Poker Site Rant...

Here's my poker site rant.

Full Tilt - The outages recently. I convinced my friend Kevin to play the Full Tilt $100 on Saturday and then promptly forgot to register myself. He gets his stack to 18k among the leaders and the site goes down and he loses a bunch of equity as he only gets his entry back. Not to mention their strange policy of awarding payouts in order of chip stack when there is an outage while in the money.

During their most recent outage I was registered for the 9pm Winner's Choice tournament. (I had won a one table satellite a few hours earlier). I still have not received my refund and two emails to support have gone unanswered. Wake up Full Tilt. You've got some of the classiest people in poker representing and running your site and your support and infrastructure are awful.

One more thing about Full Tilt. They changed their structures a few months ago from 12 minute levels to 10. What a difference this makes. Their structure is now essentially the same as Pokerstars but we start with 500 less chips for the big tourneys.

Bodog - The new software is terrible. The whole one window thing is great for people with one screen I guess but its awful for me (three screens). They've slowed the games down because anyone that is multi-tabling doesn't know when its their turn. In the $100k on Sunday I got moved from one table to the next. For some reason they do not just move you, you have to close the table and then it re-opens your new table. I forgot this at one point and then arrived at my new table to find pocket queens in the bb. The action was to me, I put in a raise and the server rejected it! WTF.

When we got down to 2 tables, I wanted to open up the other table. I'm always curious to see who has the chips on the other table and get a little bit of a read on the other players when I get to the final table. First, FINDING the other table was a task. The list of tables (with the corresponding amount of players) hadn't updated in hours. Once I figured out which table still had players, I tried to open it and it said I already have max number of tables open. Since when is the max 1 table? I had another one open earlier playing a satellite.

Also, playing a satellite - you have no way of knowing what the payouts are. Its bizarre. It doesn't tell you how many people started the tourney and it doesn't give the payouts. Now, maybe they are working on this, because I am playing an LA satellite now and I see that they have payouts. 45 people started and they are showing T$750.03 for first and T$11250 for second. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. As far as I know its first gets a seat and second gets nothing since you need 48 to get a seat (and one seat is guaranteed).

Bodog is trying.. I mean, as a consumer..how can you not like their bonuses and overlays? And their structures have gotten way better. But the old software sucks and its way better than the new software. Bring back the sky blue.

Oh, and whatever lists they have for keeping track of tournament standings is a joke. Those don't work either. One last thing...the new software is a real resource hog.

I guess that's about it. I killed the 20/40 game today. It was a nice change.