I remember it well when we decided to start development of the PokerStrategy.com Elephant back in late 2007. Althought today it seems like a natural decision, we were hesitant to do so at first.

For one, there already was a decent product – PokerTracker – which we back then offered to all our members that successfully gathered 2,000 StrategyPoints. Secondly, we did make the experience that offering a really good software was not easy: besides interesting, valuable features you always have to make sure the quality is good. A software that crashes or is hard to handle / hard to install will not be a product welcomed by the community.

But still, there were some reasons to try: if we had development under our control, we could easier implement the community's favourite features – whereas convincing an indepentend partner to do so was really hard, even though we were their biggest customers.

Additionally, with a software of our own, we can make sure people get their licenses quick and get a long-term support. So its easier for our members and less risk for us all.

So we tried. And if I look at the Elephant today, we succeeded. After less than a year of development, it is a full-fledged tool with less and less weaknesses. I'm very much convinced it will be the #1 tool in all important areas in 2009.

But of course not everything is too bright: to make sure we get the right amount of feedback to fuel our development and bug removal process, we decided to make an early alpha release. The following months were of course still full of not-working features, performance problems and annoying bugs. And as most people don't have too much time, they rightfully don't want to give a piece of software more than one or two chances. If it annoys them with bugs the first time they try to use it, they don't like it. And this opinion stays.

So today, we have a much better product – but still a large bunch of members that had too bad experiences with the Elephant to try it again. To us, that means double effort: to convince them, we need to make the Elephant so good that new people using it talk in the highest tones of it. Only if we convince those using the programme, we will be able to get back the users lost to bugs. 

Hundreds of freelancers work for PokerStrategy.com today. Each of them is an important part – they especially stand for the vivid side of our site, doing not only videos and articles, but interactive coachings, hand ratings, interviews and so on.

All of these freelancers should get their fair share of appreciation, and usually they do: people give feedback, praise their work. Basically, this feedback is the best measure for the quality of their work. Because of that, we are currently in the first stages of a plan that would give a little power to our users.

The idea is to make our community vote and give the best authors of the content pieces a premium. Why? Because the quality could improve! Doing great work, one could get not only extra attention and praise, but also a few extra bucks. And coming from the hearts of the community, these extra bucks would even feel better.

What do you think about empowering our users to rate and evaluate authors, coaches and video producers? A chance? A risk? Too complicated?

Last, but not least, I want to answer a question by BigStack83 in the comments: the title of this blog entry holds a good hint to our next partner!

...between Gibraltar and Kentucky. 

A few weeks ago, I already wrote about the dear judges in Kentucky, who try to seize domains like PokerStars.com. Funny of course, because Kentucky would need to think it owns or at least controls the Internet. But sad, if it would work.

Yesterday, the responsible court "ruled" that the dozens of big gambling / poker sites on their list have to expell Kentucky residents – or face forfeiture of their domains. Still, I don't believe they could – but is Kentucky with its population of just 4.2M worthy enough as a customer base? Will they be worth going a 1% risk for big companies like PokerStars or Full Tilt Poker?

It may seem wise for them to obey the court's decision, and we won't suffer too much, because Kentucky should be at best .5% of the world-wide poker market. But the signal could be bad! What if bigger states like Texas or California would follow their example? Let us not hope that the indian heritage for the name Kentucky, Ken-tah-ten, meaning "land of the future" will not mean a negative future for the poker world.

 (Image: Wikipedia.org)

To get past these thoughts and over the ocean, let's talk about tiny Gibraltar with its tiny 28,000-odd population. Other than Kentucky, Gibraltar is great for Poker, being home to companies like PartyGaming or Mansion – and us.

If there's not a once-in-ten-years-storm like on last weekend, Gibraltar is a very nice place to live. Especially if you're used northern Germany, the 20°C plus sun we got here now in mid-october is nearly tropical.

Here, we are planning for the next stages of your PokerStrategy.com experience: social networking features, new navigation, user-to-user-chat, new forum software – quickly followed by relaunches of all major parts of PokerStrategy.com (video section, coaching area, news hub etc.). And we will do even better once we move to our new office, where we will be able to fuel our development and improvements even better.

A last few words: I know, I'm not the most active blogger amongst all, but that is mainly because I don't want to write nonsense, but only stuff that I guess might interest you. So vice-versa, if you could think of an interesting topic, I'll be more than happy to read your suggestions in the comments!