I thought I’d give Everest a whirl the other day only to find that after downloading their poker software, the lobby screen wouldn’t fit within the screen of my laptop. I use a netbook with a native screen resolution of 1024×600 so sometimes some sites need resizing a little. Not possible with Everest unfortunately. I checked their FAQ’s and in black and white I could see that the minimum specifications for software download is a screen resolution of 1024×768.

Remember the 1990’s when occasionally you had to check the minimum specifications for a piece of software? Well apparently in 2011 a poker room wants to curtail its user base amongst an entire set of Internet users. Given that sales of netbooks are outpacing traditional laptops significantly and the native screen resolution for a typical netbook is 1024×768 you would think that software vendors would want to cater to users of netbooks. I was sure that Everest wouldn’t be so stupid to design software so badly and that there would be a workaround so I got one of their support bods on instant chat and asked them to confirm whether people using a 1024×768 resolution are unable to use Everest software? The entirety of our conversation consisted of my question and his rather enigmatic “Yes”. So that was it.

My attempt to give an online poker room my hard earned money was scuppered by a software development team that apparently doesn’t do usability tests. Everest poker uninstalled…