I think it’s good to start this at the beginning. Back in 2012/2013 I was working with John (Not his real name).

John and I where planning out a poker site, how we’d create one and market it. I jumped on board when I saw the potential to make some money through ads. I was still living at home and worked a 9 to 5. When I got started, John had already started and rented poker software to power our site. All we’d have to do is simply promote it on social media and “get rich” 😛 😉

When John told me the price for renting the software on a monthly basis I thought about my hobby being websites and web development and thought to myself: why not create my own script and NOT pay a monthly fee to another company!

I started where everyone started, and how you probably initially even found this post: Google.

I typed in: Online Poker Script. Enter.

The first thing that came up was a $10K solution and was a full blown poker website suite. Beautiful, but way out of our price range.

A few results down I found an “Open Source” script called PHP Poker. Why the quotes you ask? Read on…

I downloaded it, adapted it to our website design at the time and we restarted our website.

After a while some revenue came in and when the time was there, I didn’t get paid. John didn’t pay me, he locked me out of our hosting and that was it. I never heard from him again and won’t go into more detail in this post… Maybe later. (Building suspension here folks!)

However, I did have a backup of the website I made, and of that open source PHP Poker script.

The original coder’s site www.phppoker.net was down and at the time I was not aware of The Web Archive Project – check that out btw, it’s amazing. I remembered what I typed weeks earlier in Google: Online Poker Script. Having registered about 5 domains max at the time, I checked if onlinepokerscript.com was available and… IT WAS! So I got it… And you’re on it. Right now! 😀

I started building on the code I found and kept on improving it for the next 2 years.

After two years of selling my modified and enhanced version I got an e-mail from Steven Powell, the original developer of PHP Poker. He told me about Chinese hackers that had decoded his PHP Poker script’s files and spread it around the web. And that was what I found and build Online Poker Script on… Not good.

He told me that the script was NOT open source, and he was selling it back in the day at phppoker.net. As the hacked version of his code spread like wildfire, and him being a one man operation, he binned the project but kept all the files he used to build it. All of his images, all of his code, licenses, modifications and more.

After realising what was happening – I was selling Steven’s work without his permission – I apologised for my mistake and negotiated with him to purchase the copyrights from him. After a few emails back and forth, the deal was sealed, payments where made, files where sent: I became the official copyright owner of the PHP Poker source code and even obtained the original domain name, you guessed it, phppoker.net from Steven.

The downside of this great deal was however: The hacked version was floating around.

Many sellers have illegally sold versions of the PHP Poker script and some still do. I’m working on taking these down. Unfortunately this includes customers who purchased or downloaded an illegal version of my script and work. I try to work with each one to keep their sites up and running, after all they purchased a script from someone or have a poker site running and don’t want to see that go down the drain. Neither do I!

I’m thinking about actively reporting about the illegal sellers that do not cease to sell or illegally using my work on this blog with proof, etc. Could be an interesting read 🙂

But after all this time, we’re still here. I’m actively developing and working on the Online Poker Script and plan to update and release Add-Ons as frequently as once a week. We’ll see how it all works out.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed. Share a business story below, I’d love to hear from you!