A single incoming call can wipe out forty minutes of careful tournament play. That is not a hypothetical: a reader of this site, playing a mid-stakes mobile tournament on an iPhone 13, dropped from second place to fourteenth when a cold call from a courier arrived at the worst possible moment. The call itself lasted 90 seconds. The damage took the rest of the tournament to measure. What follows is a breakdown of that hand, the platform differences that caused it, and the settings and habits that prevent a repeat.
What happened in the 90-second knockout
The player, let us call him Dan, was three levels into a Saturday evening tournament with 220 runners and a guaranteed prize pool. He was running the Casushi app on iOS, had the mobile lobby open on the tournament tab, and was roughly 40 minutes into a session. His phone was set to ring normally because he was expecting a delivery. When the call came through, iOS took over the screen. The Casushi app went to the background, the tournament timer kept running, and by the time he hung up and re-opened the app, two hands had been folded automatically and his stack had bled through blinds and antes.
The interesting part is not the loss. It is that the loss was avoidable on one platform and not on the other. The Casushi iPhone build supports a timer-pause behaviour during an active call, provided Do Not Disturb is enabled before the call arrives. The player had never turned it on. He assumed, reasonably enough, that a phone call would simply pause the game the way it pauses a podcast. It does not, unless you set it up. Android users have a harder problem: the Casushi mobile site runs in a browser, Chrome in this case, and a browser tab cannot pause a server-side tournament clock when the OS hands audio focus to the phone dialler.
That distinction matters more than most players realise. A tournament clock is not a local timer. It is a server-side counter that advances whether your screen is on, off, backgrounded, or in a call. No app can stop the server. What the Casushi iOS app does is hold the local session state and re-sync on return, giving you a short grace window that the browser cannot replicate because the browser process is suspended by iOS. The practical result: on iPhone, a configured Do Not Disturb plus the app equals a survivable interruption. On Android in a browser, it does not.
The setup that survives an interruption
Dan’s fix, which he documented for the rest of his poker group, takes about four minutes to apply and should be done before the first hand, not during a break. The sequence is straightforward. Install the Casushi app from the App Store on your iPhone or iPad, sign in, and confirm the tournament lobby loads inside the app rather than in Safari. Then open Settings, go to Focus, choose Do Not Disturb, and set it to allow calls only from favourites if you genuinely need to be reachable. Enable Face ID logins inside the app so a re-entry after a call takes one glance rather than a typed password. Finally, test it: have someone call you during a low-stakes sit-and-go and watch what happens to the timer.
Android players need a different plan, because there is no standalone Android APK file from Casushi and the mobile site cannot pause. The workaround is defensive rather than corrective. https://casushi-online.uk/app/ offers additional context worth reviewing. Open the Casushi site in Chrome, use the browser menu to add a home screen shortcut so the lobby launches full-screen, and set the phone to Do Not Disturb with calls routed to voicemail for the duration of the tournament. That is not a pause; it is a refusal to let the call arrive. If you must stay contactable, play cash tables rather than tournaments, where a missed hand costs you nothing but time.
The table below compares the realistic options for competitive mobile play, scored on what actually matters when a call lands mid-tournament.
| Option | Timer behaviour during a call | Setup effort | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Casushi app on iPhone with Do Not Disturb on | Local session pauses, re-syncs on return | Four minutes, one time | Tournaments and sit-and-gos |
| Casushi app on iPhone with Do Not Disturb off | App backgrounds, timer keeps running | None | Casual play only |
| Casushi mobile site in Chrome on Android | No pause, browser suspended | Home screen shortcut, two minutes | Cash tables, short sessions |
| Casushi mobile site in Chrome on iPhone | No pause, tab suspended | None | Quick checks, not tournaments |
| Desktop browser | No pause, but no call risk | None | Long tournaments at home |
Two details from that table are worth pulling out. First, the difference between the top two rows is a single toggle, and it is the toggle that cost Dan his tournament. Second, the responsive site detects screen dimensions automatically, so the mobile lobby, the welcome offer banner, and the cashier deposit flow all render correctly on any phone. The layout is not the problem. The interruption handling is, and it splits cleanly along app versus browser lines rather than along screen size.
There is a wider point about notification discipline. Push notifications from the Casushi app are useful for tournament reminders and cashier confirmations, but they compete with everything else on your lock screen. During a tournament, prune them. Keep tournament alerts, mute social apps, and let the phone do one job. The players who consistently cash in mobile tournaments are not the ones with the fastest thumbs; they are the ones whose phones are configured to leave them alone for ninety minutes.
One more habit from Dan’s post-mortem: he now checks the responsible play tools in the Casushi mobile site before each session, sets a session limit, and uses the reality check prompts as a natural break point between levels. That is not a moral point, it is a practical one. A tournament that runs four hours will outlast your attention span unless you build stops into it. The tools are there in the app and the site; using them is a matter of treating the phone as a piece of equipment rather than a distraction.
Before your next tournament, do three things in this order: install the Casushi app from the App Store if you are on iPhone, enable Do Not Disturb and Face ID logins, and run a test call during a cheap game to confirm the pause works. If you are on Android, accept that the browser cannot pause, set the phone to silence calls, and stick to formats where a missed minute is survivable. Note that this website operates as an information page only and does not host games, process deposits, or issue accounts; everything above happens inside the Casushi platform itself. Set the phone up once, and the next cold call costs you nothing.