Challenge

The client was a serious poker player who primarily played live games.

The live format is unlike online poker, where you have the luxury of myriad ways to save, export, and analyze your play.

At the time, they were constantly typing notes and numbers into their phone through the Google Sheets app. Columns were squeezed to just 3-4 characters wide, and timestamps were manual. Wrangling an ever-growing number of tabs became cumbersome.

More importantly, it was not discreet.

Friends and adversaries often couldn’t help but peek over their shoulder, noticing that their game was being tracked on a spreadsheet. Maybe they felt threatened, or intimidated. Or just awkward.

Solution

What do most people do on their phones during poker night?

Between hands, they’re probably scrolling through social media, checking emails… and texting.

If a player glanced over at your phone after losing a hand and it looked like you were texting someone, they wouldn’t bat an eye.

So I created an interface that emulated the look and feel of iPhone’s iMessage.

Within this one web app, you could:

• create/view “conversations” (poker sessions)
• send green “SMS texts” (non-gameplay events such as blinds, buy-ins, tips to the dealer, etc.)
• send blue “iMessages” (individual hands)
• view graphs of gain/loss progression and self-reported “tilt” (emotional state)
• export data

Starting a new session was simple:

Once you finished logging a session, you’d have a convenient list of every hand and event:

Plus, a set of graphs to help visualize your performance (you can drag horizontally and even adjust the zoom level):

Outcome

The client now uses this exclusively to log their poker play.

like mission impossible spy type ****

god this feels so good to use

this webapp is too cool

this web app still feels exponentially better than using google sheets

While they ultimately export the data into Google Sheets for further analysis, this input format allows detailed, robust logging without raising any eyebrows.