Running a pool night when the bar wi-fi is bad

The failure everybody has had

Rack six. Twenty people. Somebody misses, you reach for the phone, and the app is showing a spinner. The names are on a server you cannot reach. Nobody can remember whether Marcus had one strike or two.

That is not a hypothetical, and the usual recovery is a beer mat and a guess — which means somebody gets a strike they did not earn, in a game with a pot on it.

What to check before you trust an app with a night

1. Turn aeroplane mode on and record a shot. If it does not register instantly, the app is talking to a server on the critical path and it will fail you in the back room.
2. Force-quit it and reopen. The night should still be there. If state only lives in memory, a phone call will wipe it.
3. Let the screen lock, then come back. You should not have to unlock and re-navigate forty times a night.
4. Undo something. Mis-taps happen constantly in a dim room. If there is no undo, there is a beer mat in your future anyway.

How we handle it

Every tap is written to a log on the phone first and the screen redraws from that immediately. Nothing waits on the network. When there is signal, the log is sent up in the background; when there is not, it queues and the badge in the corner says "Saved here" instead of "Saved".

The consequence is that losing signal mid-night changes nothing you can see. The two things that do pause are the TV display and the player QR card, because both read from the server by definition. The table itself carries on.

It is worth being honest that we are not alone in this — at least one competing Killer app advertises offline play too. It should be table stakes. It frequently is not.

The paper backup

Keep one. Print the score sheet, leave it by the table, and you have a fallback that needs no battery. You will almost never use it, and the one night you do will be the night you are glad.