As always, I like to write about changes first in the blog, to get an idea of how you feel about them.  These changes address the 3 major issues I’ve been trying to improve since Poker Underworld launched 1 year ago.

Point Totals Are Ridiculous!

I hoped to fix this last summer, but unfortunately I let many of the comments in the forums discourage me from making any major changes.  Back then we had balances of 1 million points - today 11 billion.

I’m really happy to see so many top players that have been here for over 6 months, and I want to maintain the leaderboard as it is.  While I was tempted to do a full points reset, instead I am planning to “reverse split” the points at 10,000:1, so for every 10,000 points you have now, you’ll have 1 point.  This will reduce the site leader back to 1 million points, which is still high, but manageable.  Anybody with less than 10,000 points will be reset back to 2,000.

SnG Tournaments Should Be About Skill

I will also be reducing the prizes in the SnG tournaments to 60-30-10, 80-20, and 100 (Winner Take All) instead of 100-50-30.  Originally, I set the SnG this way to make it more attractive, but it is directly responsible for the huge balances, and has taken the seriousness out of the game.

These changes will immediately bring the points totals down to more realistic levels, and hopefully make the games more serious.  Poker Underworld was meant to be a place to learn poker, and play for reputation.  Unfortunately, with outrageous balances, and easy SnG prizes, there is little skill being shown at Poker Underworld anymore.

At Long Last, Poker Underworld Will Give Away Prizes

My goal has always been to give away prizes, but this has been difficult to do legally, and financially, while still remaining a free website.  While Poker Underworld does run advertising, there is not enough money to afford to give away prizes.

Finally, we will begin to offer daily freerolls for small, real money prizes.  You will be able to enter these freerolls by completing various free advertising offers on Poker Underworld.  You will receive credits for these offers which will get you entry into the tournaments.  Runner-up prizes will be free entries into future tournaments.

I am currently building the tournaments, and hope to have them ready in the beginning of May.  There will be a new leaderboard to display tournament winners, and we will also offer a satellite tournament each week for the winners of each day’s tournament.

Thank You For Being Loyal Poker Underworld Players

Because these updates have taken a lot of work, it has taken a long time to get to them.  Thank you for playing here, and please send your feedback on these changes if you have suggestions that help accomplish our 3 goals.

Some players may miss being able to practice on these Trainers, which is why I hope to bring them back eventually as private Trainer tables.

There has been good discussion in the Forum on player etiquette.  Personally I see that we’re suffering from a lack of competition other than the main leaderboard, so next week I hope to introduce some new competitions for serious players who want to prove they’re the best around here.

I will also be introducing a daily, weekly and monthly leaderboard for all players to go along with the current leaderboards.

Along with the recent fixes which fixed the problems loading profiles, I hope everyone is having a good time!  Look for more announcements next week.

Ryan
Poker Underworld

These issues are a result of calculations that were done from July 18th to July 19th to update player stats.  It was necessary to run these updates because we had not been aware that the stats were out of date.  These calculations have been completed and are now correctly updating again.

I hope that the issues stopped once the calculations were completed, however if they are continuing please let us know by writing support[at]pokerunderworld.com.

I’d also like to mention that as a result of feedback from players, we will be removing trainers slowly over the next week, reducing the number of trainers at most tables down to 1 or removing them completely.

Also, we are still working on restoring the winning % and tournaments won statistics.  These will be restored at the same time that we release enhanced statistics for each player.  Look for this in August.

Thanks for your patience through the last few days!  In the future we’ll try and find a different way to run calculations so that they do not affect games.

Ryan
Poker Underworld

I have started a forum discussion about this, so post your comments there. I’d like to know what bugs you are aware of, and what suggestions you have. I would like everyone to start using the larger sized chat on the right instead of the tiny chat in the bottom corner.

Forum - http://forum.pokerunderworld.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=26

I will also be uploading a fix for a couple Poker bugs tonite. Feel free to comment here if there is anything else you’re waiting for.

Ryan
Poker Underworld

You will notice some small changes happening around the website today as we move things around.  We’re also working on a new chat bar as there have been so many complaints about the one we have now.

Thanks for everyone’s suggestions and input!

