Welcome to Wizard of Odds 5.0

Welcome to Wizard of Odds 5.0, an enormous behind-the-scenes project, about 18 months in the making. While great efforts have been made to keep the same look as before, all the nuts and bolts that hold the site together have been completely replaced. There are still more details left, but the vast majority of the upgraded site seems to be in working order.

 

With this project out of the way, I'll be able to devote more attention to bringing new game demos and applications to the site, as well some other exciting features that are in the pipeline. Meanwhile, if you find any mistakes with the new site, please fill out the contact form.

You may be wondering, if this is version 5.0, what where the first four. My gambling site launched in 1997, first called "Mike's Gambling Page." Here is a little history of the site, for your amusement.

Version 1

After finishing the actuary exams in 1995, I suddenly had a lot more free time. Some of it I filled with creating a site about math problems, which still exists today at mathproblems.info. Many of those problems were related to gambling. Eventually, I moved all the gambling stuff to a separate page called Mike's Gambling Page.

Version 2

About two years later, I took a two-day course in web site design. The teacher pointed out the value of a concise front page, prompting me to pretty much completely redo the front page. You can see a cached version at WayBack Machine.

Version 3

In the year 2000, I entered into a partnership with a marketing company in Montreal. As part of their duties, they revamped the whole site. They brought a whole new look to the site, with, admittedly, entirely too much advertising. Here is a cached version from the WayBack Machine.

Version 4

About three years later, I parted ways with my initial partners. In addition, I moved the site from thewizardofodds.com to wizardofodds.com. In 2003, I took on Michael Bluejay to webmaster the site. In 2004, he was also put in charge of selling ads. He added lots of features and made it easier to do redundant tasks. Here is what the site looked like on March 8, 2010.

Michael also has hit own site about Vegas and gambling, VegasClick.

Version 5

In 2010, Michael Bluejay left the site and "JB" took over the task of webmaster. The site pretty much stayed the same, but JB worked hard on converting everything to PHP and modernizing the whole back end.

On December 6, 2011, we threw the switch and moved the site to a new server hosting version 5.0.