Update: We were approved on Yahoo today after removing dollar signs from our balance totals.

I thought today I’d blog about one of the biggest issues I face in running Poker Underworld - negative connotations with gambling. Since I first started trying to promote Poker Underworld in February, I’ve faced adversity with every advertising channel I’ve attempted to use. Every company has seen the word Poker and (at least initially) denied our application to advertise on their network.

Poker Underworld is a free Poker game. No wagers take place here. We do not accept memberships for enhanced features or paid entry into tournaments - we don’t even accept donations. We do not run advertisements for pay-for-play Poker games, even though that would logically be a profitable upsell to our customers. In fact, the original concept behind Poker Underworld has always been to stand as an alternative to online gambling, and to use a mixture of web 2.0 style social networking features, and a community based competition, to create an alternative that is fun to play and challenging without the need for real wagering.

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Back in the first week of February when we were getting ready to go live, we decided to hold off on adding forums until we hit 1000 players to avoid having boring, empty forums laying around. Last week we passed 1000 players without even realizing it and before I could get my act together and put the forums online we’d already passed 1500 players!

You can now access the forums by clicking on the forum tab between Strategy and Blog at the top of the website. On a technical note, I decided to go with Vanilla forums because they were very easy to integrate into the Poker Underworld accounts and I didn’t want everyone to have to have a seperate forum account. It’s nice because now I can work on adding forum stats to everyone’s profile pages and I can work forum activity into the ranking system (news on the ranking system updates should come next week). We’re pretty proud of how the forums turned out and will continue to work on them to make them easy to use.

Be sure to drop by the forums and say hello so they don’t stay empty. Now we can all get to know each other and hopefully get some competitions going. The first thread was about Tournaments and you can read all about our plans for tournaments there. We’re going to try and get a couple SnG tables ready for tomorrow so stay tuned for that as well.

Best of luck everyone,
Ryan

Congratulations to the first Poker Underworld challenger to reach $1,000,000! We’re playing for points but it’s great to see, and it gives me a chance to talk about how we’ve grown up over the past month or so since we launched.

It’s been over 2 weeks since my last update because things have been very busy. We’ve grown very quickly in the last month and are now over 1,000 members. It’s nice to see that we’ve consistently got players at the tables. This is good news because it means we can start adding in some features that will make the game more competitive and more fun - features that aren’t really possible without enough players to make them fun.

I’ve talked a lot about head-to-head games and those will be coming soon. We’ll also be adding sit’n'go tourneys soon and we’ve been working hard to make sure we can give away some prizes. These special tournaments should be starting up within the next few weeks and will add a lot of excitement to the games that I think is lacking right now.

Having a player at $1,000,000 points is great because it shows that you’re enjoying the games, but to me it also shows how there isn’t enough challenge on the site right now. I’d like to split the tables into “trainer tables” and “competition tables” and have the points only count on the competition tables. If anybody has any feedback they want to give about how to make the games more fun, please email us - I’d love to read about your ideas. I’d also like to add a forum soon so you’ll all be able to post about features there.

Congratulations to all of the leaders, and good luck to our new players!

Ryan
Poker Underworld

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

We really hope that Poker Underworld will be popular, because we’d love to give away some great prizes every month to our members. We’re currently ranking players by their chip stack, however we have bigger plans then that. Once the head to head challenge feature is ready, we’ll be able to do a lot of really fun things with tournament style head to head matchups. Because everybody will be ranked, we can start to rank players the way Tennis is ranked - not just by how much you win, but by WHO you win against. This way, sharks taking advantage of new players won’t dominate the website unless they can beat the good players.

Did I mention prizes? Yeah we hope to give away a lot of those. We’ll do lots of tournaments and hopefully be giving away prizes every week. Not only that but your prize winnings will be displayed on your profile page, so you can show off how much you’ve won long after you’ve received your Nintendo Wii.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team

It seems like a simple idea, but we’re pretty proud of the fact that you can now see which of your friends are currently playing and with one click, join their table.

The same goes when you are browsing people’s profiles - easy peasy.   So now you can find out what table people are at through the website, and find out who people are from the table by clicking on their avatar at the table.  Now you have no excuses for not meeting the other poker players, so I don’t want to hear any excuses for not having huge friends lists.

The site should be fully live soon.  I had some issues with things but we’re looking good now.

Ryan
The Poker Underworld Team