Ryan & Jason
Poker Underworld

First of all, here are the criteria we want to meet with any changes we make:

1. Create a monthly contest that allows us to crown monthly champions and give away prizes
2. Keep the game challenging both for new players and the current leaders
3. Stop the chip counts from climbing higher and higher to ridiculous totals
4. Reward players with high lifetime totals
5. Add something unique and interesting to Poker Underworld

While the original idea was simple - reset balances every month and move money to a “lifetime” total - it doesn’t necessarily satisfy #4.  Great new suggestions have been made but are more complicated and can’t be ready for June 1st.  Here is a summary of what has been suggested:

1. Create an SnG ranking system
2. Have a monthly SnG for the top 8 players each month (based on games played that month)
3. Create ranking “classes” such as Bronze, Silver and Gold and rank players within those classes
4. Limit access to different tables by balance

We like all of these suggestions, and actually they are more in-line with our original idea for Poker Underworld which was to allow you to challenge other players and make the rankings based on “head to head” matches - almost like the rankings in Tennis or Golf.  We’re still developing the “head to head” tables though so hopefully that will be ready for July 1st.

To us, the most interesting idea is the “classes” idea, with some additions.  Here are some rules we would want to see, please send us your feedback.

1. Every class has it’s own set of tables
2. To move to the next class, you must achieve a minimum balance and have played a minimum number of hands
3. Every time you reload, your number of hands played is reset as well (there will still be a lifetime count though)
4. Each class has it’s own chip value, so when you move to the next class there is a new starting balance
5. If you want to move back to a previous class, you must start at the starting balance of that class
6. A lifetime balance will still be kept for the lifetime top 100

This new set of rules can’t really be ready and tested for June 1st, so we would continue the games the way they are played now, but with a special set of tournaments played weekly to crown a June champion.

Ryan
Poker Underworld

I am so impressed that James from Google took the time to offer support - I can’t say enough good things about Google.

A few weeks ago I started playing with Google Desktop and trying to build some gadgets for Poker Underworld so that you can keep track of your balance and rank. I’ve also been playing with building the same thing for Yahoo! Widgets.For those who don’t know what gadgets are or what Google Desktop or Yahoo! Widgets are for - basically a gadget/widget is a small object that sits on your desktop. Gadgets do all sorts of things from showing you the weather outside, stock quotes, a calendar, the time, etc. You can see a little screenshot of the Google gadget I made - it’s pretty basic, it lets you know how you’re doing at Poker Underworld.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get the gadget to work perfectly.. for some technical reason after about 2 hours it just stops working. If anybody reading this has written Google Desktop gadgets before, let me know if you’re interested in finishing this with me so we can release it to all of the players!

Ryan
Poker Underworld

As the balances get higher and higher, I think it’s time to consider adding in a monthly reset. This means at the end of the month, your balance would be banked to your “grand total” and everyone would start off even at 2000 again.

There are a few reasons for this - making the game more competitive, giving new members a chance to compete, and even just that it gets hard to fit those huge balances on the screen after a while. Best of all, it lets us crown a Top 3 every month.

What does everyone think about this? We’d like to start out fresh in June. Your current balances will still go into your Grand Total and there will still be a lifetime Top 100 - but we think this would make the game more challenging and force the leaders to defend their titles every month.

Ryan & Jason
Poker Underworld

This means that the best way to win money and raise your bank roll at Poker Underworld is through they SnGs, so go in chat and grab some people from the tables and have some fun in the SnG tourneys.

We are keeping track of the winners of the tournaments, and soon we’ll be posting stats on who wins the most tournaments.  We are planning to have our first real tournament for prizes this month, so get into the SnG rooms now to improve your ranking!

Ryan
Poker Underworld

So far, we don’t see very many people using this feature. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s not visible all the time or if people really don’t like to chat while they play. Please give the chat a try and let me know if there is anything we can do to make it easier for you to chat. Do you think Chat should be visible when you first enter the Poker table? Should it beep when people are chatting?

As a basis for this chat, I used AjaxChat from http://www.ajaxchat.org.  I had to heavily modify it to work with the poker accounts and avatars from Poker Underworld, and to auto-log players in and to create chat rooms for each Poker table.  None of that would have been possible if AjaxChat weren’t such a great product, and I highly recommend anybody looking to integrate AJAX chat rooms into their website to give AjaxChat a try.  Also if anybody needs help or has questions about AjaxChat, feel free to write me!

Have fun with it!

Ryan
Poker Underworld