Disconnection Anxiety

  Bad connection, I'm losing my mind,
  Ooh ooh ooh, won't you throw me a line?       The Crocodiles



   I regularly play online poker on the 888 and Pokerstars sites. My wife also plays, on 888 only. The reason that I first started playing on 888 is very simple. My first online poker site was Fulltilt. Then came 'Black Friday' when that site was shut down and the money I had on that site disappeared into cyberspace for quite a while. Eventually I got it back when Pokerstars bought out Fulltilt, but for a long time I thought it was just gone. So I went looking for the safest, most secure site I could find. My research into the security and reliability of various sites pointed to 888 as the best option. So I've been playing with them ever since, with no problem. That is, until this week.
   My wife sometimes gets up early in the morning to play some poker online. On Sunday morning she woke me up to tell me that the 888 program wasn't working. So I dragged myself out of bed to take a look. Sure enough, the program was just loading, and loading, and loading... So I checked out the 888poker website, but it wasn't there. You know how it goes: 'internet explorer cannot display this webpage'. I tried a bit of googling to find out what was going on, but couldn't find anything. Oh well, hopefully it was just a temporary glitch.

   As it happens, we were playing in our monthly Interclub Poker Tournament on that day, so off we went. During the course of the tournament one of the players at my table mentioned that 'they' had shut down the 888 site and that it was only New Zealand players that were affected. He didn't elaborate about how he knew this or who 'they' were. He also said that 888 had been down since Saturday and expressed some relief about not having any money on that site. I wasn't relieved at all as I had in excess of $US200 in my 888 account.
   On arriving home I checked out 888 again but the site was still down. I tried googling again but no matter what combination of keywords I tried there wasn't so much as a whisper about 888 being down. Of course the problem with the site being down is that there's no obvious way of finding alternative contact methods. After a lot of searching I eventually found a helpline number mentioned in someone's poker site comments. So I tried ringing them but couldn't get through. Then I realised that I would have a record of the customer support email address among my emails, from previous contacts. So I fired off an email and went to bed.
   On Monday morning before work I checked the site again. Still down. I tried another quick google search and this time came up with a result. There was a discussion thread on one of the poker sites among some players who were complaining about 888 being down. From what I could gather it was also down in Australia and Japan and some other Pacific nations. It was a relief to actually get some sort of information, no matter how sketchy. However I was getting increasingly worried about the security of my money and was getting an ominous feeling of deja vu.

   On my smoko (morning tea)  break I checked my emails and found one from 888 customer support. They said they were having some technical difficulties and were working on fixing the problem. Oh well, at least it wasn't another Fulltilt scenario. About 11am I got a call from my wife. The 888 site was working again!
   So what's the point of this little tale? Well it's got me thinking again about the security of my cash on poker sites. I've been pretty relaxed about it for a while now, especially after getting my Fulltilt money back through Pokerstars, and after finding how easy it is to withdraw money from 888. Up until now I've been happy to keep the equivalent of three cash game buy-ins (about 15% of my bankroll) sitting in each of my poker site accounts. But this little incident has driven me to reconsider. Call me paranoid, but I think it's better to err on the side of caution. After all, if my balance gets too low, I can reload my account literally in a matter of seconds. So from now on I'll be running a much lower balance in both my online accounts. Just in case.