My apologies for the glitch that occurred on the CP server today. The problem was very short lived (<5 minutes), so hopefully the inconvenience caused to the players was also very minimal.

The only reason why such a short service interruption even matters enough to mention it here, is because it also caused the server image to be restored from a snapshot that was taken just a few minutes earlier. So any hands that might have been played within those few minutes would have been reversed.

Had the duration of the problem been longer, then of course the right solution would not be to reverse the actions and have the players replay them, but I’m hoping that with a glitch this short nobody was actually affected. And since I don’t really have the time to analyze the issue in more detail, I decided to just let the games continue from the snapshot as if the glitch never happened. If anyone disagrees with this, please contact me.

Thanks,

Teppo

Thank you all for another fun year playing poker here at CP. And happy new year to each and every one of you!

This past year was a very busy year for me personally (and not least because of my 8-month-old baby girl who takes up most of my free time), so I didn’t have much time to work on the site or play as much as I did the previous year. The correspondence poker format is still by far my favorite way to play poker, so even though I’m not playing as many tables or making moves as often, I will continue to play as much as I can in 2011 and will keep loving it. And we did add Pot Limit Omaha in 2010 and that has been tons of fun. I also started several other projects such as redesigning the site using HTML5 as well as building an Android app for playing on a mobile phone, but I never had the time to finish either of those yet.

Some other future plans of mine have been adding "doubles poker" (a format that’s played by teams of two players, which might be an interesting way to learn from other players on this site), adding "poker tracker enabled tables" where the site would collect and show up-to-date stats of your opponent before each decision, adding an AI based "adviser" to teach a solid beginners’ strategy for new players, and many more. These would all be optional game formats aimed to either be more fun or more educating than the current game selections, but of course the existing game formats would still be available exactly the way they are now so nothing would be lost. I hope to find enough time to build some of these in 2011, but cannot make any promises as to when.

And as always, I welcome all feedback, positive or negative, and try to take all opinions into account when developing the site further.

Best,

Teppo

P.S. Lately I’ve been playing mostly on my Droid using the old iphone.correspondencepoker.com interface that does not have the chat functionality built yet, so I may have missed some of your chat comments because of that. So if I have ignored any of your chat messages, it has been completely unintentional (and is definitely not personal) as I probably just never saw the message. If you want to contact me you can also always email me directly at "teppo at correspondencepoker dot com" and that way there is no risk of me not seeing it.

My apologies for everyone if I have been timing out in your tables, or otherwise been slow in responding to messages or making my moves.

The reason for me not being online as much is the fact that I haven’t had internet connection at home for over 3 weeks (other than a slow smartphone). After ~15 days of fighting with Verizon’s completely incompetent support staff, spending hours on hold waiting to talk to the support, waiting for a replacement modem for days that didn’t make any difference, and after 3 technician visits (well, two since one of them flaked), they were finally able to track down the problem, which surprise, surprise, was 100% their fault. They had never even activated our connection in the first place, while they sure had been billing us the whole time. And the reason why we were able to get online before, was because we recently moved to a new house where the previous tenants had also had Verizon DSL. So it turns out we were actually connecting through their account until it eventually got deactivated.

During the 3 weeks of no internet we tried to change service providers too, but our "friendly" Verizon staff wouldn’t even let us cancel since we had a 1-year contract with them now. Mistakes happen of course, but I don’t understand how it can take 3 weeks to figure out something as simple as that, while at the same time preventing us from signing up with another provider so we could actually get online. I wonder if it is possible for any corporation to ever treat their customers any worse than that.

To get at least some fun out of the whole thing, I did start some back-and-forth emails as a joke with their support that went roughly like this:

ME: Our internet is still offline after x days and the phone support don’t know what is going on, please have someone look into it asap.
VERIZON: Please call our support at xxx-xxx-xxxx and we will be happy to help you.
ME: I am mute and cannot call your number, please send a technician to take a look at the problem instead.
VERIZON: We understand you are mute and are dedicated to helping people with disabilities. Please call our support line at xxx-xxx-xxxx and we will be happy to help you.
ME: I am mute and I don’t have a phone, so stop sending me your useless phone numbers. Just send someone over to fix the problem. (Below my signature is of course a small note: "Sent from my Blackberry")
THEY: We understand you don’t have a phone. Please call…

At this point I realized they email support is probably handled by bots (or outsourced workers in cheap labor countries who act like bots), so for a brief moment I was thinking of writing a bot of my own that would send them 10 random support requests every day and I could just keep reading the replies for my own amusement. I gave up on that idea though.

But I do wonder what is the point of even claiming to have email support if the only answer you will ever get, is a phone number to call to. And of course the first person to answer the phone never knows anything, so you end up explaining the same things over and over again hoping that eventually one of them would actually be competent enough to be able to troubleshoot the issue. A good tip for anyone in similar situation is to simply ask for the higher level support person right from the beginning, without wasting time with someone whose questions are "What does your browser say when you try to visit a website?".

Even funnier is when my wife called to demand a refund for the time we didn’t have service, and to the first person who answered the phone she said "Can I speak to you manager, please?", and they get their manager on the phone, to whom my wife says "Now, can I speak to YOUR manager, please?", to which they "but…", and she "No buts, I just want your manager.", and when the next person comes to the phone my wife finally explains the situations, and surprisingly to me that person was actually in a high enough position to grant us a refund without too much of a fight (some fight, yes) for some of the time and effort we had lost in the process.

Anyways, I’m back online now and plan to spend more time at CP again, both playing and developing the site further. So if I did accidentally sit out from your tables and you would like to play more tables against me, feel free to open new invitation-only tables in the lobby, or join some of my new tables that I have opened.

Teppo

All,

I set up a CorrespondencePoker.com mailing list today so that I will be able to send out emails to everyone whenever there’s an update worthy of an email or some other news I’d like to share with you.

Unfortunately importing the emails to the newsletter platform didn’t capture the names correctly, so a generic and suspicious looking confirmation email was sent to all of you instead.

I had couple of people wondering if it was legit or from a spammer who got hold of all the emails from this site, so I wanted to post it here too and confirm that the email was sent by me, and that it is safe to click on the confirmation link in that email in case you want to be on the mailing list. (Being on the list is not needed for playing on the site though, so feel free to ignore the email if you prefer not to receive any email communication related to Correspondence Poker.)

Thanks,

Teppo

Anyone else tried Rush Poker yet?

I just did, and I have to admit that it may be even better than Correspondence Poker. I’m hooked on both now!

In short, if you haven’t tried or read about it yet, it’s a new poker format where you will immediately be moved to a new table after you fold your hand in your current table. This eliminates the waiting time between hands. And in practice it works even better than I can explain it, so give it try.

Rush Poker at Full Tilt Poker

I am planning to move the site to a new server on Saturday, January 2nd, and that may cause some interruptions on the service. In case the site happens to be unavailable when you try to log in, please try again later in the same day and everything should back back online again.

My apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

I’ve just finished recording a ~45 minute screen capture video of me playing correspondence poker and explaining every move I make and why I make it.

I still have to wait until the hands are finished that were on the video (so you won’t see which hands I’m bluffing and which hands I have it), but I’ll be posting the video here as soon as I can and I look forward to all the feedback.

I’m hoping it’ll help some people to learn the game, and that I get critiqued in a way that will help me improve my game too.