Common courtesy

Playing in a $6 turbo single table SNG on Pokerstars Saturday morning and experienced 2 players with bad connections really holding up the show. These folks were sitting next to each other and each was getting disconnected nearly every hand. As a result, it took almost 90 minutes to complete this tourney which was exceedling frustrating. Obviously Pokerstars does not have some sort of connection monitor to make sure this doesn't happen.

As it happens, I was ready to bail from this one as it was very frustrating and I was short stacked anyway. Next hand I got 10-7 suited and just went all-in. Had 4 callers (including the 2 bad connections) and the flop ended up 10-10-7.

So I won this event and decided to give it another shot. Joined the next one and sure enough, the 2 bad connections joined it as well. I quickly unregistered and called it a morning. My question is why would these folks gamble with real money with lousy connections? And, if they know they'll be an anchor for everyone else, why play?

[16:56] <Qhr1s> because they're trying to raise the money for broadband

The obvious answer is that most poker players don't care about their opponents - after all, you're all trying to take money from each other, aren't you?
I was surprised recently to be sat at a real-money table, where half of the players are discussing strategy, and why the previous plays were good or bad, while still playing to try and take money from each other... I didn't mind, as I think there were enough fish to make it profitable for all of us (I certainly still made a profit).
I don't think that players with bad connections should be playing turbo tournaments, though - that's taking the mickey a bit...

It's possibly something that could be addressed by the poker sites, in the sense that having a time bank for disconnections is fine, but they could limit the number of times that someone can disconnect in a tournament, or in a given time frame - so if someone has a consistently bad connection then it holds up play for a little while, but then they have to pay the penalty for playing with a bad connection.

The main approach as a player is to sit back and relax, and hope that because a lot of the other players will be frustrated and impatient, that they'll go on tilt and play looser than they should do, at which point you can make the most of the poor play. In a cash game, players just in for fun will quit, and you'll lose the most profitable players, but in a tournament it'll frustrate other players and you can potentially profit from it instead.