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2025-12-4 Status Report

I apologize not writing intermediate status reports. I still need investment in Craft Poker Co. (CPC), but there was enough turbulence in my life that I chose to wait until things had been calm for a couple of months before updating people on what happened and what my plans are.

You know those signs that say “N days since someone cut his thumb off with a circular saw?” Well, I didn’t think it would be that hard to get to get N to sixty. After all, there’s only one of me and I only havehad two thumbs. I was mistaken.

TLDR

I was overwhelmed, am broke, still working hard and looking for investment.

Status

The big news is that equity crowdfunding raise is on hold (and may not happen entirely), and in the meantime, I’ll only be able to accept investment from accredited investors, and most BARGErs are non-accredited. Furthermore, securities laws are complex; I’m not a lawyer and I’m broke. That said, I believe that if and when CPC is allowed to accept investment from non-accredited investors (e.g., through an equity crowdfunding portal, or if the laws change), I can arrange things so that everyone who expressed interest last year can buy the same number of shares at the price that they expressed interest in, with me making up the difference in price via an unconditional gift1. As such, if you’re not an accredited investor, there’s nothing for you to do with your money, but you’re more than welcome to continue reading my status reports, using mb2, telling others about mb2 and CPC, etc.

I’ll “soon” be contacting everyone who expressed interest in investing a year ago and checking to see if they still want to invest. If people want to invest and they’re accredited, CPC will allow them to buy as many or as few shares as they want, ASAP. If they want to invest and are not accredited, I’ll reserve the number of shares they expressed interest in last year.

What Went Wrong

In order to proceed with the equity crowdfunding raise, CPC had to have our financials prepared by a certified public accountant (CPA). Our tax preparer isn’t a CPA, but normally, that wouldn’t have been a big deal, per-se, I’d just have to find a local to Albuquerque CPA. However, at the time, I was broke, but awaiting a check. The check was from the sale of the house that my late dad and his wife owned. So, I didn’t send an update, because the house had already been sold.

However, the check wasn’t sent when I thought it was going to be sent due to a combination of my step-mom’s health issues and tax concerns. The health issue delayed the sale toward the end of the year and at that point, delaying until 2025 would save some taxes. So, I didn’t send an update, because I thought the amount that would come in would be sufficient.

However, when the check came in, my bank put a hold on it, even though it was from the same person who had written similar checks previously. Then, that hold turned into a freeze and the freeze turned into the bank closing my account and not giving me my outstanding balance. I did nothing wrong and I have a twelve page PDF that I’ll be happy to send to you that documents what happened and why, but it contains personal information, so I’m not going to put it on GitHub. So, not only did I not send a status report while that fiasco was transpiring, I also didn’t seek out a new CPA. Ugh.

What Went Right

Although the above financial problems were—and still are—stressful and distracting, I continued development and even had a financial company interested in using my software to teach their budding traders poker, in the belief that learning poker helps make them better traders.

Taking a minor detour to add features to support the financial company was designed to get CPC some “quick” cash so that we could get a CPA and proceed as planned. It did indeed give us a very much needed $25,000, but it took long enough that month-to-month expenses did not leave anything leftover, much less to pay a CPA and get back on track with the equity crowdfunding plan.

During this time, overall, mom’s health and mental acuity improved. Mom’s progress was punctuated by some speed-bumps often complicated by my lack of money. In the early days, both mom and I got spooked when she backslid: “Is this the beginning of the end?” she’d ask herself? I never thought so, per-se, but each temporary set-back was certainly distracting.

As mom’s health was improving, I rode a roller-coaster as I tried to come up with a schedule that worked for both of us. It took months of trial end error, but we’ve reached what I think is a great equilibrium, considering the constraints. Other than my teeth, I’ve been exceedingly healthy the entire time. It’s now been over two months since there have been any mom or mom’s house surprises and a about two months since I had my upper six front teeth pulled2.

“Just” Add Money (and thus, Time!)

I need money. I don’t need your money. I don’t need BARGErs’ money, but I do need money. I need to pay monthly bills, but I’d also like to get my head above water so that I am less distracted. There are still 1,520 shares left to be sold at $175 per share. My plan is to let any accredited investor who wants to invest do so now and then, split my CPC time between:

  • documenting what I’ve already done,
  • seeking more accredited investors (if necessary),
  • letting people know about mb2 and CPC, and
  • new development (prioritized by investors)

As people invest in CPC, CPC will lend me money to pay bills, pay creditors and do other things. It may be a while before I can pay contractors to do much, although I’ve been experimenting with AI and am having good enough results that I suspect I’ll pay for more AI before contractors. Until I know how many shares I can sell how quickly, I won’t be more specific, but my goal will be to get enough of those shares sold to prepare for a raise at a ten million pre-raise valuation which would trigger the conversion from Series A Preferred to common stock.

I never intended CPC to have only one person working for it, but I also don’t want CPC to have recurring expenses that it can’t meet from revenue, partnerships or investment. Although I’m much further behind in the bootstrapping stage, I’ve done quite a bit of proof-of-concept work in the last year, which will allow a major (probably non-BARGEr, but you never know) investor or client to choose specifically which half-baked feature to fully bake, including:

  • Native apps
  • Impossible to rig deck
  • Asset-pack customization
  • Ring games
  • Membership administration
  • Statistics / Alternate scoring systems
  • More games
  • White-labeled sites
  • The server running on a phone or tablet
  • QR-code based pick-up games

If we sell all the Series A Preferred shares, there should be money for contractors as needed and to allow us to go forward with the next round of funding.

