Ryan, keep up the good work.

Nothings perfect in life but this isn't bad at all.

"Morphine, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just don't know what is involved with running this site. I'll correct your statements for you..."

Actually I do but I don't think it matters. The value of a software is not directly related to the time and effort involved in its developpement.


"It's not worst each month (worse even). The changes were put in for January. What are the downgrades for Feb and March? All I can say here is that sometimes a couple steps forward needs to begin with one step back."

Spelling mistakes aside, it was worse in January for the reasons I gave, worse in February because of the "cheaters" issue, and as I said, I only played here for the last 2 months.

Even if sometimes a couple of steps forward needs a step back, downgrading a software is still that, downgrading. It means more steps back than forward. All the changes to the player profiles + more latency issues = many steps back. Maybe you cleaned up your code a lot, and there are indeed a couple of improvements: it's faster to leave a table, a few friend list features, what else ?

"Remember this is no limit. It does not have to be limited to 200, 400, or 600. You are able to bet as much as you'd like. The fix was for the raising minimum which changed to doubling the previous raise. If it's still not correct you can simply post a bug report."

In no limit, you do not double the previous raise, you (at least) double the current bet ammount.

"See my other post on cheating. I don't have sympathy for cheating even if it this is a free game. Nearly everyone who plays here does not appreciate cheating."

Cheating is illegal communication between players during a game (or playing several accounts at the same table, but it's the same result), assuming there is no "technical" cheating possible. Transfering funds is entirely harmless if both accounts are owned and played by the same person. If someone is giving away his chips to someone else, it can be considered cheating in some situations, however the line is not easy to draw, is highly subjective and open to debate.

You can't just decide one day to punish someone because he did this or that, it's not "fair" in any way, and if you take these kind of measures it's all about fairness isn't it ? Who cares if a couple of people don't deserve their ranks... when the top players of your leaderboard are gaining most of their chips in heads up anyway. They do not deserve their rank more than someone who was boosted by a few mils on their last days.

"Why don't you pay for a game that has ads? I might make a membership option to take away the ads (they honestly dont make much).. but I'm not sure where you get this rule. When you buy a magazine there are ads that help lower the cost of the mag."

That was only 1 of 4 reasons I gave, and certainly not most meaningful. I'm not saying it's a rule, it's just a bad thing. See points 2, 3 and 4. If membership had a real meaning, but there were still ads on the site, I couldn't care less.

"Don't believe everything people say. The card drawing is completely random. Nothing is tweaked. It's very simple. The deck is shuffled randomly many times before dealing. It's human nature to recognize patterns in randomness. It's very common in poker for a player to get upset after a bad beat and start blaming some of the mechanics."

Actually I never believed it and was the first one to say it couldn't be so for the 2 months I played here... Just because it's not logical. As it's fake money, people are chasing left and right with just about any hand, so you see very wierd draws (someone paying 2:1 pot odds for a 20:1 draw and so forth). However it does feel wierd when 3 times in a row a flush meets a 1 card higher flush, or several full house draws hit on river, when every time for a whole hour every pocket pair is matched against another pocket pair.

Of course it's a matter of luck, and such draws happend to me sometimes on real tables as well.

I just went mad when several people I thought I could trust on this told me today you stated yourself the game was tweaked for showdown. Hence this post. When you get rivered 5 times in a row on a 5% chance, you curse your own luck, and when poeple tell you the dev himself (you) stated it was an intended feature, you get mad.

"I usually appreciate feedback like this but when it's prefaced with failure I can't really take it seriously. You can simply go play at one of many other poker sites.... there has to be at least one that is not a failure... or you can make your own since you already have a clear idea of what it should be. If you do I'll make sure to reserve my judgment on your work."

Actually there is no free poker site worth playing except this one. As I said in my first post, I find your interface is by far the best one there is at the moment, miles ahead of sites like pokerstars or bwin, let alone free poker sites. It's even the only site where you can have a chat while playing.

See the part about gpokr randomness, you should understand why I did preface this rant with failure.

I was like, "oh my god it's not possible to screw up a poker software like this". See, I was right ;)


I wanted to write a post about things like player profile and membership, you know, a constructive post, but I wanted to take my time to do it. At least this madness made me write some of them, good thing ! Isn't it ?


All my apologizes for the worste parts of my post, I need more of my own medecine.

PS: Would be cool to be able to edit our posts, so I could clarify my opening post, eventually fix my spelling mistakes, and not appear like a complete jerk if people do not read the 2nd page (and care about it).

Thanks for replying morphine... it's made your point quite a bit clearer.

To explain the downgrades better you have to understand a bit of the development process. The January change was a massive backend technology change that was essential for the site to grow (if you could compare the time the forum takes to load now to before you would notice the massive improvement). It meant rewriting much of the software - which also means some older features that were at the bottom of the list didn't make it due to time.

Of course changing to new technology has a few growing pains but at this point they're gone. The result is a site that does perform much better than before. It should also be noted that the traffic doubled with the changes in January (not sure why maybe just word of mouth).

You may not recall but the old site had a ideas page that was mostly disabled, a forum where you could only see the first page, a friends list that would only display the first 10, a top 25 page that simply listed the top 25, no previous hand, daily, monthly archives, or career stats. It didn't have these features because they needed to be disabled to save performance for gameplay.

With the January change the architecture of the server was remade including a new database schema, stat calculations, and game event handling. This allows the site to grow much bigger. I can have a forum with pages that span back to the beginning, an ideas section that works again, stat archives for the winners of each month, and more detailed stats page with more interesting stats. The weight on the database with this new design is nearly nothing.

From my point of view the things that are missing are insignificant relative to what has been gained. The missing pieces can be added back eventually without worrying about the performance implications - this is huge.

Although the January change was primary a strategic performance move that would see more future than immediate benefits there were some new features added. One change in particular that is hard and not entirely popular is moving away from being a social network with a friends list and comments. My goal is to have your profile be like the back of a baseball card for your player - so more emphasis on fans (rather than friends), and stats. The player notes section lets you write things about players to help define who players are. I want the site to be the poker extension of your other social networks. I will eventually integrate with social networks like facebook who already support friends lists and comments - there's no need to duplicate this.

With the changes I was able to sneak in a feature that I believe to be one of the biggest features on this site dwarfing the significance of profile comments. It's the online friends list. If you had to pick profile comments for this list I think you would this list.

So, my point is the features that didn't make it will eventually come back as I devote more development time to GPokr. But from my perspective they are insignificant compared to what was gained in January.

Thanks for the interesting reply Ryan.

I'll make sure to write a constructive topic later, so this one can die peacefully. I wasn't trying to make up things in my opening post to make gpokr looks bad, but it was badly worded that's for sure.


On a side note there is already a Texas Holdem application in facebook, altho not a great one.


PS: Don't tweak the drawing! ;)