Into Zynga Poker? Want a bit o’ artificial intelligence to tweak-up your game play? Then meet your new buddy, PokerBuddy Pro that is. The PokerBuddy team spent nearly two years perfecting algorithmic and statistical analysis for no-limit Texas-Hold’em. The result is a Windows-only software client that provides players advice, in real-time, throughout their game play. In case you’re wondering, no it’s not limited to Zynga Poker, this is just the first implementation. Using PokerBuddy Pro is quite simple, all you need to do is keep it open alongside your Zynga Poker window, and just follow its advice. It will keep it coming as it continuously updates its hand-play recommendations based on assessment of hole cards (your hand), the flop cards (top facing cards on the table), the number of cards dealt, and pot size. How does it gather this data? Good question. All I was able to get out of CEO Alex Frenkel is that evidently it’s not all that difficult to do using deep level of communication protocols. He went on to say: You need to understand that this wasn’t the major challenge as there are many ways to integrate, this includes reading the chat, scraping from the screen and more. Legally we don’t see any problem as well because it is not a bot , it won’t play for you! Here’s where PokerBuddy’s truly compelling features come into play. The application provides players with two situation indicators: Hand Rank – After a player is dealt the first two hole cards, PokerBuddy rates the hand against the overall deck, and provides a percentage indicator of how many possible hands the player’s current cards gives them an advantage over. For example: An Ace of Clubs with a 7 of clubs is statistically better than 88.1% of all other possible hands. Once top facing cards are dealt (the “flop”), the Hand Rank lets you know exactly what your highest current hand combinations are (two pair, Flush, etc.). Your Stack – This is the number of Big Blinds (potential bets against the current high bid) that you have left so you can plan your betting strategy accordingly. After the flop, this indicator switches to let you know how many cards left in the deck can improve your hand, also known as ‘Outs’. Note: I am more of a cock fighting man, so all this Texas Hold’em lingo had to be explained slowly to me To make things even easier for players, PokerBuddy deftly integrated game play aggressiveness levels in the form of characters who act as ‘advisors’. These range from the more conservative ‘Edward Bailey’ (The Hold’em Professor), to the mid-road ‘Karen Brown’ (Brown Sugar), to the most aggressive advisor ‘James Ford’ (Young-Gun Ford). When it’s time to act, the advisers’ backgrounds will change to yellow, allowing the player to click on any one of them in order to get their advice on the current hand in play. Interestingly, the PokerBuddy team has limited real-time advice at five hands per game. Their logic behind this decision was not to hurt the game or give unfair advantage to any of the players. Also, the team noted that they will gladly adjust this should Zynga ask them to. Post action feedback (after the player made a move) is unlimited because the decision was made and the feedback has no effect on the results of the hand. There’s one additional part to PokerBuddy Pro and that is its website. The site acts as a sort of social data locker where players can track their results and performance. For players that take their Zynga Poker more seriously, this is a big deal because Zynga Poker doesn’t provide game logs, so the only alternative is to video record a game session. A social envelope on top of the data allows players to discuss game play with others. All-in-all a great way to learn and improve your game play. How does PokerBuddy aim to make money? Quite simple really… They plan on selling credits for real-time advice. At the moment advice is free to all, but the company plans on turning on for-pay advice in the coming months. CrunchBase Information PokerBuddy Pro Information provided by CrunchBase

One thing Zynga loves are the “ville” games. Farmville now has 80+ million monthly users, and they’ve go FishVille, YoVille, PetVille, etc. as well as lots of other games. Next up, it looks like, is FrontierVille And as ridiculous as these games are, people love them, sometimes they get addicted to them , and the revenue keeps rolling in. Next up is FrontierVille, if the screenshots I saw while logged in to Facebook as a Developer Test Account are to be believed. The game description? Click and then keep clicking. Ok, not really. It’s “Howdy Pardner! Let’s explore a new life on the frontier. You gotta chop trees to construct buildings, clear land to raise livestock, plant crops, and raise a family. The untamed wilderness is hazardous, but your fellow pioneers are there to help.” Milestones include things like “learned the ropes,” “just broke ground for a new homestead!,” and “just finished building a General Store in FrontierVille.” I just wish they’d create BloggerVille. I think I’d be really good at that. CrunchBase Information Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase

