I can’t believe we’re still waiting for this upgrade. I guess you can’t either.

Unfortunately it takes 24 hours to restore each chunk of the database. We’re on the last chunk now so it’s supposed to be complete by this evening. We’ve restored it twice now but each time there’s been missing data. We should be live by late tonite.

Update: The copy finally worked so we’re just restoring the database now. Should take the rest of the night and then I’ll make sure everything’s ready in the morning. Go out and get drunk and hopefully we’ll be back up by tomorrow night.

Unfortunately we’re still in the process of moving to new servers. The old server has been acting up and has made it very difficult to move all of the data to the new servers. We’ve had to restart the process many times, so hopefully we’ll be able to complete the move soon.

Thank you for all of your comments and suggestions for changes we can make to improve Poker Underworld. I’m going to address a few here:

Moderating Chat & Avatars
Poker Underworld does not make any profit, so we can’t afford to pay for moderators, or customer service to go through chat logs and to approve avatars. For that reason, Poker Underworld will continue to be unmoderated. If a player is being so rude that it becomes impossible to play with them, then you can write in and ask that they be muted or banned, however this becomes very difficult for me to determine what is fair. For that reason, PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Folding At The All In Tables
I will see what I can do about this.

Resetting Points
Honestly, this change is inevitable, no matter how unpopular it will be at first. I will maintain the leaderboards as they are now with lifetime balances, however we need to reduce the balances because they will eventually be too high for the software to handle (if they aren’t already). Also, these balances were inflated because the tournaments pay out more than they take in, so while they represent the amount of time players were willing to put in to build them up, they don’t represent skill. Sorry guys, but you’re going to have a lot more fun when the balances are reset. The lifetime balances will continue to build up and will always be there for you to see.

Multiple Accounts
This is another thing that is very hard to manage on a site that doesn’t make any money and can’t afford customer service. I can’t prevent customers from doing this, because there are always loopholes. I will look into what I can do to deter this though.

Cash Tournaments
These will be coming shortly after the upgrade is complete. You will be able to buy tournament passes, or complete offers to get them for free. We’ll run tournaments weekly at first, and then more often if there’s enough demand. The winnings will be paid back out to the winners through an e-wallet account.

Other Updates
Once the upgrade is completed, we will be testing out a new table design. We’ll also be working to bring back the hand analysis, and we’ll be improving the poker hand advice tools so that the game gives you tips from other players, and from your past performance as you are dealt hands.

Wish us luck, this upgrade has been a nightmare so far… hopefully the beast of an old server will let us leave.

If you’re wondering why our login is disabled, it’s because Poker Underworld is upgrading right now. We’re moving to new servers, and the process is very slow since there’s a lot of data to move over.

The new servers are very fast, so it’s worth the wait – although I wish we didn’t have to shut Poker Underworld down during the transfer.

Update Oct 13: We are still moving the database and files, and it’s taken many days now. Unfortunately, in order to not lose any hand history we have to move over 80GB of data to the new server, and it’s crashed a few times due to the old server being so unstable. We’re looking at another night of waiting for the new database to restore successfully, so we should be up tomorrow afternoon.

We are working on some changes to Poker Underworld that I’d like to let everyone know about.

To start, my most exciting news is that we are moving to new servers over the next week. This has been a long time coming, and we’re very lucky to have found new hosting that will solve the speed issues that have plagued us for a long time now. I’ll let you know when we’re moving through the blog since we’ll have to shut the tables down for a few hours.

With the new servers, we’ll be able to host multi-table tournaments, which we couldn’t do before. We’re really excited to be able to do this because we’ll be crowning Champion of Poker Underworld champions every month. We will start with daily tournaments which will seed into the final monthly championship tournament.

We’d like to continue to offer our rooms for free, but we’d like to add a cash tournament as well which will require a $5 entry fee. The winners of the tournament will split this prize. We’ll start having these tournaments every Friday night and then add more if it becomes popular.

Finally, I’m still as concerned as ever about the inflation of points on the site. In the past I have toyed with resetting points monthly, with a lifetime total that carries over. I’ve always backed off on this idea but I think the time has come to reset everybody and find out who the best players are.

I’ll keep you updated.
Ryan

It has been quite a while since my last update, so I’m pleased to be able to write about some new features that will be coming to Poker Underworld in May.

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.

Trainers have now been completely phased on on Poker Underworld on all tables.  Trainers were originally used to help create action on the tables, but we’ve now regularly got more then 50 players at the tables so they have been removed.

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

Many players have started reporting issues with the Poker games over the past few days.  These issues have ranged from lagging in the games resulting in missed turns, to odd animation issues and chips being swept off of the table or not displayed correctly.  In some cases, this has result in lost hands or missed winnings.

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 am preparing to do some bug fixes on the website this week. I am going to start with fixing the chat.

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

June 1st is here and we’ve decided to stick with the current games while we use all of the suggestions to create the new rules and tournaments.

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

In the past week since we proposed some rule changes for July, there has been a lot of discussion in the forum and on the blog.  There have been some interesting suggestions, so I wanted to highlight them here.

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