Click triangles for more details

Mom's Status (physically healthy, staving off dementia, happy)

Until Monday, the first of December, mom had a huge streak of walking almost every day. She got a little sick on Monday, and has missed four days of walking, but she’s getting better every day. Even with her missing the last four days, Strava lists her walking stats for the last four weeks as 11 activities / week, 12.3 miles / week, 6 hours, 59 minutes / week.

Five days a week, I am standing by mom’s bed with her coffee in my hand when her alarm goes off at 6am. I let her know what the weather is like; she then dresses for conditions and she and I leave the house between 6:15 and 6:30. She walks a 1.6 mile route, without using her walker or cane, but with me by her side, pushing her walker. She has to sit and rest several times during this walk.

Typically, we talk about current family events in the beginning of our walk, and then I help mom with memory, orientation, navigation and cognition exercises. We’ve learned the names of many of her neighbors and their pets as well as the names of the streets and many plants. Lately, we’ve named and have begun to tame a wild roadrunner.

After mom’s stroke, she was on six or seven different medications, some of which she had been on prior to the stroke. She is now down to a single baby aspirin a day. She is in the best physical shape she’s been in for the last ten or more years, but mentally still needs assistance. I have, however, been able to leave the house for days without anyone else moving in. When she’s by herself, my sister and/or wife check in on her regularly.

 
My Status (healthy, broke, and in debt)

I still have a great immune system and am running regularly. I have begun my training for the Bataan Memorial Death March 2026 and it’s starting out better than it started out last year.

Mentally, I’m doing better than last year, because the roller coaster is much smoother now (getting mom off her meds made her much more stable), and I’m also used to the roller-coaster. I am sleeping better and getting more done per hour, although I have fewer hours than I’d like.

Financially though, I’m hurting. Each month, I have a mortgage, phone bill and insurance bill to pay as well as being on a payment plan with the IRS and another payment plan with New Mexico Taxation and Revenue. All of those will come due for December shortly and I haven’t had enough to pay my November mortgage. For what it’s worth, my son has lent me money in the past and most likely would have lent me money for the November mortgage, but I wanted to get this status report written and to have sent email inquiring about investment before hitting him up again and once again things slipped.

Not having money to pay bills is annoying, distracting and in some sense pathetic. It’s certainly a red flag for potential investors. On the other hand, the amounts that I owe and my monthly spend are very small compared to what I used to make as a consultant and—IMO—the value I continue to add to the company.

 
Mb2's Status (ugly, unknown, undocumented)

Mb2 continues to be ugly, but there’s actually a way that anyone can customize it to make it look much better. The method is ungainly and undocumented and will change in the future, but documenting it is high priority (although not as high priority as finishing this status report).

Few people know about craftpoker.com and I doubt that I can change that in a big way anytime soon, however, I will stop letting its unpolished nature prevent me from touting it, especially once I can pay my bills.

I will add a section to this Players’ Manual that documents the state of the bulleted half-baked features above. My documentation itself will likely be half-baked, because there’s only one of me, but it’ll at least be something I can point people interested in using mb2 or interested in investing in CPC to.

As always, anyone can see the vast majority of the work that I’m doing on Mb2 simply by following the issue tracker for my mb2-doc GitHub repository. I sometimes abuse the high priority and easy labels, but I try not to work on things that don’t have issues and I try to work on the issues that are labeled high priority before working on other issues. The big exception to working on non high priority issues is when they all require me to be wide awake and I’m tired and want to do something. I’ve battled sleep issues all of my life and much of last year was the worst it’s been in over a decade. Programming is my happy place, so I’d rather work on something unimportant than not work at all.

Coda

I started writing this status report on November 12th. It’s been through many revisions, and I also put it aside for a while after Peter’s and Tanya’s death. By the time I picked it up again, Thanksgiving was approaching. I do not want anyone to feel sorry for me, because money is fungible, whereas health is not.

A year ago, I wanted to know who was essentially willing to bet on me, using Mb2 as collateral (i.e., the liquidity preference). I was—and still am—overwhelmed by the positive responses. However, for a second time in a row, I wasn’t able to accomplish what I thought I could, and for months, I was even questioning if I would ever have the stability to predict the future. The answer is, I can’t predict it with any specificity, but I will keep plugging away and using my time in what I think does best for the company and that may change.

I am not a wordsmith, and do not think that this status report does a good job of explaining why I’m so optimistic about CPC; in fact, it feels more like a dirge. OTOH, I hope it does a good enough job. I’m much rather undersell and over-deliver than vice-versa.

 

  1. The unconditional nature of the gift means that if I am indeed able to do this and you elect to not buy the shares, you still get the difference in price. That wouldn’t bother me, because I’ve received more in value just from people’s willingness to invest last year than I’d be paying in this hypothetical scenario. ↩

  2. Basically the five teeth I broke or chipped back in my 2017 [bike accident](https://github.com/ctm/Bataan-Memorial-Death-March/blob/master/2017.md #bike-accident) eventually fell prey to further neglect, as did an adjacent tooth which may also have taken damage that day. ↩