With the millions of poker hands are played every day online, it’s actually a pretty amazing feat that there’s as few problems as there are. Until a mistake like what happened recently at Cake Poker occurs.

In what has to be a worrying case for Cake Poker, the wrong player was awarded a pot Wednesday at a $0.02/$0.04 no-limit hold’em table. All the money got in preflop, and here’s how the hand went down, according to a post at 2+2.

Player 1 was dealt Ah Qs

Player 2 was dealt Kd Kh

The flop looked good for the pair of Kings, with the board showing 4c 4h 8h.

Things got a little dicier on the turn, a 6h, giving player 1 four cards to the nut flush.

The 9h came on the river, and the pot should have been shipping to the AQ hand, which had rivered a flush. Instead, the pot of $5.36 went to the player holding KK, who had the second-nut flush.

The wrongly awarded pot was dismissed as a doctored hand history, until Lee Jones, card room manager at Cake Poker, quickly posted this in a thread at 2+2 on the subject of the hand:

Hi folks –

Unfortunately, at the moment, this appears to be real. What’s bizarre is how it happened this one time out of the tens of millions of hands we’ve dealt. Needless to say, our software people have dropped everything else to track this down. I’ll update you as soon as we understand what happened. Best regards,

Lee Jones Cake Poker Cardroom Manager

That was yesterday. Just a few minutes ago, Jones posted again, and provided the reason for the wrongly awared pot, which is pretty complicated. Instead of trying to explain it ourselves, we’ll give you the answer straight from Jones:

During the hand in question, there was a player who had missed the blinds and been asked to post a dead blind in the cutoff. He didn’t, but somehow there was a perfectly timed lag between the client and the server that caused him to have a “Fold” button presented (though he may or may not have seen it). Probably unknowingly, he clicked a non-existent “Fold” button, which went through to the server. The server has code built in to protect it from extraneous messages such as this (including malicious intent from hacked clients). But it turned out that it didn’t have that protection from a dead blind-posting player if the message was something that shouldn’t have been coming in anyway (e.g. a “Fold” from somebody who shouldn’t be allowed to fold in the first place). The result of all this was for the system to believe that it had a side-pot between the sitting-out player and the small blind (the guy with the kings). It evaluated that pot, awarded that pot to the small blind, and then had no more pots to award, so it ended the hand.

Jones said the code that caused the problem has been fixed and is being tested even as we speak. So, Cake Poker hopes this is the final word on this fairly frightening scenario for online poker players.

Jones also said that $500 was sent to the player who should have won the hand but didn’t, $250 to the poster at 2+2 who brought the problem to light, and $250 to the other players dealt into the hand. Cake Poker would probably be out a lot more money if this happened at a higher-limit table.

We’ll keep an eye on the situation. For now, however, it looks like it’s safe to play on Cake Poker.