It came to light recently that a player was awarded a pot with the worst hand, over at Cake Poker. The revelation was revealed on the 2+2 forums – where a player with a king high flush beat an ace high flush. While it was amusing that the first few posters on that thread didn’t even spot the winning hand, online poker software should spot it. We take it for granted that a poker site will award the pot to the best hand. These kinds of mistakes aren’t meant to happen, but as anyone with a computer will know – they do some strange things sometimes.

Software has bugs, and this was clearly a bug in their system. Such a mistake is obviously not great PR for an online poker room (“don’t play there; they don’t know what beats what!” etc). But depending on how you handle the situation, you can either turn it into a huge issue or limit the damage. Cake Poker should be applauded in the way they dealt with this situation. The poker room manager at Cake Poker, Lee Jones, quickly responded to say that it was indeed a genuine mistake, and a short time later came up with a detailed explanation – which is entirely plausible and while I’m no programmer, I’ve no reason to doubt them.

Compare this to Ultimate Bet, where a similar situation occurred. This involved none other than Phil Hellmuth, who won with the worst hand. How did they respond? Well, the opposite to Cake Poker. Of course that’s no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Ultimate Bet – a site with zero integrity and one that should be avoided at all costs (Google ‘Super User’ for more on them).

So, credit where credit is due. Well done Lee Jones. Well done Cake Poker!