Season 6 ends tonight so get spending those chips!

Theres a problem with the displaying of the rankings at the moment but i can see the correct scores in the backend database so spend all you can and get as many points as possible and i assure you they will all be counted towards you final standings.

[b]New thing for Season 7 is that you can KEEP your original name!  Only you can re-use the name, so no one can steal it, but if you would like to go season to season as the same name, you now can.[/b]

What else lies ahead for Season 7:

- New poker room
- WPSS is back

Season 7/8

- promotional work done to attract 2000+ players

before 2009

- new rankings system that makes it much more fun to be further down the rankings.

I’m sure a few people have realised the dropping player numbers - thats purely down to me not pushing the site as much as usual due to things being not quite right.  I still have huge plans for poker sharks and they WILL be realised.  You can see what my plan is for the next 6 months or so above and i intend on sticking to them.

Good luck for the end of Season 6 and see you in Season 7!

Lynx

I do have an update though.  Progress is going well and the new poker rooms and WPSS should be back in the next month or so.  As always it is longer than I’d like but these aren’t small tasks we’re doing here and they are taking some time to get finished.

I’ll be looking out for some keen poker room testers in the coming weeks and test whether we really do have a new and improved poker room.

Really looking foward to a Live WPSS where we have a whole host of sharks playing the WPSS for real in the poker room in a multi table poker room, should be pretty cool.  Can’t wait.

Hand 30,000 in the poker room was played and Blue Monkey was the winner with the huge hand of a pair of Queens =$. 

The poker room was busy the whole night which was nice - see you there soon and well done Blue Monkey, nh!

Here’s the Top players:

The poker room played a bigger part this season with much more chips being won and lost.  The more chips won and the more hands played the more poker skill was gained - in Season 6 this will be even more important.

Congrats to the Iceman for being top of the poker room rankings for quite a while.  I launched a late serge and and Rover was always on his heals, but the end of Season big money poker put you well out of reach.

Honorable mentions to these 10 players too.  I’d estimate 20,000 of the 27,000 hands played in the poker room this season had one of the below involved.  Lets hope some of you are in the table above next season though yeah ;-). 

Poker Skill is the cornerstone of any great Poker Shark, who had the most?

Challenging for that poker skill is another huge part of the game.  Who won the most?

The daily tournaments and the WPSS are a good way to boost your chip count, here’s who won the most:

No-one likes to come 4th in a daily tournament, just out of the payout.  Well some managed to do that with some degree od skill - in fact this season we have 3 very skilled sharks that managed to come 4th, 11 times…wow.

.

Thats about it from me tonight - my head is fuzzy from numbers and databases right about now.  Remember Season 6 starts in just a few hours.  If you are 100 days old today then you will be auto-retired tomorrow so you dont need to do anything.  If you are not 100 days old today you will need to manually click ‘retire’ so you start from day 1 and have the best chance of a top 10 prize.  If you dont want to go for the top 10, then just carry on into next season and revel in being at the top for a bit!

Cya in Season 6!

Season 6 is just around the corner and behind the scenes there is a hive of activity getting everything ready (full details in the forum).  I hope to see as many of you as possible back for Season 6 and for many Seasons after that.  However, I’m aware that Poker Sharks is in a very competitive arena and there are many online games that are just as absorbing as Poker Sharks can be.

I realise we have a few issues in Poker Sharks regarding the poker room that have been present for quite a while.  Whilst it may seem like im dragging my heals and not doing a lot about it, its far from the truth.  I’d like to explain a bit further into the issues the poker room has had.

*A year ago*

Once i had saved up the pennies I decided a great addition would be to have a poker room in Poker Sharks so went ahead and started developing one.  In this development we learnt a lot, and made some mistakes, fixed them and moved on to the next task.  Once we were happy the Poker room went live.  Unfortunatley there were some problems - thats fine, we fixed those within weeks.  Then some more issues cropped up - so we fixed those.  Then some more, etc etc.  As time went on we discovered that the bugs were getting harder and harder to find and then fix.  To the point where we are chasing our own tails (yes Lynx tails).  This brings us up to date as of a couple of months ago.  Since then we have started over, totally from scratch on a brand new poker room.  We have learnt so much from the initial poker room that this new one is being built in a much more structured and effecient way.  Its much easier to test and will also cope with many tables all playing at once.

