You fold.
That is the answer in almost every situation on almost every site, and the mechanism is worth understanding, because the thing most people blame is not the thing that causes it.
The Default Rule Is Blunt
GGPoker’s published house rules state it plainly: if a player times out during a hand, whether connected or disconnected, the hand is folded if facing action, or may be checked if facing no action.
Note the phrase “whether connected or disconnected.” The server does not care why you failed to act. It cares that the clock expired.
It gets worse before the hand even starts. Under the same rules, a player who is not connected when the hand begins is still dealt cards, and still has a blind or ante posted. Being offline does not remove you from the game. It just removes your ability to participate in it.
The stakes here are different from most consumer applications, and it is worth being precise about why. According to the Pokerology blog, which has published free strategy lessons since 2004, the entire object of studying the game is helping players make better decisions at the table. A dropped frame in a video call costs you a syllable. This costs you the decision itself, along with whatever was already in the pot. It is the same distinction that makes the connection question for slots less interesting than it sounds, because a slot outcome is resolved server-side regardless of what your router does.
Disconnect Protection Exists, With One Enormous Caveat
Several operators do offer protection. Ignition’s help documentation describes it clearly: if you are disconnected during a hand, the software detects the state and grants an additional 30 seconds to act, and if you reconnect inside that window the table reappears with 30 seconds on the clock.
Now read the exclusion, which is the most important sentence in this entire article.
If you are still connected but do not act in time, the protection does not apply. You time out and fold. In a tournament you are placed on Auto Fold. In a cash game you are placed in Sit Out.
Protection is triggered by the server detecting an absent client. Not by your experience of the connection being unusable.
The State That Gets No Protection At All
Here is the failure mode nobody designs for: connected but useless.
Your TCP session is open. Keepalives are being acknowledged, eventually. The socket has not closed. From the server’s perspective you are present and simply choosing not to act. From your perspective the client has been frozen for eight seconds and the fold happened without you.
Several ordinary network conditions produce exactly this state.
Access point roaming. Moving between mesh nodes or APs produces a brief re-association. Without the fast-transition mechanisms the Wi-Fi Alliance certifies, that handoff can take long enough to stall traffic while the session technically survives.
Aggressive power saving. Client power save on laptops and phones can delay packet delivery in ways that look like latency rather than disconnection.
Congestion and interference. A busy 2.4 GHz channel produces retransmissions rather than a clean failure. Throughput collapses, the connection persists.
TCP retransmission behaviour. The protocol is designed to be patient, and that patience is documented across the relevant IETF specifications. It will keep retrying rather than tearing down a session, which is correct for file transfer and unhelpful when a clock is running.
In every one of these cases the disconnect detection never fires, because there is no disconnect. There is a connection that has stopped being useful, which is a different thing and one that no poker client is designed to identify.
Time Banks Are a Reserve, Not a Pause Button
A related trap. Time banks add seconds when your normal allowance runs out, and on several clients they drain in real time, including while you are struggling to reconnect.
Players have long reported returning from a brief outage to find their time bank exhausted across multiple tables at once, with no indication of which ones. For anyone playing a dozen tables, a thirty-second interruption can strip the reserve from every table simultaneously, leaving them exposed on the next difficult decision at each.
The bank is not held for you. It is spent on your behalf, whether or not you are there to use it.
Cash and Tournaments Fail Differently
Worth separating, because the consequences diverge.
In cash games you are moved to Sit Out. Hands stop being dealt and you stop paying blinds once the sit-out registers, though you may be removed from the table if you stay away.
In tournaments you cannot leave. Cards keep coming, blinds and antes keep posting, and your stack erodes while you are absent. Operators generally acknowledge no responsibility for player-side disconnects, with the common exception of extra reconnection time in the late stages of real-money tournaments.
What to Actually Fix
Five things, in the order that matters.
Use 5 GHz or 6 GHz. Congestion on 2.4 GHz is the most common source of retransmission stalls in a residential setting.
Wire it if you can. A cable removes roaming, power save and interference from the problem in one step.
Disable aggressive power management on the wireless adapter for the machine you play on. It is a laptop battery setting doing damage to a real-time application.
Check whether you are roaming. If your mesh has nodes with overlapping coverage where you sit, your device may be hopping between them for no benefit. Locking to one band or repositioning usually solves it.
Measure jitter, not speed. A throughput test tells you almost nothing here. Sustained low jitter and zero packet loss matter enormously, and a connection can pass a speed test comfortably while failing both.
None of this requires more bandwidth. A poker table consumes a trivial amount, and adding headroom addresses a bottleneck that was never the problem. More troubleshooting on the underlying network behaviour is worth the time if this keeps happening, because the fold you get charged for is indistinguishable, in the hand history, from one you chose.
Somewhere along the way she found herself doing freelance consulting for small businesses and home users, supporting both Linux and Windows users and integrating Linux and Windows on the LAN, primarily Linux servers and Windows clients. She is the author of the Linux Cookbook, Linux Networking Cookbook, and the Linux Cookbook 2nd Edition for O'Reilly, and has written hundreds of Linux howtos for various publications, .
- One App for Every PDF Task—Save up to 47% on UPDF - September 15, 2026
- Ranking Online Games From Low To High For Wi-Fi Strength Required - August 27, 2026
- What Actually Happens When Your Connection Drops Mid-Hand - August 20, 2026