Hello folks,

As many of you know, I have been developing a site to simulate the experience of home poker games online. I need people want to test to help find bugs, give suggestions, and whatnot.

The purpose of the site is to allow people to host their own "home poker" games online. This includes being completely free to set stakes, play a large variety of games, dealer's choice games, straddles, checking in the dark, rabbit hunting, all kinds of things.

I want to get a nightly game going (nightly in the US, morning for me) over the next couple weeks or so to thoroughly test that everything is working and shake out the bugs as well as get suggestions on improvements from the type of people I intend to use the site (you guys).

PM me of you're interested in helping out.

What's your eventual goal- build a business? I'm assuming you're in a non-US country... I wonder if we red-white-n-bluers (the ones with the stars and stripes, that is) would have any issues? Probably not, if it's free.

My eventual goals are two, I suppose.

1. For a site like this to exist. Primarily, I made this site because I wanted to use a site like this and nothing was available that met my needs. There's one other site that makes a good start, and I even contacted the owner of that site and offered to improve his site for free, but he declined. Then I offered to buy his site, but he declined. So I was left with no other option than to build one myself.

2. To make money. After the incredible amount of effort it took to make this, I would certainly like to make a little profit off of it. I have no concrete plans for monetization right now, but it would sure be nice if I could figure out a way for it to bring in some income. I doubt it will ever bring in a whole bunch of money but if even pays for the cost if its server then at least I have a free dedicated server I can use to host other stuff as well.

I can think of no law anywhere that would prevent people in the USA from using the site. It does not take money for bets or pay out winnings. You can play it just as freely as you can play Zinga poker. It has a deposit and withdrawal system to allow club owners to control money coming in and out in case a club wants to back its currency with real money. If that's the case, then the members would have to check their own jurisdiction's social gaming laws to decide if their game is legal.

Lastly, I don't need people to commit to coming every single night or anything, but I'd like to get as full a tale as possible as often as possible to make sure the bugs are found before I start doing any advertising.

How do you monetize it? Simple. Charge people for the software.

Can you explain more of the nuts n bolts of how it would actually work?

I don't intend to sell the source code, and it's all online so there's no software to install. Well, I guess you need a modern browser and a Flash plugin, but those aren't mine to sell.

You can read some of the initial development of the idea here

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/24...-game-1110229/

I'm not up on current tech so I don't know what you would need to do, but I wasn't talking about charging for the software. I was talking about charging for access to the site.

Sounds like an interesting idea? I wonder how you plan to schedule these events or build a community so that games are always running. How will the games actually be held and kept track of?

If you need help with the website, I do own a company specializing in the poker niche. Message me for more details and with your goals for the site.

Good luck!

I don't plan to schedule any events except the ones with my own friends (and test games nowadays to make sure it works). There also don't necessarily need to be games always running. Hosts schedule and invite people to their game in the usual way. The site just provides the venue and equipment to play.

Played with Akhanar the other day, and this is looking really cool! It's already functioning like an online poker site just fine, except with a crazy selection of games at a dealer's choice table. Checkboxes for showing cards or rabbit hunting. We played no-limit 5-card-draw, commie stud, oxford stud, and games I can't even remember the names of!

I'd like to give it a spin.

Very, very cool. Just shot Akhanar a PM.

How would this be different than using Pokerstars for play money home game league?That's what we do and we track finances offline. Been working pretty well as we have a standing weekly game.

With OnlineHomePoker you are free to play a larger variety of games, each with a larger variety of options (straddles, checking in the dark, rabbit hunting, etc).