*back to today*

So to cut through the detail, this new poker room will be going live in mid season 6 so April/May time.

I realise that when people pay a fee for a service (such as a game), then you expect a certain level of performance from that service.  With regards to the poker room, we may have dropped below that acceptable level.  I take the full blame for this and hold my hands up.  Even the most disgruntled of players must agree that there has still been many a happy hour in the poker rooms and the small community we have here really makes it.  Its very rare to have such a good community for an online game, i dont think ive ever played for more than an hour on a real money poker site without being called some obsentity countless times everytime i win a hand.

*queue the smallest violin in the world* 

Poker Sharks is run by me, Lynx, one person.  As it stands today i run this game in my spare time and dont make a penny for my time.  Web development, hosting and marketing more than absorb any income so the set up is slightly different to some other online games provided by Yahoo, or alike.

I dont want to harp on about that because its my ambition to have the new poker room launched in the coming months and then to go on a full offensive to get thousands of new players and then the money will come flowing in.  I’ll be doing these blog posts on my private yet on my way to Vegas in a year or two so its all good.

So to sum up

Poker Sharks is still evolving and yes we have a few issues.  Looking passed that we still have a unique game here that really puts the fun back into poker and is fun for all the family.  We have one of the best online communities i have ever come accross and I will need everyones help to maintain this as we grow into a game with 10s of thousands of players.

Cheers,

Lynx

(PS There is going to be some high limit poker being played in the poker room over the next couple of days to spend the last of those chips - if you have any spare, pop in and have a splash, you could win big)

The Iceman here…

Season 5 is drawing to an end, the final hurdle is in site and the checkered flag is raised.

Blizzo has taken this season by storm and hung it out to dry, so a big congratulations to him and with 5 days remaining, i for one, sincerely hope he goes past the record number of points, currentley at just over 28,000,000…………..i think its in the bag.

Nakd has held the Champions Chalice well and another fine innings has no doubt secured that runners up slot.

The Poker Rooms have seen some big hands/pots in recent days, spare cash may be flying around, so the chance to finish top of the Shark pile is still up for grabs, good luck to all who are playing.

This season has seen many firsts, we had new players, this was the most important.

We’ve had the first pokersharks Disco, CookBook and the first pokersharks full poker room.

Lynx, PokerGod, aka The Man Upstairs has kept us informed of bug progress and future plans and has no doubt been burning the midnight candle wax to keep us all entertained, so well done here.

Lets also be honest, the poker rooms havent been as stable as we would have liked and some niggles have no doubt prevented people from playing. In my opinion, without doubt, these would have been somewhat worse and playing time dramatically reduced if it hadnt been for the PokerShark Detective that is Kaysus.

This shark was somehow able to ascertain what rooms would and wouldnt work by a process, i think, only really understood by him. Over the course of a season this chap has put in many many hours in ”preparing” Poker Rooms, so that they could be played that day, posting explanations of how and why and teeing up a room for that evenings challenge.

A big shout to you Kaysus, well done buddy.

With some firsts, theres always some lasts and we wont mention the same shark for his efforts at  being the best charity, this side of the Atlantic.

This will be my last blog. Its been fun. I must thank all those who’ve replied, your comments have been funny and much appreciated and none so more so than by Everyones Favourite Gal, ChloeCakes, the No:1 Blog Poster. No doubt Lynx will be looking for someone else to carry this mantle, so get your applications in and have fun blogging your way through season 6.

After this season, i also wont be around much, either, in the Poker Rooms. Other commitments will take up too much time, so again its been great fun playing with you all and i’ll try and pop in now and then, say hi and donate some chips………..i’ll be missing Dabe and his box, the shark that has hassled me like no other this season, well done matey, you deserved your points.

