Poker News

Lots and lots of people dream of a passive income. Making money by showing ads online can be a very good way to do that. Running a poker site is somewhere in between a passive income and really hard work. If you succeed you can make big bucks without working hard but it can be a lot of work to actually get there. We want to give you a few pointers in how to succeed as a Poker Affiliate.

 Forget about it

To start with you need to forget the idea of a passive income, save that for later. When you start out you need to work hard, really hard. There are thousands of sites telling people everything they need to know about poker, there are thousands of forums and blogs dedicated to poker. If you want your site to take off you are going to need to spend lots and lots of hours writing good content and promoting your site.

 Getting started – setting up a poker site

First of all, you need a site. There are a few affiliates that make it without sites but you can count them on your indexfinger. You need to build a good site, with real quality content. The usual stuff about how you play Texas Hold’em just won’t do. You need a way to attract visitors, you need to offer something. There are lots of things you need to think about when you start a poker site and we’ll look in to a few of them.

 You need to decide if you want to target the US market. This decision is not as easy as it looks. The US market is the biggest market for online poker and if you manage to hit it off there you’re made of money but there are two problems. The competition is killing, it’s extremely hard to launch a poker site targeting US or in English in general. The other problem is that Online Poker is banned in the US. Most poker rooms don’t accept players from the US so affiliate deals might be a bit scarce. There is always the off-chance that if you go to the US they’ll want to arrest you if you promote online poker.

 Another thing to think about is whether you want to offer rakeback or not. Rakeback is a good way to attract the really good players and with revenue share and good players you can make a lot of money. The problem with rakeback is that most networks has put a stop to rakeback. The reason is that it’s not really profitable for the poker rooms to hand out rakeback.

 Next step – Promoting your site

There are of course a lot of ways to promote a site, no matter if it’s a poker site or any generic site. Search engines are usually a good way to start promoting but when it comes to poker sites you are somewhat limited. Google for example does not accept advertising for poker sites. You just can’t get those adwords if you deal in poker. You can of course turn your face to SEO to hit it in the organic results but lots and lots of good search engine optimizers work with poker sites, the competition is massive. Ordinary banner ads can be a start but in the long run it’s very hard to get profit from buying traffic like that and try to sell it to a poker room in the other end. The advise here is to get creative, do whatever is necessary to get people to start noticing your site. You can start competitions, arrange live tournaments or you can try to convince your buddies to walk around in your branded t-shirts.

 One of the best ways to attract visitors is to offer something someone else offers. Give everyone that signs up on one of your poker deals a free pizza or visit every one of them. You can even try and give your visitors an experience they didn’t expect, try setting the world record in most burgers eaten during a single poker tournament. The key here is to get creative.

It takes time to attract visitors. If you don’t hit it off in the first 6 months you need to give it 6 or 12 more. Keep up your advertising, force your friends to keep the t-shirts on for at least 6 months before you decide it didn’t work. As they say advertising is 10% creativity and 90% sweat.

 Making money – Get good deals

You have probably seen most of the offers the poker rooms give to future affiliates, you’ve been checking out the deals and think they look pretty slick. $60 for a player signing up and depositing looks good but it’s not. Don’t fall for the standard deals the poker rooms offer to anyone. Talk to their affiliate manager and get a better deal. There is quite a lot of room for improvement on a $60 deal, I’d even stretch and say that if you sign up for that one they are making a fool out of you. I wouldn’t send a player anywhere for less than $140 and that’s when I’m feeling really nice.

 One way of forcing the affiliate managers to give you that extra cash is to make them come to you. I they find you in Google they’ll be prepared to give you more money than if you mail them and tell them you want a deal. See if you can get a few articles hitting the search results on a few of the less competitive keywords and then just sit back and wait for them to send mails and ask you if they can give you free money.

