Craftpoker.com, is the flagship site of Craft Poker Co..

Craftpoker.com's mission is to provide a fun, non-gambling, site for playing serious1 poker with friends, including friends you haven't met yet.

Craftpoker.com is this website; Craft Poker Co. is the company that wrote and controls the Mb2 software.

Craft Poker Co.'s mission is to build value for shareholders by creating a powerful, flexible poker ecosystem that can be deployed anywhere.

Play Money, Real Players

Play money often isn't taken seriously. In part because the business model of many sites that have play money is to sell play money, which in essence devalues it and leads to horrible, unrealistic, annoying play—often accompanied by bad attitudes.

Craftpoker.com's play money is called Fun Money, but the fun that it is encouraging is to play well and learn more about the game, not to be a jerj.

Our testers love and respect the game; they're real people with friendly rivalries.

As we grow, although we'll do our best to get people to take free public play money seriously, we'll also provide a subscription service that will allow you to establish clubs, where you'll control of whether your games are seen or not, whether the general public can participate, and alternate scoring systems. For example, if you want to use craftpoker.com to practice play in a casino, you might want to set up tournaments or ring games that have the same Fun Money vig or drop as the establishments you will be playing in IRL.

Flexibility

Mb2, Craft Poker Co.'s software that we run on craftpoker.com is extremely flexible. You can see it in the variety of games, mixes, structures and series that we offer. "Soon" you'll be able to customize games, create mixes, put together and edit structures and series.

Even though it currently looks horrible, the user interface is also very flexible, and "soon" you'll be able to customize it, either privately, where your changes live on your device and not even uploaded to our web site (i.e., a client-side upload) or in a way where you can share your customization with others (i.e., a server-side upload).

No Ads

Craftpoker.com doesn't serve you ads, nor is any information about you shared with any entity. In fact, very little information about you is kept. Currently, so little is kept that it interferes with debugging (no user agent) and communicating with our player base (no email address).

"Few" Dark Patterns

There are plenty of ways to boost revenue that are considered dark (or deceptive) patterns. Craftpoker.com does not use any of what is traditionally considered a dark pattern, but an expansive definition would consider both closed source and low user-ids to reward early adopters as dark patterns. Low user-ids being artificial scarcity.

Sometimes, it's a fine line. Mb2's interface is ugly and annoying. However, Mb2's interface will be elegant, comfortable, and customizable. Perhaps our interface will tip someone with an addictive personality into playing more online poker than is beneficial. It's like high ABV craft beer. Take Prairie Artisan as an example. My relationship to Prairie Artisan is solely a satisfied customer. I do not know the founders, but it is extremely unlikely that they boost the ABV of their beverages to encourage alcohol addiction (which is a real thing). That is very different from many online sites. Addictive Design is all too common.

The bottom line is, craftpoker.com is and will remain a site where you can invite your friends and family to play with as much fear as taking them to a bar that serves excellent beer, wine or spirits.



1. As serious as you want to be, with respect to the other participants.