Take care folks and keep living that Big Poker Shark dream,

You may………..just may…………..see me out there.

The Iceman.

The time has come for me to write a few words though, so here goes… 

Progress and the future

Progress on the new poker room has been going well.  I’ll soon be opening this up to a few beta tester players to iron out the final problems, (let me know in the comments or via email if you’d like to be involved).  A big bonus of the new poker room, not only will it work seamlessly with no random freezing, but we will be able to play tournaments.  Not just 1 table tournaments either, but multi-table tournaments that can involve every poker shark player we have.  The WPSS is currently disabled and being worked on but before long we will have a real life WPSS that you play yourself!  No random elements built in, no advantages for the bigger players, just you and a set of chips playing real poker against other real people.  The WPSS would be played twice a week to be account for players in different time zones and if they’re successful more frequent daily multi-table tournamets can be scheduled in.

How good does that sound?

I think it will be a great way of getting players into the poker room and knowing there will be people in there to play at certain times - plus there will be a lot of chips to be won in the weekly WPSS.  It will be great fun.

The money thing, donations?

A few monetry changes (booooooo) have happened over the last week or so.  A new line in adverts are displayed on the right of the game in 100×100 squares.  These boxes can be brought from AdToll and are dirt cheap at the moment.  As Poker Sharks is still be officially reveiwed by AdToll an ad on the right can be brought for 20cents a week, thats it, 20cents - thats 10p!  So if you want an ad of your own to get some interest in your site, or just say Hi to other players via the ad, head over to Adtoll and buy one.

A donate button has bean added to the side of the blog as requested - its below the ‘Links’ at the top.  So for those that are feeling generous or have a bit of cash burning a hole, feel free to send over your pennies.

Season 5 and onto Season 6

Season 5 is coming to a close and it looks like there’s going to be a clear winner.  There’s plenty of battles going on further down the rankings and I suppose now is the time for other players to start thinking about next season.  If you are well down and would like to know how it feels to be in that Number 1 slot, you could retire your shark now, in 100 days time you’ll be the oldest shark in the game and all the regular players will be 20 days behind leaving you the best chance of a top spot.  You won’t be eligible for a prize, but you’ll be number 1 for a bit.  Depends on where in the rankings you tend to come I suppose.  (you could get your own back on that player that challenged you all those times and have the advantage of being 20 days older than them - not that i encourage revenge…)

Season 6 will be interesting to see how the new format plays out.  For the first time a season will start and there will be a whole host of sharks much older than all the sharks that have restarted so should make for interesting watching as players climb up through the older sharks.  I’ll be watching, popcorn in hand.

Thats all folks

Well that’s about it for this post.  There is loads happening and lot’s of it is very close to being launched so loads to be looking foward to.  Once we have all the main things boxed off we have some cool new developments to bring plus a load of promotion to get the player numbers well up.  It’s all taken longer than expected, but will be well worth the wait.  Thanks for all of your patience, and I hope you keep enjoying the game - we’re working very hard to make it better and we’re getting there.

Cya,

Lynx

*does the shuffle*

*exits*

The Iceman here.

Fresh back from the first Live By satellite International Disco Extravaganza, its down to normal Pokersharks Business.

The Top 10 is still ‘tooing and froing’ with some of those ageing sharks looking for a Viagra type rise, into the top echelons, can they do it..?, its changing everyday.

We’re just about to come round the final bend on season 5, Blizzo is commanding a mighty lead and it looks like the initial pacemaker wont be caught. Nakd has stamped his authority on 2nd place but lets spare a thought for ”Airbus”, Pokersharks newest shark, way down there in 213th place and only 2 days old……….cant wait to see you in the PokerRooms Airbus, come and join us.

Rover has returned to his favourite seat at the tables and is making up for some lost time.

Its good to see them filling up so regulary and the magician that is Kaysus keeps us all playing round the clock, maybe he can weave some of that magic and stop himself propping up the pack, hey maybe he can even find a hair-cure for some of the follicaly challenged amongst us…that would be a winner..!!

