An interesting story about a guy who lost a lot of money because his DSL went down during an online poker game (due to a gunfight?!), and his “All in” message, sent while sitting on pocket aces, ended up not taking effect until a later game;
In discussing who to blame though, Mike Masnick of Techdirt suggested;
The guy, needless to say, is a bit pissed off. He wants to blame someone, but Qwest, the DSL provider isn’t taking responsibility (can you believe them?). The online poker site also said too bad. Obviously, he’s going after the wrong people. The person to blame is the “random” shooter who took out DSL in New Mexico.
It seems to me that this is a design flaw with the poker room software; that the messages sent from the client aren’t sufficiently self-descriptive. If the messages included an embedded “hand id”, identifying the particular hand of poker being played, then there’d be no problem as delayed messages would be ignored. Sue ’em, I say!