Leading Russian online poker site Pokerdom has been forced to suspend its Chinese poker games following mysterious software glitches, PokerFuse has reported.
Pokerdom has been a leading pioneer of Chinese Poker games, which are wildly popular with players, yet are rarely found on the internet for real-money outside Tony G’s TonyBet.com.
However, those games have now been temporarily withdrawn by the site, pending an investigation of a bug which players say have led to them losing money.
Several Pokerdom users complained on the Russian language poker forum pokeroff.ru about the peculiar disconnections on the site.
One player said he had lost $541 as a result of one such disruption.
What is Open-face?
Open-face Chinese poker differs from Chinese poker in that 13 cards are dealt to each player, one by one and face-up.
Thus, players must compile three poker hands in ascending order of value, card by card, while trying to avoid committing fouls.
Fouls occur when the three hands fail to ascend in value; for example, if a player is going for a flush in his high hand and fails to get the required fifth card of the suit, so that all he has in his “high” hand is a busted flush.
Points are scored for a player making certain special hand combinations, while fouls score zero.
Meanwhile, a player who makes Q-Q or better in his low hand enters “fantasyland,” where he is dealt, and may arrange, all his cards at once, thus receiving a huge advantage over his opponents.
And according to the Russian forum posters, it’s generally when a player is in fantasyland that the mysterious disruption occurs.
Why the Disruption?
At first the site’s representatives were disbelieving of the reports, asserting that it had to be a problem with the players’ own internet connectivity.
However, players were able to provide proof that their internet connection was stable during the disruption.
Pokerdom has conceded that there must be a bug in the software and promised that it will increase the time bank on each table and provide disconnection insurance on all its OFC tables.
But the fact the disconnection is occurring when a player is in fantasyland and playing with an advantage leads to speculation that there could be something more sinister afoot, as such hackers colluding within the games to disable the edge of their opponents.
It’s not necessarily the whacked-out conspiracy theory it might at first sound.
Players at a well-known unlicensed US-facing site recently reported server disruptions and disconnection issues that consistently appeared to favor one player named “L4ss3m4jj4n.”
This led to speculation on internet forums that a DDoS attacker or attackers had found a way to disrupt the servers at strategic moment in order to steal pots.
