Online poker technical errors

[Alan Mendelson]

Online poker technical errors abound, and sometimes they are very strange indeed.

Tonight while playing on a free poker site operated by Zen Entertainment for Hustler Casino near Los Angeles, I was in a tournament where my hole cards and the board cards were "invisible" to me. When I was in the blinds -- and not in the blinds -- no cards appeared on my computer screen, and the cards that appeared on the "board" appeared as "black" -- see the photos below.

I reported this to support at Zen and I will let you know what happened. When the problem did not correct itself, I logged out. Then I logged back in to go to another game and found that the "computer" still had me as active in the game I left. So I went back to the game and found that the problem had fixed.

Still, I had lost nearly one-fifth of my starting stack.

[Alan Mendelson]

This is ridiculous. Second night in a row and the same problem. My cards are invisible and the board cards are black. Second report sent to Zen and still waiting for a resolution. These are "step tournaments" which lead to prize money. Can't win any prizes this way. See photo below.



edited to add:

Went back to the site tonight and other players were complaining about the same problem.

[Max A Million]

I'm not sure what the problem is with the cards not displaying correctly. It seems to be that the graphics are not refreshing for some reason. Is there a way you can minimize and then restore the game window for the game you are playing? Try that. See if it can refresh those card graphics if it happens again.

[Alan Mendelson]

About an hour ago another player said his cards were invisible for several hands and then they came back.
In my case tonight, I knew to immediately close the site, and then come back to it.
The night before, never having experienced this, I tried to refresh the screen and ended up losing one-fifth of my stack before just closing the site. That's when I logged back in and found the game would let me back in and then the cards "worked."
This is why I will never "put money into" an online site. I'll play their games to win, but I won't put money in.

[Max A Million]

Well, if refreshing the screen did not work then it seems to be a network related problem on Zen's side. Looks like you are not getting the information downloaded to your computer. Of course, this is what I think is going on given the info you've provided. Yes, I also agree with what you've said about these online games. There are just too many factors involved that may cause problems while playing online.

[Dan Druff]

Most of these free online poker sites are running on terrible software, so errors like this are not surprising.

I used to get the "missing card" issue on Paradise Poker back in 2001-2002. But that was for real money!

Sites like Pokerstars and Full Tilt never had issues like this, as they had quality software. (Of course, Full Tilt stole from everyone, but that's a separate issue!)