I’m glad to see people enjoying the games and using the community features.  It seems the new sidebar has helped people to set up their avatar (Poker Face), add people to their friends list, and blog about their poker stories.

Yesterday we added a new “Top 25 Poker Hands” page which is nice to look at and see how people are doing.  Still no Royal Flush, so maybe we’ll have a competition to see who can get one first.  I’ve been wanting to give away a Nintendo Wii so we’ll see if we can set that up.

We have some new features we’re getting set to roll out soon, including more reports, and the ability to add notes about other players.  This will let you jot down how that person plays, or maybe whether they won credits from you so you can chase them down later and get them back!

We are still working on tournaments and head to head matches, however we’re waiting until there are more players for those features.  Speaking of that, if anybody reading this has a website or blog, you can really help out by posting a short note about us, or even a review that will help spread the word.  We don’t have a large advertising budget and since I produce the website for free, it’s hard to buy any major advertising to let people know we’re here!  You can find our logo on our Contact page to help you out.

I’ve been feeling like there was something missing from the Poker tables at Poker Underworld. They felt too disconnected from the community features on the website, and as we went into our 2nd week since going live, I was noticing that not many players were using those community features. In fact, not many people were adding avatars, and the website is full of ? icons these days!

I’ve just added a new feature that seems to bring all of these features together into one place, so I’m very proud of it and I can’t stop playing with it today. The Poker tables now feature a new right sidebar with quick access to your profile, and the profile of the other challengers. Through this sidebar, you can perform various tasks that you would normally perform through the website, such as uploading your Avatar, adding people to your friends list, commenting on other players, or browsing through player profiles. All of these things can now be done right from the Poker table which should make it a lot easier (and more obvious) to players.

Even though the tables are currently mostly full of Poker Trainers (these are now more easily identified by clicking on them), you should now have an easier time meeting the other challengers and connecting with them. Please try out the Bad Beats, Big Wins and Hand Analysis posting tools while you’re checking out the new sidebar and start sharing your Poker advice with the community!

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

If you are enjoying Poker Underworld, help us spread the word and attract more players so that we can start to have Sit n Go tournaments and get more challengers for future contests. Let everyone else know what we’re trying to build here!

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Well, in case you’ve failed to notice - we opened the tables and went live last week!

We’re pretty happy about the turnout so far, and mostly happy that there don’t seem to be any major bugs causing headaches. We’ve definately identified some problems that need to be addressed, but mostly we knew about those already. The lobby is painfully slow to load, so we’re going to redo it so it’s not in Flash anymore.

We’ve had a few requests already by email, and so I thought I’d give an update for everybody here on what’s to come and when those things can be expected. Our strategy right now is to grow slowly and not add too many features all at once. This way, the website isn’t too empty and overwhelming. That is why we haven’t added Sit n Go tourneys, or a forum, or a poker wiki, or any of the other ideas we’ve got in the works. In fact, I’ve already built some of those features and I’ll add them to the website when I know they’ll be used.

We’ve got around 100 or more players now and I’d like some feedback to know what the website is missing. All along, we’ve wanted to build Poker Underworld in response to what the poker players want, so let us know. You can add your own item if we missed one.  AJAX Poker has some new competition.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

We’re getting pretty close to opening the games up to the public.  The last few weeks have been hectic and we’re really excited about finally going live.  We’ve finished adding features such as RSS feeds, messaging, comments, poker story blogging, hand history and hand analysis… so we’re just about ready to invite everyone in to enjoy it.

I thought I’d offer up a quick snapshot of the game itself.  It was hard to decide what sort of bankroll to start accounts off with - whether we wanted to go with realistic amounts to start or not.  It seemed the game would be more fun if we were dealing with balances in the thousands instead of the hundreds so we’ve started with that for February, although we may try a “hard luck” month in March where everybody starts with only $20.  For now, everyone will start with $2,000, so it’ll be a race to $1,000,000.

We’ve put “poker trainer” robots at most of the tables to fill them out, but hopefully we’ll only keep them for a few weeks while we wait for real players to fill up the tables.
We’ll send an email out to everybody who has reserved their screen name tonite giving you access to the tables.  Then we’ll open the registration to everybody.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team