Crashing Carbon

In the post-Black Friday era, I was still playing online for a couple of years thanks to winning some cabbage in a freeroll over on Hero Poker. Those funds I had transferred over to Carbon Poker once Hero decided to step aside in December 2012, where I played a few months longer although sadly saw my small roll dwindle down to next-to-nothing.

I believe the last hand I played over there was probably sometime in the spring or summer of 2013, which now that I think about it had to have been the last hand of real money online poker I’ve played.

In any event, my memory of briefly goofing around on Carbon for a few months isn’t especially enduring. That said, I found myself trying to remember the games when hearing about this recent story of the site experiencing frequent crashes and disconnections, including some weirdness involving players subsequently logging back on and having access to other players’ accounts, having hole cards change on them in the middle of hands, and other oddities occurring.

It sounds like the site might have fallen victim to a hacker who figured out a way to crash the site (like a “distributed denial-of-service” or DDoS attack). You can read more about what’s known and what’s being speculated about it all in this article by Steve Ruddock for PokerUpdate.

Ruddock uses the story as an occasion to argue again for legalized, regulated online poker in the U.S. He’s right that in a regulated environment players are theoretically going to be protected from fraud, theft of funds, or other consequences of site-hacking, even if the regulated sites aren’t necessarily going to be immune to such attacks.

Meanwhile... that business of the hole cards changing mid-hand -- how many of you have had that bad dream before?