Happy to be announcing my first 2 revamped ‘Poker Bonus Club’ sites today… Seems like Gergely and I have been working on these forever, and we still have some tidying up around the edges to do. Feels great to have 2 of our bonus sites up though – one in Hungarian and the other in Russian.

Some redesign plans taking shape for SNG Planet now too – as my focus shifts to even more of the bonus club network.
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I learned something new about the SCOOP which I wanted to pass on ASAP today. Most of the ‘Low’ buy-in events are priced at $25+$2, and you can use tickets for a ‘Step 2’ SNG to enter them… Now, with all the publicity and hype surrounding the Spring Championship – just sit back for a moment and consider how super-soft the Steps just became.

Fresh news today confirming that Lock Poker are buying the Cake Poker network. I think this is good news for Cake / Merge / Lock and different types of players… more below.
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It sometimes seems to me that grinders (the smaller stakes online pros who multitable for a living) feel that the poker sites should be doing everything they can to give them the money of new players as quickly and easily as possible… This is wrong on so many levels, a healthy poker economy needs new players and it needs to give them a chance to enjoy the game and even to (shocking I know!) win some money early on.

Many poker sites have been changing their promotions and bonus schemes to appeal to recreational players, while the traditional rakeback models are in decline. I am happy to plug Titan Poker again today for this reason – they have made a big change to their loyalty / VIP scheme which has some real focus on giving back to the recreational and smaller stakes players… this is called ‘Titan Treasures’ and comes in 3 parts.

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Another Planet Corp update today, this one will provide me some welcome relief from the project I am trying hard to retain my focus on! I went through an analysis of my strengths and weaknesses as far as the website network was concerned while travelling down in Australia… and came up with 2 glaring holes in my armory – graphics and link building.

So a project was launched to get these things addressed – and 5 weeks after returning we are about a week away from the first fruits of the Planet Team’s labors! Continue Reading »

There was a lot of publicity this week concerning Pokerstars’ legal action against Poker Table Ratings and their subsequent withdrawal from ‘mining’ the games at the world’s biggest stand-alone poker site. Sites such as PTR collect data on 100000’s of players and then resell – the buyers are often online pro players who gain a huge advantage by knowing the tendencies and hand ranges of opponents they have never played before. This information is used to locate bad players, who are usually the newer ones. The pros then join their tables, fully aware of what the different bets mean, and take their money very fast…

This is bad for poker in many ways, especially since the newer players get ‘raped’ before they have a chance to learn the ropes – they give up much faster than before.

The bad news is that data mining is very common…

The good news is that there are ways you can beat the data miners… this post lists 5 things for beginning and improving players to consider before you next play. Continue Reading »

In between some running, shopping and general drinking this weekend I managed to discover some great videos. These are at Casino Affiliate Programs, a site I had not visited for a good couple of years, and featured some industry giants including the CEO of Poker Listings and Poker Strategy and the former Pokerstars VIP manager. Continue Reading »

US players have not had a great deal to celebrate in the world of Poker this past year. So I’m actually pretty happy to be bringing a positive round up today… This includes news of the upcoming ‘Liberty Tournament’ on the 15th April – which will be the single biggest online poker tournament open to US players since Black Friday.

I’ll also mention some world series qualifiers and Carbon Poker’s new calculator too.

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It was chaos in my apartment over the weekend… the ‘better half’ was storing away here winter wardrobe and bringing the summer stuff out. With moving made difficult by piles of stuff everywhere what else could I do than split my time between working on my websites and, erm, drinking JD?

So, a bunch of updates to tell you about today… starting with the Fish-o-Meter! Continue Reading »

Let me open this post with a question – would you like to earn 30% to 50% more each month for playing the exact same number of Sit N Go tournaments?

This might seem like a silly question, of course us poker players want more money! I have a feeling most people out there will keep on playing in their regular sites against the same old grinders though! This post shows you 3 different places which can make a BIG difference to your profits this April (and every month!) with their Sit N Go leaderboard promotions… best of all if you have not yet discovered these sites for yourself you can clear an extra ‘welcome’ bonus at the same time!

Read on for how to make April your most profitable month yet!

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Yesterday I published a list of the poker sites and networks along with estimates of their traffic on a blog called ‘The Poker Bonus Network’ which I am in the process of renovating at the moment. Seeing Stars with 3x the traffic of Party and iPoker, and then those sites having 3, 4 and 5 times the traffic of the next tier of operators (everest, microgaming, 888 etc) brought back some of my feelings of Pokerstars-related discomfort which I have blogged about before.

So, I decided that April will be ‘Alternatives To Pokerstars’ month for me – and that I will not play there at all. In fact, I’ll add Party to that list right here and now… Titan will survive, at least until their tournament super-sale promotion is over! Continue Reading »