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Wednesday, November 01, 2006

The Betfair Disaster

Well, not a bad time recently on the poker front, no mtt win this week but a couple of final tables and but for a bad beat or two, well, who knows.
Played in the UKBetting Poker Payday tournaments this week and despite the huge overlay, managed just a small overall profit.
Had a good run in Mondays when my J9 on the BB was rewarded with a J99 flop, lots of cagey checking, calling and eventually re-re-raising on the river, was the order of the day as my opponent had T9 and despite flush and straight possibilities called my all in on the river with trip nines - happy days.
Unfortunately it didn't last, a few hands later I limped with QJ and saw a flop of 89Q.
When a ten came on the turn, I thought Christmas had come early and was all in v Opponents KQ unfortunately a J on the river gave him the higher straight and shortly after I was gone for a small profit when I thought a final table was in reach and maybe a big payday.
The biggest news of the week, however has to be Betfairs new poker platform.
The worst kept secret in poker for months has been Betfairs imminent move from Cryptologic and onto the PokerChamps software.
I thought, however that they had been upgrading and updating it for months prior to the changeover to provide a state of the art poker platform to compete with the best, what they have actually launched on, is Pokerchamps with blue tables.
I honestly couldn't believe how poor it is, you still have to decide before you sit down, how many tables you want to play, just like the old pokerchamps set-up.
The tables are way too small, or fill the complete page (Where is the PokerStars style re-sizing option ?)
On top of the awful graphics there have been all sorts of problems with stability and connectivity and the Betfair poker forum has been full of complaints from regular forumites and newcomers alike.
Some Betfair stalwarts are doing a stirling job of defending the indefensible, its not Betfairs fault, wait until the problems are sorted out, etc, but It looks very much like a lot of players will, like me, be looking for a new site to play on, at least until Betfair sorts out all the problems, and that may be quite some time.

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