The great thing about building a better poker website is that we can build tools to tell you things about your Poker game that you always wished you knew. Everybody has a style of play, certain cards they like, certain hands they shoot for (do you chase straights? flushes? do you hold pairs?) and it’s pretty easy to look at a player’s hand history and pull out their strengths and weaknesses. We’ve got a lot of plans for doing this, but we’ve started simple by allowing you to see your best performing hole cards, your worst performing hole cards, and how many of each hand rank you’ve won.

This is pretty great even by itself and I’m surprised more poker games don’t show this. Basically, the more I play, the better insight I get into how I play. I can see things like even though I love those J-10 hands, they don’t always perform that well for me, and things like that. You can see this for any player you’re up against, and soon you’ll be able to see averages for the community as a whole.

Now, when you combine that with our Poker Advice through hand analysis provided by other players, we hope we’re building a very useful Poker Training tool for you. For example, the next time I’m dealt a J-10 (suited or unsuited) I can flip to the Strategy page and search for that J-10. Now I can see what my averages are with that hand versus the community averages, and I can read any hand analysis that other players have written for that hand. I can’t wait to see this section once it fills up with content.. it’s going to be a lot of fun to use.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

We’ve just added RSS feeds to every player’s profile page. Most people won’t understand what these are for, or why we’ve added them so I thought I’d write a little bit about it. Eventually I hope to create a whole page about RSS feeds to educate anybody who cares to learn about the magic of RSS.

To put it as simple as possible, RSS allows you to take all of the information you want to know and bring it all together into one place. All you need is an RSS reader - whether you use Netvibes, Pageflakes, Google Reader, Yahoo!, or you make your own. Once you have a reader, you can set about importing all of the news articles and information you want from any RSS enabled website, and the result is your own sort of newspaper, with only the information you want to see.

For example, on Netvibes, I import digg news, sports from The Toronto Star, stock news from TheStreet, and tech news from TechCrunch (among other things). That in and of itself is very handy and cuts down on the number of websites I have to visit each day, but I use RSS for something else as well…

On Netvibes, I also have a personal tab, and I use it to track my information at various different websites I am a member of. I use it to list my 43 Things, my Gmail, my eBay auctions and my personal blog. Well, now I can also use it to track Poker Underworld comments, stories, strategies, and winners. I can also be specific about it - I can track MY details, or I can track a friend’s, or the entire site’s. This gives me an easy way to be notified when things are happing at Poker Underworld even when I’m not actually at the website. I find RSS very handy and hopefully a lot of our players will as well.

Now if we could only get the site live… so much to do!

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

We hope that Poker Underworld’s features will make it easy to connect with and learn about the other challengers on the site. Through the Challengers section, you can meet the Poker players you’re playing against, share friends and strategies, and eventually communicate with them and create private tables to challenge them.

These social networking features are great, but the best way to get to know the other challengers personally would be through their MySpace, facebook, blog or other site that they are a member of. We could never replace those great networks, so we’ve added a Social Networks section to every member’s profile. Through this, you can share the link to your MySpace, facebook, last.fm, flickr, bubbleshare, del.icio.us, and many other network profile. You can also use it to link to as many blogs as you want. If there are any networks you want listed that we’re not showing, just let us know and we’ll add them.

Over time, we hope to integrate with as many different services as possible. We’ll add RSS so that you can export your comments, hand history or poker stories to your favorite newsreader like Netvibes, Pageflakes or Google Reader. If you don’t know what any of these things are, we’ll also be writing articles to introduce you to them so you can find out about all of the great social networking tools that are out there!

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

A lot of time and thought has gone into Poker Underworld so far. We started with the software and the graphics, and to be honest, we could have gone live with that right away. The game works great and is typical of most Poker games out there - but we’re not live yet. The reason for this is that we wanted to bring as much of the concept behind Poker Underworld to life as we could afford to first, so that when players come in for the first time they understand that we’re a lot more then a Poker game.

This site is being built without any startup money or investors - it’s just me and Jason building and promoting as much as we can in our spare time after our day jobs are over (and sometimes on our lunch breaks), hoping that one day soon other Poker players will have as much fun playing here as we think they will.

So how do we build a true Poker community? We tried to learn a lot from other successful social networks like Facebook and mySpace. We liked the way that once you added a person as your friend, they became part of the content on your homepage. We’ve tried to interpret this for Poker, so when you log onto your Poker Underworld homepage, all of the wins by people in your friend circle are there for you to see. If your friends post a blog entry about a bad beat, it shows up right away so that you know what your friends are up to. If your friends are sitting at a Poker table right now, it tells you where so you can join them.
Most of these features are complete now, and we’ve got a lot that we want to add over the next few months. Combine this with our “private table” and “head to head” features and we think this website is really going to change online Poker. Make sure you reserve your screenname now.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

As the BETA launch is approaching, we have created a signup form which will allow you to reserve your screen name, and also be notified the day the tables open up and you can start playing. This also gives us an idea of how many people will be around when the site launches so that we can make sure the tables are full of holdem players.