 Revenue share or CPA

Most of the poker rooms offer revenue share or CPA. This is no easy decision. CPA will give you the money as soon as the player deposits. Revenue share will give you a percentage of all the profits from the player in the future. If you have really good players, revenue share is the key but if you have average or bad players; go with CPA. If you don’t know if you have good players you usually don’t, go with CPA.

 That’s all for now, hope you enjoyed the guide and I wish you good luck with your future affiliate business.

Tags: cpa, make money online, poker affiliate, promoting, revenue share
Posted in Articles

Are you a rotten player? Don’t ever manage to win a tournament? Played all the freerolls and every sit and go and still not a single victory? We’ve got a strategy for you.

Finding a good poker strategy is hard work and takes long time. You need to get yourself tuned with the game and adapt the strategies you read about to your own personal way. Copying good players might be a good way, but it will take a lot of time. You need to get their strategy to match your style to get it to work, and you need to play lots and lots of hands.

We’ve got a strategy that works with brute force instead of skill, you hardly need any practice and it’s actually decent. It’s not a good strategy but it can be good enough, at the beginner tables at least. It’s actually a strategy from a very crude No Limit Texas Hold’em Bot. It was never a very good bot but it didn’t loose too much money, meaning that it could play for the first deposit bonuses. How did it work then?

It’s pretty easy but works only sit and go’s, maybe in freerolls as well as you don’t have anything to lose. The important thing here is that it works worse the bigger the tournament. Another important thing is that if you happen to run in to a good or at least above average player, it’s not the best of poker strategies. Play on the small buy in sit and go’s on a poker site with lots of fish. As soon as you get a decent hand, go All in. Keep it up, every time you get a decent hand, go All in. Don’t stop and try to play smart, just go All in, every time a hand shows up. You’ll look like a moron, people will say you you play like an idiot and that you don’t have any skills. They’ll tell you that you just got lucky every time you win a hand. All those are true, you are playing like a moron and you get lucky every time you win a hand.

This is actually a decent strategy because you force the play. You make it more about luck than about skill because there is no way to kick you out of the hand by raising. There is no way to bluff because if you have a good hand you’ll go all in, no matter the pot or the previous bets. There is no way for the limpers to see a flop because they need a hand they are prepared to go all in with f they are playing against you. You are playing like a moron but like a very calculated moron. True, this strategy will not win every sit and go for you but tell me the poker players that win every sit and go. It should win more like every fourth or every third if you are a bit lucky, it’s actually a working sit and go strategy.

What starting hands should you play then? You should play all pairs that are at least better than sevens. You should play Ace with almost any kicker. You should play Jack-Ten and better. You can of course play this a bit tighter but this should be a valid poker strategy for idiots. Give it a try.     

Tags: All in, Bot, Online Poker, Sit and go, Strategy
Posted in Articles

A 22 year old student from Canada named Glen Chorny has made himself famous, at least for this year, and he has made himself 2 million euros as well. Glen Chorny came to the European Poker Tour from a satellite on Pokerstars. The Canadian economy student managed to beat the Hungarian Denes Kalo heads up with A5 vs KQ. Chorny could leave the beautiful Monte Carlo with a little more money then he came and he’ll need those economy studies in a completely different way today.

Tags: EPT, Glen Chorny, Monte Carlo
Posted in news

Part I, Part II, Part III

Feed your brain and watch it grow.

Who wouldn’t like to have a bigger brain for poker? Think of all the strategy you could learn, how quickly you could calculate odds and make devious plans to conquer pots all around! While we do not promise a 50% increase in brain mass, we can point you to some foods that will help your brain repair itself and even grow.

Unless you live under a rock (or chained to three flat screens and 20 single table tourneys, which is quite similar) you must have heard talk of “essential fatty acids” or “Omega 3” oils. This is not astronaut’s food, nor a new invention to make you buy more supplements. These nutrients are old as the hills, and they can be your best friends at the poker table, since eating enough of those will make your brain stronger, healthier, and maybe even bigger.

