It’s been a really fun year thanks to all of you who have played on the site and shared improvement ideas on the forums! Thank you so much for all that and I hope you’ve had as much fun doing that as I have!

I think this little community of ours has really helped us all improve our game while having fun at the same time. And though I really feel that it’s thanks to each and everyone who has been playing on the site and sharing their ideas, I wanted to recognize a couple of people who have been the toughest opponents to me personally.

First, my biggest "asshole" for 2009 ended up being "baboseki", who won ~ $900 against me the past year, which is more than any other player I played against (even though it was in relatively small number of hands so I think there’s still quite a bit of luck involved in that result too). He’s actually also a buddy of mine in real life too, so for those of you who don’t know, the term "asshole" is a compliment given only to players who are beating you fair and square.

Then, if I forget about the "objective" and "unbiased" statistics and instead ask my guts who’s been the toughest opponent I’ve had to play all year, there is one name that comes to mind: SmokinAl – He’s the one player who must have had the most impact in my game, in a sense that whenever I play against him I just cannot let myself fall into predictable patterns and habits and really have to concentrate 100% on each hand or I know I’d get destroyed by him. I also believe I’ve been running pretty lucky against him and yet he’s up against me for the year, so I have no excuses to make. Thanks to him I’m sure I’ve improved my own game a lot in the past year, and I look forward to playing a lot more in 2010 and keep challenging myself against the very best opponents I can find.

Of course there are many more highly talented and tough players I’ve had the pleasure to play against, some of them who are up against me for the year, and some who should be up but have been running bad. I could name all of you individually too, but to save time and space I won’t do that but still want you to know that I feel honored and privileged to have played with you for that past year and I hope we’ll keep playing and learning and having even more fun in 2010!

And since it really is 2010-01-01 now, the annual leaderboard as well as quarterly and monthly leaderboards are all reset again, so we can all start fresh and see who can claim the new titles for the coming weeks and months in 2010.

Good luck everyone and may the new year be the best you have had!

Thank you, Al!

I have started this year by being very lucky against you. With these cards it would have been difficult to lose. (Though I think my luck has evened out some by being a little less lucky against some others.)

PLO is definitely coming to CP in 2010. It will probably be quick and easy game to add once I actually get to it, but unfortunately I don’t have too much free time either so I don’t want to give any ETA’s quite yet.

It’s a fairly obvious question, but I’ll ask it anyway, have you considered open sourcing / sharing the code in some way?

To be honest I haven’t given it too much thought yet. Mainly because the site is still so young that I don’t know exactly what direction I wish to see it evolve in the future. I’m also not too familiar with the open source philosophy, or at least not familiar enough to fully understand all the benefits and risks of open sourcing a project such as this.