I haven’t had a chance to go over this before, but I wanted to mention that Poker Underworld has a strict policy about not spamming our players. We will never email you about anything unrelated to Poker Underworld and we plan to allow you to customize exactly what email you receive from us (none at all, only alerts, only news, etc). We want to be sure that you can trust us with your info unlike other online gaming sites that just sell turn around and sell your email address to other advertisers.

We’re hoping to launch very shortly (every day we find some new thing to do that we didn’t know about the day before!) so reserving your screen name is the best way to make sure you’re here when we launch - there may be prizes to be won that day!

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

We have completed the lobby, and it looks like the plan is to open up the registration and tables on Monday for testing (and playing). We are still working on the final layout for the tables and looking for any bugs that might still be crawling around on the site.

We’re looking forward to getting feedback on the site, especially your experiences and any difficulties that you might be having. The goal of Poker Underworld is to create a game which can be fun without gambling for money. Our goal here is to give players a chance to prove how good they are by building their rank on the site and improving how well they play.

The poker analysis won’t be ready for this first launch, but as you play our servers will start to profile you so that once it’s ready we’ll be able to give you feedback about the way you play. This way, as you’re playing you can learn from your past mistakes and become a better player.

One thing that will be working is your profile, so once we go live be sure to upload your avatars and fill out your profile to let everybody know who you are. You’ll be able to go to a player’s profile by clicking on them at the poker table so you’ll be able to learn who you’re playing against.

I can’t wait to play next week.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

It’s finally done! Check out our homepage at http://www.pokerunderworld.com to see what we’re so excited about. We’re very proud to (at last) have the main page polished and accepting signups for the upcoming BETA launch. A lot of work has been completed in the last few weeks in preparation for the launch of the games.

Be sure to read the past updates to see what features have been added along the way. The Profile with the poker playing habits analysis is looking good, and we hope that everyone will find it useful. There are so many features we’d like to see added to the website that we have to be very picky about what we want ready for the launch and what we will add in the future.

As we continue to polish up the lobby and the games, I’ll update this blog with screenshots and details. Soon enough the Poker tables will open up and the tournaments and rankings will begin. It will be exciting to see who rises to the top of the Poker Underworld ranks and how the games will play out.

Remember to spread the word about us, and keep an eye on this page for details on the launch date.

See you then,

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

One important feature of Poker Underworld will be the Profile.  Through the Profile, you can communicate who you are to the other players in the Underworld.  The Profile will allow you to describe yourself, upload and activate Avatars to display at the poker table, list your friends and store playlists to listen to while playing.  You can also comment on other people’s Profile pages and search through other members.

All of this sounds a little familiar, however what makes your Poker Underworld Profile so important is that it also analyzes what type of Poker player you are.  It will keep track of how many hands you’ve played, what % of hands you see the flop on, the turn and the river card.  It will tell you what your winning % is when you make it to each round, and what your winning % is overall.  It will also show you how well you play with each starting hand and help you figure out your weaknesses to avoid playing on tilt.

For those of us who like to show off a bit, your Profile will also display your total winnings, as well how many tournaments and head to head games you’ve won.  When you win big prizes, they will be on display for the rest of the Underworld to envy.

Finally, your Profile page will be where other players will go to challenge you - but more on that later.

For a sneak peak of the Profile page under construction, check out my profile page at http://www.pokerunderworld.com/user/thenotself and be sure you’ve reserved your name by signing up because the BETA launch is around the corner.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

We’re going over usability right now to determine the best way to navigate the website. We were going to use the traditional poker navigation which involves a lobby window in a popup that spawns poker tables in their own windows. This could lead to 3 or more windows open at a time and obviously wasn’t very user friendly.

Although I’ve been trying to keep the main website as basic as possible with as direct a navigation as I can manage, I’ve been experimenting with a row of tabs across the top of the site that would give easy access to Profile, Community, Leaderboards and other content. It’s also possible to put the lobby in as another tab which means all of the content is contained within the main interface with the exception of the poker tables which would have their own windows.

Click the image above to see a working demo (while supplies last) and feel free to leave comments.

In other news, the new art for the header has been inked and should be imported into Flash within the next few days. We are excited to be within a week or so from our BETA launch and your first chance to play the game!

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

We’ve been going over sketches for the replacement header for the top of the main site. We’re pretty close to inking a final version and we hope to have it colored and live by the end of the week in time for our official BETA launch.

Here is a preview of the header we’re working on. Please feel free to leave feedback or recommendations. Click the image for a larger version.

Remember to sign up and reserve your screen names for our BETA launch. We will have a playable demo by the end of this week and we are working on the ability to upload your avatars, playlists and profiles.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team