Background of PSCrew.com
In December 2004, I was watching the final three tables of the Stars $215 NLHE tournament and I noticed a player named xBABKUZYx with an avatar that said “PSCrew.com” on it. Of course, I took a look at the site and only a few words were there, basically stating that the owner wanted help to make a PokerStars community website. I knew the basics of website building, so I wrote the owner an email and volunteered my help.
After a few emails back and forth, we agreed that the Mambo Content Management System would be a good fit for what we were looking for: a community website for players from PokerStars. Mambo is pretty easy to work with, so I had the site up, designed and running within two or three days. At first, it looked like this. It has gradually evolved to what it looks like today.
The main reason for setting up the site was so PokerStars players had a place to go to discuss hands, strategy, bad beats, etc. Forums were set up to handle each topic of conversation and the site’s registration numbers pretty much exploded for most of the spring of 2005. Eventually, the number of registered users climbed to over 3K.
XX RAGED XX took over as co-owner when he bought out xBABKUZYx’s share around May of 2005. I decided to keep my half of the site even though I didn’t expect to make any money off of it (in fact, I lose money on it paying to host it). XX RAGED XX bought half the site so he could put TradePoker links up and grow his W$/T$ trading business.
There were two main features on PSCrew that set it apart from the huge mass of poker forums out there.
The first was the player profiles. Unlike the typical forum profiles, the PSCrew profiles included mostly custom fields, as well as a spot for a picture.
The second was the database. Originally conceived as a ranking system to better that of P5s, the database was a listing of PokerStars MTTs with all of the player cashes associated with each tourney. It was pretty rudimentary at first as I had to enter each tournament one-by-one by pasting the information into a parser, which subsequently inserted the tourneys into our database. After a few months of this, I tired of the whole process and I considered giving up such an exhausting process. I spoke to the database programmer, Paul (aka xBABKUXYx’s little brother) and he and I agreed that the database had a lot of potential, but needed to be reworked.
The database that started as a rankings side project was about to become thepokerdb.com. I’ll discuss the process involved in the creation of thepokerdb.com in the next entry.
Related posts:
- Background of thepokerdb.com
- Fantasy Fanatics
- Welcome
- The best stretch in online MTT history
- Good luck to Jordan and Shane
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to get future posts delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.