Advice if you have a connection issue

Sky_Poker

We’ve all experienced occasional connection issues when accessing the internet, this thread is to help advise you what to do if you experience any problems whilst playing Sky Poker. It is not intended to be a technical document, more a guide to help you, should you be unlucky enough to have a problem.

The first thing to say is that playing poker online is helped by a regular and reliable connection to the internet. This is because you can be sat at a table or playing a tournament for several hours, playing hands regularly throughout this period.

A lost connection (for whatever reason) will obviously affect your ability to play a hand. The Sky Poker software is designed to handle a short loss in connection and reconnect you but a long one will not allow you to play your hand in the time available.

Sky_Poker

With this in mind, this is the order of preference we recommend playing Sky Poker at home:

1)     A wired broadband internet connection (i.e. directly plugged into the phone line or router)
2)     A wireless / Wi-Fi broadband connection, ideally a strong and reliable one.
3)     A 3G dongle connection to the mobile broadband network
      a.     Because of the points made above, we would not really recommend this option.
      b.    Sky Poker can be played over this kind of connection but it is generally not as reliable

Sometimes, if someone has a connection problem, they will say ‘but I can access other things on the internet’. However, the kind of connection you need for other things online is different, depending on what you are looking at. Even streaming a video you don’t necessarily need a 100% connection because your device buffers the video ahead of you watching it and catches-up as and when it can.

Sometimes people say ‘but I can play poker another site’, but even that would depend on the software they use, the device and how it is setup (more on this later). It’s likely that there will be occasions you can play on Sky Poker but not on other sites.

Sky_Poker

As you’ll be aware, Sky Poker software utilises Adobe Flash Player. There are regular updates to this so we recommend where possible that you keep up to date with the latest version of this software (currently v11). The same applies to the Adobe Air software that our download product uses (currently version 3.3).

If you are playing on a browser, the same applies. Which one works best for you will depend on your own setup but Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox etc all have regular updates so we recommend you keep up to date with those too. You may have your device setup to do this automatically but, if not, a quick search for the above in a search engine will help you identify if you have the latest version. Also, if you have a problem on one browser, you might want to try another.

For example – Internet Explorer by Microsoft is on v9 at the moment (10 coming soon). You can check what your version is by going into ‘About Internet Explorer’ menu in your browser.

Another thing to consider is general housekeeping on your PC and software to make sure it runs as smoothly as possible.

Sky_Poker

So if you have followed the above and have a problem, what then?

Firstly, it is important to remember that connecting over the internet has various links in the chain. So for example, one example setup could be:

1)     Laptop device (which obviously has its own memory, processor etc)
2)     Utilising ‘X’ browser
3)     With ‘Y’ operating system
4)     Through a wireless connection (which may be shared with others or running other things)
5)     Attaching to a router
6)     Going through your ISP
7)     Which links to your local exchange
8)     Communicating via the national network
9)     To the Sky Poker servers (and back again)

Now as you know, on most occasions each of these ‘links' will be fine and you will have a reliable and enjoyable playing experience, but it only takes problems with one to affect your connection. The trick is to find out which one.

You may have seen people occasionally point the finger at Sky Poker. In fact, we’ve had situations before where people have said something is ‘wrong’ with Sky Poker. Only to find out this is not the case or it remedies itself in a later session.

Sky_Poker

Something you may not be aware of is that Sky Poker has very sophisticated live monitoring systems to tell us how many people are having connection issues. Thankfully, it is very rare that this rises above a handful of players amongst the many thousands online and even amongst those, there are people ‘sat out’ which people sometimes mistake for another player with a problem when really they just haven’t turned up to play.

Whenever people contact us we can see if there is a Sky Poker ‘wholesale’ problem with connections. However, as we have said, this is rare but could happen.

So we would recommend you try to eliminate the potential causes we have been through, perhaps doing things like speaking to your ISP (if you think that could be the problem) to see if they can do a line test or whatever they recommend.

Sky_Poker

If you are struggling with this and need some help then please do contact our customer care team and we will do all we can to help.

To do this you need to please email help@skypoker.com and preferably entitle your email ‘Poker Connection Help’, with the following information:

A)    A short description of your problem
    Which game you were playing, ideally with a hand ID
C)    Your browser and version
D)    Your  device and spec
E)    Your  ISP

We'll then look into this to see if we can do anything to help identify the issue you are having.

We hope you found this useful.

Thanks
Sky Poker Team