Moving on ……

OK, so the blind date may not be a boy meets girl type of thing but a big heads up to Spindry for setting up the first Meet….details here.

PokerSharks Get Together

What a great idea and im sure it will be a fun evening, especially as ive heard through my secret seaweed grapevine, that Lynx, PokerGod, aka The Man Upstairs could well be doing the Lynxy-Shuffle on the hour, every hour to keep you all entertained.

If i may, Spindry, also offer an alternative source of accomodation, a site ive used a fair amount…www.laterooms.com, covers the whole of the UK, simple and easy to use, with reveiws available. a quick search finds a guesthouse 1.6 miles from the city centre at £25.00 for a single or £45.00 for a twin/double. Here It Is. or

by all means check out the site yourselves, its easy to use….Here It Is.…it may help out.

So whoever is thinking about attending the meet, shout your name up to Spindry and have a wonderful evening…..remember all, what Goes on Tour is there to be shared with the rest of us, we look forward to the pictures.

Spread those PokerShark Seeds.

As usual Folks……………..I’ll see you out there.

The Iceman.

The Iceman here……..

Time to don those glad rags and dancing shoes, the first pokersharks disco is about to roll into town.

Exclusive for those who wish to visit the Poker Rooms, DJ ICEY will be on the decks.

Mixing Cool Tunes from the 80’s and 90’s, via YouTube, I’ll be asking you all to open up a seperate browser window and pasteing in the links ill be slotting in at every 5 minute intervals.

So whilst playing away in the Poker Rooms you’ll be able to reminisce to the background sounds supplied by the hottest DJ in town. Fresh from his Winter tour of Ibiza, Ianapa and Southend-On-Sea, DJ Icy will be cranking up the beats to keep you all entertained.

Requests are welcome, just post them in below, pull up a chair, load the bass and turn up the volume.

Thursday 24th January 2008, 9pm UK Time.

Be there or Be Square as they used to say, who knows we may even see a Lynxy Shuffle.

See You There.

The Iceman

The Iceman here…

Ok, i havent lost the plot, but following in that long line of Poker Shark Branding, i think it would be a good idea if we share our favourite, quick menu’s of the day………and Shark Fin Soup is NOT on the menu…

Icy’s Lamb and Apricot Hotpot……Serves 4.

Ingredients.

750g of Lamb Shoulder or Boneless Leg

1 tbsp olive oil, 2 onions(sliced),2 tsp fresh thyme or 1 of dried, 2 bay leaves, 2lb potatoes, 6oz of dried apricots, 1 pint of veg or chicken stock.

Method…..

1. Pre heat oven to 180 C, gas mk 4. Cut the lamb into chunks. Heat the oil and gentley fry the onions for 10 mins until soft. Add the thyme and bay leaves.
2. Thickly slice the potatoes and arrange a third of them at the bottom of a deep, casserole dish, with about a 2 Ltr capacity. Put half the lamb on top, then half the onions and then half the apricots. Half of the remaining potatoes, the remainder of the lamb, then the remainder of the onions and the last of the apricots. Finish with the last layer, the top, with the potatoes.
3. Heat the stock and pour over the ingredients. Cover the dish tightly and bake for 1.5 hours. Remove the lid and cook for a further 30 minutes to brown the potatoes. You can serve direct from the dish.

Prep Time=15 minutes, Cook Time= 2hours………………Easy and Delicious…Enjoy.

Just think, by the end of season 6, we could be seeing our very own Poker Shark Cookbook on the shelves of local retailers, soon to be followed by Channel 4’s  Ready Steady Pokershark, hosted by our very own Lynx, Pokergod, aka The Man Upstairs, bounding out of a very large Sharks mouth, doing the Lynxy Shuffle….

Eat Ya Heart out Delia, the Poker Sharks are in Town….

So post up those quick recipes and lets eat healthy for 2008, who knows, it may catch on.

As Usual, see you out there

The Iceman