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

There’s something wrong with that link. It’s not a valid activation link. If you forward the confirmation email you received to us at [email protected], we can help you get your account activated.

Thanks,

Teppo

this site would be ideal for duplicate poker. i.e. have an hour tournament with 10 hands against each opponent with results compared.  Also a great way to learn: see what others did on the same deal.
Duplicate poker was tried some years ago, but full table…just didnt work

Duplicate poker does have some benefit of reducing variance in the game, but I’m not so sure how to make it work well.

Unless I’m mistaken, I think the full table duplicate poker that once appeared online was an attempt to get around certain US gaming laws by claiming that it was a game of skill (and therefore legal) while regular poker was a game of luck (and therefore illegal). And because the motivation for creating duplicate poker was legislation rather than making it fun to play, it was actually pretty easy to predict it would never become popular. (And while this is irrelevant to our discussion, their whole claim that a format with slightly lower variance would be a "game of skill" while a version with slightly higher variance is a "game of luck" was absurd to me as well. But then again I’m a mathematician and not a lawyer so I wouldn’t really know if the claim could hold up in court or not…)

In heads-up games the duplicate format might work a lot better and actually be a lot fun to play that way, but to get the maximum variance-reducing benefit each player would need to play each hand multiple times, twice against each opponent (and play "both sides" of the same hands). And unfortunately that would not work because the players would then know what their opponents hold in certain hands where the board repeats and the player already played the other side of the hand.

A team of two players playing against another team of two players could be used to solve this particular issue (as it has in certain man vs. machine match-ups), but only if you can trust that the players are honest and don’t share their hands with their team mates.

I do agree though that this could be a great format for Correspondence Poker if there was a way to guarantee the honesty of the game, but cheating would also be so easy that I’m not sure if I’d enjoy playing this format against people that I didn’t already know and trust. In private tournaments, or some other similar setups, this might be a fun way to play though.

It might also be possible to come up with some other "semi-duplicate" formats, for example where the whole cards were duplicated but boards were not (to prevent knowing what your opponent holds on a board you’ve already seen), but that would have it’s own complications too and not be as trivial as it may sound at first. And in case the variance was reduced only slightly but not significantly, it might not even be worth it anyways if it just made the game more complicated with little added benefit.

If you do have any other ideas, either regarding the duplicate poker format or something else, please feel free to share them here. I will keep the duplicate poker idea in mind in case we can figure out a cool way to implement it. And in any case, thank you so much for sharing the idea, Bill.

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.

Hi, I’m not able to replicate the issue. Can you please send a screenshot of the problem to [email protected]? Thanks, Teppo

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

Heads-Up PLO