I haven’t been writing for a while, but that’s because I’ve been hard at work. I thought rather than wait to have enough time to review the new Subtle album, I’d give you some info about Poker Underworld.

For about 2 years now I’ve been working on an idea for a free online Poker game. The idea for the game was to come up with an alternative to playing for real money that’s more then just “win as many points as you can”. There are a lot of free poker games out there but most of them make you play as much as possible to earn enough tickets to get into tournaments to win money. That’s great, but only the best players actually win the money and the rest just waste a whole bunch of time trying and don’t get much else out of it.

Our idea was to let the players build up a profile while they play. We let them comment on the hands they play almost like a blog, and have their own profile page where they can describe themselves, upload pictures of themselves, and show a list of their friends and comments. The profile page shows all of the comments that person has written on the hands they’ve played, and also ranks them on the site based on how much they participate - not just how much they win.

A great offshoot of all of this is that we can also tell you while you’re playing what other people have written about the hand you are dealt, and show you what your history with that particular hand has been. In fact, we’re hoping that the more people play, the more we can analyze their game history and tell them things about the way that they play.

This project has really ramped up since November. I sat on it for almost 2 years because I was busy and couldn’t find a good person to finish the artwork for the homepage. Now that it’s done, we’ve been working like crazy to get it live and we’ve already got a nice Alexa ranking!

So we’re hoping to launch in a week, but we’ve been saying that since December. There’s a lot to do and so far I’m the only one who can work on the programming parts. I suppose we could go on forever trying to perfect it, so we’re just ironing out bugs trying to go live for now. I’ll update here as I get closer, at least it’s better than not posting at all!

Oh yeah, I’m supposed to put a link to my Technorati Profile in order to let them know that I really own this blog.