Essential fatty acids are not “essential” in the sense that oxygen is – they are called “essential” because you have to get them from your food, since the body cannot synthesize them. Hence these are foods you cannot omit altogether, because there is no other way you can get the fatty acids. This is what is so “essential” about them. Is all clear now? OK, so what are they and where do we find them?

The most important fatty acids are the famous Omega 3 and Omega 6 fatty acids (i.e. oils), which are all over the news and talk shows these days because of their cholesterol-reducing powers. But reduced cholesterol is only a secondary benefit – what we are really interested in is poker, right? Well, consider this: brain tissue is composed of fat, and not just any fat but – you guessed it – essential fatty acids: Omega 3 and Omega 6 and something called DHA which we will get to in a minute. EFAs are the main components of brain tissue – the blocks out of which your brain is built.

This is a two-pronged issue: on the one hand, the more of these acids you get, the more building material your brain will have available to repair itself and grow. On the other, if you do not eat enough of these substances (and remember they are “essential” because you have to eat them to get them) then your brain will have to resort to lower quality fats to rebuild itself, which will result literally in a lower-quality brain: decreased memory, lower attention span, reduced analytic capabilities. The horror!

So where are these fats and how soon can you start eating them by the bushel? Omega 6 is easy to find and ingest, as it is present in vegetable oils (such as sunflower, corn and sesame) and cereals; go for whole grain versions whenever possible for extra nutrition. Omega 3 is abundant in oily fish such as salmon, tuna and herring (is that perhaps why Scandinavians are so good at the tables? All those pickled herrings and smoked salmon?) and doctors recommend at least 2 servings per week to cover your brain’s basic needs – however, if you want increased mental powers for those WSOP satellites we recommend you aim for 4 servings of at least 4 ounces each per week. Indulge in lox bagels, or enjoy a meaty tuna steak with a side of wilted spinach or chard for a super powerful brain. Vegetarians need not despair: flaxseed is an excellent source of Omega 3, and walnuts, spinach, eggs and algae are also very high in EFAs. A spinach omelette should be just the thing to eat before a big tourney, and adding walnuts to your cereal or salads on a daily basis will not just make them tastier but also increase your brainpower.

And now let’s talk about DHA, also known as docosahexaenoic acid. DHA is one of the main components of brain tissues, and therefore an important part of any poker player’s diet. The good news are that DHA is not an essential acid, meaning that your body can synthesize it if you get enough Omegas. The better news are that you can also ingest DHA ready made, making it easy for your brain to get all it needs to perform at top capacity. Like the essential fatty acids, DHA can also be found in coldwater fish and seafood, so try to make those a part of your diet and eat them a few times a week Vegetarians are well advised to stock up on flaxseed, soy and canola oil and eating plenty of algae – sushi and miso soup should be a quite tasty way of getting your EFA fix. Daniel Negreanu is a vegan, and look how well he fares!

So go on, order the shrimp kabob or the lobster and tell yourself “this is good for my brain!” You can almost justify it as an inversion to increase your poker ROI. For those still on lower stakes, start off a successful poker career by eating sardines on whole-wheat toast and adding anchovies to your pizza – the lobster will not be far off. Vegetarian grinders could do worse than stock up on trailer mix full of walnuts, brazil nuts and pumpkin seed to snack on while playing, and a fancy meal of wilted chard of collard greens with blue cheese is an excellent way to get EFAs into the system. Vegetarians and meat eaters alike will probably enjoy snacks of guacamole and baked tortillas, knowing that avocados are not just delicious but also make you smarter.

If you stock your pantry with the right foods, and include them regularly in your diet, you will be doing yourself a favor in more than one way: EFAs will help lower your cholesterol levels, keep your brain healthy and solid, and increase your mental capabilities for better poker results!

And for those who read the previous article and were wondering about “the miracle nutrients that will make you smarter, healthier, and more attractive;” what can be more attractive than being a smart, powerful, winning player?

Tags: Eat, food, poker, WSOP
Posted in Articles