Who is behind this
Who writes this
José Antonio Neto
Pokeo is made by one person. I write the lessons, build the app, design this site and answer the email. There is no editorial team behind it, no agency and no sponsor.
I say that first because it changes how everything else should be read: there is no brand vouching for this content, there is a name.
Why I wrote it
Almost everything written about poker in Spanish was written by gambling companies, for someone who already plays. It opens with the hand ranking, assumes you know what a blind is, and three screens later it is talking about positions and bet sizing.
The real reader is somebody else. An adult who has been invited to a game, who has played Spanish card games all their life, and who does not want it showing that they are lost. Their mistakes are not ignorance: they are the correct answer to a different game. They think the ace is worth one, because in their deck it is. They think one suit outranks the others, because in their game it does. Nobody was writing for them.
Pokeo was written against a standard that has not moved since day one: no term appears without being explained on the same screen where it appears, and the learner never feels stupid. The floor is somebody who has never played cards at all.
What exists, so it can be checked
- A course written whole, not compiled
- Ten paths and fifty five lessons, in Spanish and English. None of it is translated from English material: the order and the examples are built for someone arriving from Spanish card games.
- A poker engine verified by simulation
- The hands in the app are not hand written: they are played by an engine checked against thousands of simulated hands, verifying on every street that the chips add up and the pot ends at zero. No example hand on this site is an impossible one.
- A vocabulary decided once and frozen
- The Spanish course says pagar and never igualar, retirarse and never abandonar, botón and never dealer. Each of those was settled once, with someone who knows poker in Spanish, and automated tests fail if any of them is undone.
- Content reviewed by outsiders
- Before the course was called finished it was read by people who had never played, by experienced players and by an editor. That produced several hundred corrections, and the blocking ones were fixed before any more was written.
What I am not
This is information too, and it is almost never disclosed.
- I am not a professional player and I have no results to show you. What I can do is explain things well, and that is judged by reading what is published here.
- I earn nothing if you go and play somewhere. This site carries no links to gambling companies, no advertising and no commission from anyone. The day it did, it would lose the right to say what it says.
- I am not neutral about money. I believe this is better learned without betting anything, and the entire product is built on that.
How to write to me
If something on this site is badly explained, if a case is missing, or if you are left with a question no page answers, write. I read it and I answer it.
José Antonio Neto
hello@utropia.es
You can also write from inside the app, and it arrives at the same place.
What I am building
A poker course for people who have never played cards, with no money involved and nothing to sell inside a hand.