One of the cofounders of Zynga , the company’s executive vice president of sales and business development Andrew Trader , is no longer with the company, we’ve confirmed. He has been quietly removed from the company’s management page . Remaining cofounders – Mark Pincus, Michael Luxton, Eric Schiermeyer, Justin Waldron and Steve Schoettler, remain. As of a month ago Trader’s title had been downgraded to VP of Partnerships and Studio Services, although no top sales or business development replacement executive has yet been named. Why is he gone? No one is saying. CEO Mark Pincus says only “AT [Andrew Trader] and zynga have parted ways. He made an awesome contribution. We need to continue scaling the company.” Trader hasn’t yet returned a phone call asking for his comment. Zynga’s revenue growth has been nothing short of astronomical over the last 18 months, so it would be hard to blame him for not bringing in the dollars. Perhaps he took the fall for the Scamville saga although that has largely blown over now. Trader was with Zynga nearly three years, so he’s vested on a lot of his stock. Given how much money is at stake, the whole story about why the first cofounder of Zynga has left the building may never come out. Zynga raised $180 million in December 2009, at a rumored valuation of above $2 billion. And no, I have no idea why he’s holding a banana in the picture. CrunchBase Information Andrew Trader Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase

Zynga investor Fred Wilson remained mostly quiet during the Scamville debacle in October. But he’s starting to talk now, and he isn’t happy. In a post about Etsy a few days ago a commenter brought up the Zynga/Scamville stuff. Wilson replied “Citing techcrunch on the zynga stuff is a joke.” He waded into the subject again today on another of his posts , saying in a number of comments “i’ve tried hard to stay out of that debate because it is a false debate…zynga makes almost all of its revenue on virtual goods…the “scammy ads” thing is total red herring that everyone got excited about but is almost entirely irrelevant” and “nobody who got involved in that shitstorm took the time to really do the work and look at what Zynga did and did not do. or compare it to Google and everyone else who does way worse on a daily basis…the whole thing totally annoys me. it’s not fair.” He also said numerous times that we didn’t have our facts straight, and that we didn’t take the time to understand what really happened. Hogwash. Fred Wilson is a brilliant investor, but he’s conflicted and wrong yet again. There were a total of 22 Scamville posts (see updates) on TechCrunch alone. For the most part we left Zynga alone, until we were slammed in the face with CEO Mark Pincus on video saying “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues” (how do you take that statement out of context?). Pincus also said “we need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers” in a post about Scamville. And Facebook took one of their games offline for a few days for a violation of their terms of service around scammy offers. Zynga had claimed in the past that fully 1/3 of their revenue came from offers. Some of that wasn’t legitimate, likely tens of millions of dollars, and other companies have said that the bad stuff tended to push out the good stuff. There is an excellent argument that you can continue to find most of these scams on Google and other search engines. But a big difference is the incentive that social games give users to enter into these scams via virtual currency, as well as the fact that they targeted teens without credit cards by pushing mobile subscription offers. Google is wrong to post these ads. But that doesn’t make what Zynga has done right. I think Pincus took the right steps to move his company in the right direction, and I think the industry is on the right track now, and Zynga looks to be a legitimate business even without scammy offers. I support Pincus as an entrepreneur. But to deny that there was ever a problem is irresponsible. And to suggest that we didn’t take the time to understand the facts is outrageous. In addition to the 22 posts where we spoke to dozens of sources on and off the record, I asked Pincus to go on video with me to tell his side of the story without editing. He declined. Zynga continues to be a very close partner to Facebook. They share a major investor, DST . A facebook board member, Marc Andreessen , is also an investor in Zynga. And Zynga is Facebook’s largest advertiser. The fates of these two companies are deeply aligned, and there has been more than a little evidence of wrongdoing. The relationship between Zynga and Facebook needs more scrutiny, not less. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said earlier this week that he intends to make sure his company’s games don’t include scammy offers in the future. Our full background on this story is here . But what he didn’t say in that blog post is that Zynga has been scamming users from the beginning quite intentionally as part of their revenue model. Rather, he pointed much of the blame at middlemen offer companies: “We need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks.” Last spring, though, he gave a much clearer explanation to an audience at a Startup@Berkeley mixer, admitting that scamming users was part of Zynga’s business model from the start. And it was all caught on video. I think everyone sort of knew that this was exactly Zynga’s gameplan. But to hear it said so directly is just shocking. The full 30ish minute video is here . We’ve taken the relevant section of the video, roughly starting at around the 10:40 mark, and embed it below. From the video: I knew that i wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right, fucking, now. Like I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business…So control your destiny. So that was a big lesson, controlling your business. So by the time we raised money we were profitable. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.