Announcement

September 29, 2007

So I have been working on writing up my poker experience. It’s coming out well, and far more voluminous than I had intended. I’m now torn as to what to do with it.

It seems I have two options. One is to keep hammering away and see if I have something long enough for a book. I don’t know if I’d be able to get there, and I’m not sure I can come up with any substantial plot arc that would make it as good a read as, say, Shut Up and Deal using my own experience alone. But I could tie in other threads, much the way Positively Fifth Street did with the Binion murder trial, and I have a few ideas for that.

The other option is to cut out a lot of details and shorten it down into a few blog posts. You guys don’t want to read 100 pages of fine-grained detail. Well, some of you might, but I suspect most would rather poke yourself in the eye with a fork.

I’m a little pressed for time, so I won’t be doing either quickly. I’ve put in more hours in the last five months of working on this startup than I ever did in a year of poker. I haven’t come anywhere close to achieving my goal of blogging once a day, and so I suspect that whichever route I take, progress will be slow. My intent had been to serialize it, but I just can’t bring myself to click “publish” on one part, knowing I’ll regret the inability to fix it later.

So time is my major constraint. And in that vein, it’s time to announce why. Some of you guessed by my donkey post (which, by the way, was not in reference to Chris Fargis) that it is fantasy sports for money. I’m not affiliated with Chris’s site, which makes it kinda humorous that two friends would end up competing in the same industry, but then again I guess we played in the same $30/$60 tables plenty of times.

And my site is going to be substantially different. Right now we have one week football leagues with live drafts (I’m no donkey) but our long term plan is far beyond that. We’re moving the code base over to Ruby on Rails, for those of you with a technical bent, which will enable us to build out a fully featured site rapidly and keep improving on it. We’ve got a ton of surprises in store for when we actually roll out.

We’re currently in beta testing mode, and are doing nightly freerolls to help us develop the software. If you’d like to join, go ahead and sign up here. You’ll have a shot every night at winning some free money with no restrictions, which you’ll be able to cash out or play with as soon as we roll out money games and cashier functionality, which should be in the very near future.

This is actually an idea that we had over three years ago now. At the time there were a number of things preventing us from going through with it. But the MLB vs. CBC ruling and the carve-out in the UIGEA essentially solved them for us. Our idea has evolved over the intervening years (and especially the last few months) to add in a lot of web 2.0 era functionality, and so I can say confidently that it will be a radically new (and better) fantasy sports experience.

If you’re a sports fan and would like to win some cash give it a shot and tell me what you think.