the new thepokerdb

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You'll notice that if you go to http://www.thepokerdb.com it auto-redirects to a new interface at Bluff. I'm posting this with ZBT's "okay" -- well actually it was a "i don't care" but that's really the same thing.

There are two main things that go into the new version of thepokerdb

1. Player results (similar to the old stuff, but with more info)
2. Upcoming and current information

Part 1 works fine. We have grayed out tabs on the player interface, but we've had those grayed out in our test interface for the last few weeks. They weren't planned to debut at launch, but we do plan on filling them in one-by-one over the coming weeks and months.

Part 2 was a problem. On the test interface, we've had buddy lists and currently playing lists working for awhile. They'd been running smoothly and we anticipated everything going off well at launch obviously. For some reason, they just failed today. We had some issue, which is still not completely clear to me, with importing some of the results into the database. Trust me -- we tried to get it fixed. It just wasn't happening tonight. Everything was ready to go from Part 1 way before the deadline. Actually Part 2 *was* ready to go. It just broke down at the last minute and we never managed to get it fixed before the launch.

Anyway, moving on, [censored] happens. The good news is that thepokerdb is improved. We've added a pretty cool watchlist feature, we've added Absolute Poker as of 1/1/2007 (we still aren't 100% sure exactly what % of Absolute tournaments we're actually capturing) and the tabbed interface is pretty cool as well. The player pages have more info on them and the additional tabs will, eventually, have a TON more information. If you liked thepokerdb, you'll absolutely love what we have in store.

A few points of caution... this is FAR from a finished product. Just as an example, PokerStars tournament results from late January and early February that were in the old thepokerdb are still being added into this version. We also probably don't know about all of the bugs that are hiding somewhere -- please email me at natarem@gmail.com if you find something glaringly wrong (I know a lot of features are missing, I only want to know about something that just doesn't look right at all or is giving you an error). I don't really expect the site to be complete and really running smoothly for, at least, a few months. There's a good chance it will take longer.

Lastly, I want to comment on the deadline and the stupid name that was given to this whole thing. I had nothing to do with them. The people I work with directly at Bluff (the programmers) had nothing to do with them. One thing I learned from this is to not let other people determine that stuff for you. As far as I'm concerned, I'm running this section of the Bluff website on an equal footing with two programmers at Bluff. We should have been the ones to make the decision on how to go about launching it. It was a silly idea and a silly deadline. That much became obvious over the last few weeks. It won't happen again.

Thanks for the support of thepokerdb over the last few years -- I promise this new version of the db will, eventually, completely and utterly blow away the old one.

Nat