Things happen in online poker. It’s just a fact of life. Tables freeze, players get disconnected, servers crash. It is not a frequent occurrence, but it is just natural that technological problems can happen in a game that takes place on the internet. And it’s not like issues don’t come up in live games – they are just causes by human error rather than gremlins in the machinery.
On the Merge Gaming Network last week, and specifically its flagship site, Carbon Poker, players experienced more than the typical glitch. Frankly, all hell broke loose.
It was the middle of the night on the east coast of the United States on Monday morning (Americans can still play on Carbon Poker) and many players were competing at the end of the Carbon OPS tournament series, in addition to the usual cash games. Thus, there was a little more attention being paid to the network at that hour than usual. All of a sudden, players were disconnected. Ok, not shocking, but certainly frustrating. The outage didn’t last incredibly long, as players began logging back in after about 20 minutes. That’s 20 minutes too long, but in the grand scheme of internet poker, not the absolute worst thing to ever happen.
But what happened next changed things (I feel like that should be a click-bait headline). When some players logged back in, they all of a sudden found that they were in control of somebody else’s account. They could see balances, addresses, everything. They could even buy-in to a game with that player’s funds.
But wait, there’s more. Many players who got back online and were able to sit back down in their games just fine. But there were first-hand reports of players’ hole cards literally changing mid-hand.
Needless to say, this had turned into a very big deal.
Later on Monday, one player who had sent a screenshot of the chaos to Carbon received the following e-mail, attempting to explain what happened:
During a very brief window early this morning during a server restart, certain players using the auto-login setting were returned to another player’s session. You were one of the very few players affected. This view would have been visible only momentarily while the server completed restarting. We are confident that possible interaction with the account was limited, and we are taking measures to confirm that the situation is fully contained.
The technical error that caused this has been found and fixed, it will not happen again. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience.
About a day later, players began receiving e-mails telling them that they were, in fact, being compensated for the problems, including tournament equity lost. This was certainly a positive development, as poker rooms often refuse to provide equity compensation in addition to buy-in reimbursement, but it still did not make people feel better about the problem that resulted in players being logged into other players’ accounts.
To this point, it does not appear that the Merge Gaming Network or Carbon Poker have made a public statement about what happened and as it is a week later already, it does not appear that they ever will.