousand-dollar pots, it is a serious situation.

Unfortunately, whether you are multi-tabling max rake tables or donking on the micro-limits, you’ll probably get the same answer when you complain. Support is also a marketing arm at all sites. Even if the know the source of the problem they are unlikely to share it. It sucks but it is the way things work.

ADDENDUM:

Since I last mentioned my roll on FT, it has declined a bit. I did run it up to $300 and then fell back and am below the last report. It is about $265 this morning. Variance does rear its head at the stud tables. I’d say it is about 75% and my stupidity accounts for the other 25%. After folding time after time on 4^th street not connecting, it is natural to tilt a bit. I think I’ve held that down but I should have done better. You see the other guy hit that 2-outer and the temptation to give that a go happens from hand to hand.

There are a lot of hands that have nice potential where the pot odds say fold. When things are running bad they usually stay that way when you take that silly flier. Play frustrated fast and your blowing profits or worsening losses.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 8:11 am and is filed under Journal, Poker Other. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.