For a lot of you guys this site is relatively new to you, between AlwaysBluff, Bluffware and Bluff.com it has been over a 3 year process for Bobby (virtues to all of you) and I (and longer than that for me). The idea was simple at that point, what if we could make a replayer and make it accessible to everyone to share hands, at that point replayers existed but none were available without paying a fee. I have known Bobby since 2005 and I wanted to work with him on a project but at that time I had someone else working on the replayer. They were not poker players and never truly got the vision. So Bobby took over. Basically we thought that if you had a content site like AlwaysBluff and merged it with the tools of a site like Bluffware people would flock.
AlwaysBluff and Bluffware are just better together
Both sites have had considerable traffic at times but as the project matured it started to become obvious that the replayer part, while novel, was not going to be enough. I remember asking Bobby this question like it was yesterday (it wasn't) "what if we could create the ultimate analytics tool that worked similar to the way people do stocks analytics now?". Of course this kind of exists now, there are elements of everything we are doing that exist in some shape or form, our key would be that most of the work would be done in the browser. So when he said he thought we could get there it seemed like a mountainous project but one we both wanted to tackle.
This project needs more people
That meant that we would need more people and we have certainly run through a few of those, one that has really had a great impact on the direction of the site and you could say we would not be where we are without him is "Ian". Ian is a grinder, he just sticks his nose in and goes to work.
Anything great is worth a few hassles
Along the way we have run into a few stumbling blocks. In reality the web was not there for a company of our size (basically three people). We wanted to give people the permission to share hands privately or publicly and it is that distinction that makes our project a tricky one. Simply put if you use a shared database most sites will prohibit you, we thought that would marginalize what we saw as the real future of what we are doing and we did not want to break the rules laid out by the sites. Obviously we are not even close to the goal of providing real time analytics in most people's eyes but the software required to do so is farther along than most people would think.
Bluff.com puts a bow on our grand journey
Then came a unique opportunity, we were chatting with a friend and business companion about the direction of the project and he suggested that we should consider buying bluff.com as a central spot for the AlwaysBluff and Bluffware brands. After laughing and explaining to him that dream was far fetched I decided to make a phone call to the people that owned it. I was right, it just was not going to be something that we could realistically consider. I mentioned it to Bobby and he did not seem fazed, so it got me thinking, I mean this was going to be a substantial commitment on our part. To take a step like buying bluff.com meant you were planning on being a part of poker for a long time. Sure we had put a lot of time and money into the project but buying a site like that was real commitment.
So today marked a chapter in that progression, AlwaysBluff no longer exists and now joins the former Bluffware software.
There are decisions you make in life that you really do not know about. This was not one of them, for both us we are proud to own this site and consider it a responsibility to the poker community to try and live up to the word. What I think you will all see will soon blow you away, it really is a dream come true for both of us and I hope all of you enjoy what is yet to come.
