Merge Network is having, um, issues

As I noted yesterday, Merge did a full revamp of their software Monday night. It took many more hours than they had promised, and even when they were up again, they immediately had problems. I, for one, couldn't display the main lobby correctly. My friend Stacey couldn't even log in.

This morning my buddy Shamus ran into problems using Hero Poker, one of the Merge skins. He tweeted:

Merge is so very screwed up right now. Here's how my SNG is going... we're in Level 6 http://t.co/H5jFvakg @heropoker @carbonpoker

The good news is after a half-hour I am leading the SNG currently, with none of us having played a hand. @heropoker @carbonpoker

Erm, I just went from 1st to last. Somebody is playing my stack. What applesauce. @heropoker @carbonpoker

SNG finally shut down... says $ refunded. All at cash tables complaining about various applesauce. Whatta mess. @heropoker @carbonpoker

In spite of that, Josie and I decided, perhaps foolishly, to try to play Merge's daily $11 HORSE tournament. She will be in town in a couple of weeks, and there will likely be some mixed-game shenanigans at some point, so she needs more practice with games other than hold'em.

My table was going fine, in technical terms. Josie's wasn't. It was slow as molasses, and it looked to be more of a software or server problem than anything that could be blamed on the players. E.g., hands would take forever to clear off the table after the pot was awarded.

She started out strong, while I started out with everything going wrong. So of course she offered a last-longer bet when she was already up 1875 to my 1341. I accepted it, because, apparently, I'm a sick, degenerate gambler.

Then she watched in horror as I mounted a comeback. I rivered a ace-high flush (crubs, obv) in a five-way pot in stud/8 when nobody had a low, and scooped a monster. This was followed immediately by making a wheel on 5th and scoring a double elimination super-scooper-dooper. Those two hands propelled me well above Josie's stack, and she was trembling in fear:

But then--disaster:

WTF?

A few minutes later, this email showed up in my inbox:

As Shamus says, applesauce.

We thought about trying another SNG, but while browsing for one, it looked like they were in the process of shutting everything down. There were very few games with "registering" status. My guess is that right about now they're offline completely, or about to be.

While I'm complaining about their software bugs, I might as well also complain about some features of the new redesign. They have a few nice improvements, such as a double slider for setting the upper and lower limits of buy-ins for tournaments that you're interested in playing. But they also made it harder to find some customization features. And what used to be a one-button click to see the previous hand is now completely hidden. Josie pointed it out to me. You click on the tournament number in the upper left-hand corner of the game--which is not marked in any way as having this function until you mouse over it--and it brings up a cascade of folders from your hard drive where the hand histories are stored:

(Note that they even got the date wrong. Josie checked, and hers correctly showed 6/6/12. No, there is nothing wrong with the date and time settings on my computer. No, I have no idea why it would be right for one player and wrong for another.)

If you click on any hand number, up pops that hand history, in the same format as they have always used. But it takes a lot more work, time, and thought to get at it than it used to. This is an improvement?

They really screwed the pooch on this software "upgrade."