Apology to the world

Yesterday on PokerStars there was one player who kept slowing down the game, apparently because of a recurring connection problem. (How I detest players who set up wireless networks in their homes in such a way that they are perpetually on the edge of disconnection. Hey, morons--this is why they invented WIRES, you know!) It reminded me of my first few months playing online.

This must have been about seven years ago. I was using Party Poker exclusively. At that time there were no online poker sites with software for Macs, which is what I had. My computer was already several years old and way underpowered. In order to run Party Poker, I had to install a Windows emulation program. If any of you lived through that experience in those days, you know that that software (can't recall the title--manufacturer was Orange Micro or something like that) was a huge drain on system resources and slowed the machine down to a crawl. To make matters worse, I was still on a dial-up connection, which was being shared between my two computers, often with my wife online doing something at the same time I was trying to play.

I had no clue what I was imposing on all of the other players at the table. I was aware that I frequently timed out of a hand, but I didn't understand why. I also noticed that every session a couple of other players would ask me something in chat, like "Why so slow?" But I didn't really grasp that I was being a drag on the game. Yeah, it seems perfectly obvious in retrospect, but all of this was completely new to me at the time, and I had no frame of reference as to what was normal. This setup was all I had, all I had known, and I didn't understand what I was imposing on other people. Because my refresh rate was so abysmally slow, it looked (falsely) to me as if everybody in the game was moving as slowly as I was, so I never really thought that I was causing a problem.

So now that I get it, now that I know better, I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of the people whose time I wasted with a bad connection, a bad computer, and bad software. I hope that the fact that I lost and reloaded, lost and reloaded, lost and reloaded, was adequate compensation for all the delays. (I think I must have pumped about $2000 into Party, $100 at a time. I never kept records back in those days. Like the blind squirrel finding a nut, I once somehow stumbled into an actual tournament win for about $4000, cashed out about $2000, then bled off the rest slowly at the tables, so I guess in the long run I essentially broke even--which is nothing short of miraculous, given how utterly clueless I was.)