About Dr. Neau

Born in 1969 in the Twin Cities suburb of Maplewood, MN, Dr. Neau (Jeff) migrated to the stinky community of Cloquet at the age of 3. It was there that he developed a love for three things:

Jeff rumbled down to the University of Minnesota in 1987 and pursued his degree in Computer Science. Thereafter, he worked at Cray Research as a UNIX administrator, received his MBA in Operations Management/Accounting from the University of Minnesota, worked for Cimlinc, Inc. at The Boeing Company in Seattle, WA and received his Masters in Software Engineering from Seattle University. Jeff currently works for the Rational pillar of IBM Software Group as a Systems Architect...essentially a Software Engineer in the field of sales.

Jeff taught himself Java while taking a User Interface class at Seattle University in 1997. The project for the class was to create an application in Java that had a user interface which logically followed the user's thought process. While most students simply created "Hello, world" applications, Jeff created a fully-functional magic-number calculator for sports leagues (using just Notepad as an IDE, with one Java class). Jeff's learned a lot about JAVA, OO, the UML and IDEs since then...

Jeff was introduced to Texas Hold'em in January of 2004. His friend, The Eradicator, threw a 6-player tournament where they used the wall clock to keep track of blinds. Although Jeff won the tournament, the logistics were a disaster. It was there that Jeff decided there had to be a better way. Jeff went to work...

At first, he created an Excel spreadsheet for managing buy-ins and payouts, a simple Java app for a blind timer, and then a separate Java app for managing seating. Using what he learned from those, he created the first version of "Dr. Neau's Tournament Manager" in mid-2004 and released it as a shareware Java application. Through the end of 2004, he had over 600 download requests and many many happy users.

While V1 was a pretty good app and it received much positive feedback, Jeff saw that it could be vastly improved. He went to work on V2 in August of 2004, beta tested it in January of 2005 and released it in February of 2005 and started charging for advanced use of the application via "drneau.com".  Requirements continued to grow and the application continued to evolve. Jeff started working on V3 in March of 2006 and released it in March of 2009. V4 added in match-based tournaments and was released in April of 2010.

Good luck at your tournament!