Dear Shibes,

Such Flush here looking back on 3 years with Poker Shibes and looking ahead to where we are going!

You may recall BlakShibe's last official update State of the Shibe, September 2016 Edition.

It is my duty and pleasure to inform you that we have made good on several of our promises and goals from then:

• Infrastructure upgrades include new servers at a new datacenter that will both increase performance and capacity but also lower our operating costs.
• Mavens software upgrade offering Razz, Stud, HORSE and other mixed games.
• User survey undertaken
• New Sunday Tournaments

Some things have stayed the same, such as:

• Shibes is now well-capitalized, all customer deposits are safe, secure and available for playing poker or withdrawal. (We hope you want to play!)
• Shibes staff is more responsive and available than ever to address player questions and concerns.
• Marketing and promotional planning

Three years ago when I started working with the management of Poker Shibes, things were exciting and it seemed like we could only keep going up. Things were also not in the best state administratively, with 6+ red text names sometimes.

Roughly Two years ago when Raventhon and I took sole control of the site, things were daunting, but we felt ever more prepared to move things forward. Unfortunately both Raventhon and I were not able to work on Shibes full time. Soon after Raventhon's new job responsibilities increased both of us were able to focus on Shibes less and less and the site undoubtedly was affected.

Just over a year ago, when I took over the site, it was metaphorically as if our rocket had exploded upon the launch pad. Raventhon left us, in good graces with most users, but in a very tenuous position. I promised two things: I would make sure to take care of everyone, and I would continue to operate Shibes until dogecoin stops trading.

We are now in a position where our rocket has been rebuilt from the ground up and we are ready to begin preparations for take-off. This does mean old marketing plans going into affect, but it also means new ones on the table from marketeers such as /u/BlanceBlackula, /u/digitales, and /u/MCC33

Starting with this post, we will be regularly making posts detailing some of our work with regards to Shibes. May this be the first of many!

In the last year we have completed (some twice! server deaths can be brutal) the following things you might not necessarily be aware of:

• Investigated numerous suspicious user accounts and banned some bad doges
• Repaired our email and support infrastructure ( support@shibes.poker, admin@shibes.poker, and technical@shibes.poker all fully operational again)
• Caught up on all support cases
• Setup support notifications to our cell phones (we care about you!)
• Fixed some small bugs in the website as a result of support cases
• Setup a development environment separate from production
• Implemented our infrastructure with code
• Updated our internal wiki and work flow

In the last couple months since switching to the new infrastructure we have responded to the following emergencies (at least once):

• Breaks not working
• Various ticketing issues
• Knockouts not working

Finally, we are releasing the results of Sunday Tournaments over this last quarter. This will be part of a new software release of our backend. We are very excited to announce that Sunday Leader Board is Back and there will be a prize. Possibly more than one if anyone actually gives Bioluminous a run for his doge!
Sunday leaderboard can be viewed here: https://shibes.poker/sundays/

The boring technical details will be released tomorrow, but the short points are:

• All backend code has been modernized from Python 2 to Python3
• The backend has been enhanced with a new API service which integrates better with Mavens
• The new backend enables us to offer real-time updates that will first be depicted with Sunday Tournaments

With Love,
Such Flush