Csaba Szirják

(Chaar-Lee)

Editor-in-Chief

Csaba "Chaar-Lee" Szirják is the editor-in-chief of AsiaPokerHub and the founder of Magnolia ITS, the company that runs the site. He has been in poker since 2005, built the technology behind Hungarian poker on TV, and has led software teams for more than fifteen years.

What He Does at AsiaPokerHub

Csaba is responsible for what we publish. He sets our editorial rules, decides how our data becomes articles, and leads the product and the team. The rules are on our How We Work page.

Poker

He started with fixed-limit hold'em in 2005. In 2007 he organized a week-long poker camp with games and talks by well-known players, sponsored by Unibet and Dracula Hold'em. It ran three times.

In the same year he built a camera poker table. It read the cards from the camera image, calculated the odds in real time, followed the hands and added the graphics for the broadcast. The Budapest Poker Open used it from the end of 2007, and it went on to Hungarian poker shows on TV, including Face The Pro with Gus Hansen, Unibet Póker Milliomos and All-in. In 2008 he co-founded Poker Production, a company for poker broadcasting. In total he built the technology of ten Hungarian TV shows, poker and quiz shows.

From 2023 to 2026 he was the CTO, CPO and COO of SoMuchPoker. He led a full rebuild of the site's technology, product and content strategy, and within two years its organic search traffic grew from around 600 to around 65,000 monthly visits. He redesigned how tours, festivals and events are recorded, and built data tools for the live reporting team. AsiaPokerHub is built on this experience, on a system we designed again from scratch.

Photos

From the broadcasts and events he worked on. The card recognition, the odds and the table graphics on screen are his work.

Players at the Full Tilt Poker tables in the Face The Pro studio with a Budapest night backdrop — Face The Pro, the studio, June 2010

Studio monitor of Face The Pro next to a screen with the HandHistory.hu table graphics — Face The Pro, the table graphics next to the studio feed, June 2010

Control room monitor with the preview, program and seven camera feeds of a poker show — All-in, the camera feeds in the control room, May 2010

Players around a camera poker table on the set of the TV show All-in — All-in, the camera table on set, May 2010

Poker table with card cameras under each seat, a TV camera and a Dracula Hold'em backdrop — Camera poker table for a Dracula Hold'em broadcast, February 2008

Two speakers on stage in front of the sponsors' backdrop — Poker camp, talks on stage, August 2008

Software and Teams

Csaba founded Magnolia ITS in 2008. Before running it full time, he led engineering teams at software companies in Hungary:

Foundation HQ (MBH): Tech Tribe Lead, 2021-2022
VCC Live: Head of Software Engineering, 2020-2021
Instructure: Director of Engineering on Canvas, 2018-2020
OTT-ONE: VP of Engineering, 2017-2018, an organization of 40 people at two sites
Dolphio Technologies: Head of Software Development, 2014-2017
iData: Head of Development, 2012-2013

He won the Young Leader of the Year award in the SME category in 2017.

WorldSkills and EuroSkills

Since 2018 he has trained and judged young IT professionals at the skills competitions: as a EuroSkills trainer in web development, and as a WorldSkills expert in IT Software Solutions for Business at the 2022 Special Edition and in Lyon 2024, and in Software Applications Development in Shanghai 2026.

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