PokerNews Introduces My Stack, New Chip-Reporting App

A recent development in the poker tourney reporting world surfaced within the last few days with the introduction of the new “My Stack” smartphone app for both iTunes and the Android. Here’s a link to the iTunes preview page for the app (doesn’t load iTunes, like some links irritatingly do), and here’s the link to a page discussing it for the Android.

The app has been created by the PokerNews folks and is connected to PN’s live reporting. Speaking of apps and PokerNews, the PokerNews app has also been updated considerably over time to include not just live reporting but news, videos, the podcast and so on. The sucker is a lot less buggy, too, than when it first surfaced back in the summer of 2010.

Players who download the free My Stack app onto their phones or iPads can now update their own chip counts as often as they like. I noticed today that a couple of players have already started to use the app at the WSOP Circuit Harrah’s Philadelphia event as well as the EPT Grand Final which has just gotten underway.

From the WSOP-C event, Matt Glantz updated his count a few times yesterday before busting shy of the cash. Meanwhile, Jeff Rossiter updated his count once today during the early going at Monte Carlo before he was eliminated. Just below is a screen shot of what it looks like when a player updates his or her own count, with an icon distinguishing the update from one made by a PN reporter.

Players can also add comments to their updates, which can be seen if you check under the “Player Updates” tab on the PN Live Reporting page. Glantz took advantage of that feature to add some funny comments to a couple of his Day 2 updates yesterday, if you want to see some examples of that.

Am intrigued by this new development, which makes me think back to the first days of seeing players reporting via Twitter and by other means their tourney progress, something that really only started happening a short while after I began reporting from tourneys back in 2008. I’m remembering a post I wrote during the 2009 WSOP titled “Land of 1000 Reporters” in which I believe I reflected for the first time on how it wasn’t just me reporting from these tourneys, but a lot of those participating in the tourneys were reporting as well.

I imagine there will be some issues that will arise with the new app. I am sure there will be some instances of erroneous counts being reported now and then, although the designation that a player entered the new count should help minimize the problems that would ensue from that. There could be other hiccups associated with the app and/or its use that haven’t been considered as yet, too, although my sense is it will be an overall positive when it comes to reporting.

I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts about the app. I’ll be interested in hearing what those who end up using it think about it, too.

Meanwhile, despite my enthusiasm about the new app, I couldn’t help but post my own invented version of a “chip counting app” on Twitter shortly after the My Stack app was first announced. Felt a little like The Daily Currant guys for a short while as I believe a couple of people might have thought my faux app to have been an actual one.

I’m calling my app the Mickey123. It harnesses the considerable resources of the world’s foremost chip counter to provide an easy point-and-click method of tabulating one’s stack, as demonstrated above.

As Mickey Doft would say, it’s unbelievable.