Planet Mark's Blog. Thoughts, News And Strategy For Poker Tournaments Of All Sizes

Planet Mark's Blog

SCOOP Time To Get Your Steps On + Cake / Lock Roundup

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.

Submitted by Planet Mark on Mon, 05/07/2012 - 13:15

Titan Poker New Loyalty Scheme – Looking After The Recreational Players

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.

Submitted by Planet Mark on Wed, 05/02/2012 - 19:29

5 Ways To Beat The Data Miners

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.

Submitted by Planet Mark on Sat, 04/21/2012 - 12:12

Mixed Bag Tuesday Post

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!

Submitted by Planet Mark on Tue, 04/10/2012 - 10:37

A Few Beers + Poker Satellites

English people like myself have a good few expressions which do not really mean what they seem… one of them is ‘A Few Beers’. If I were to say that I had a ‘few beers last night…’, this would not actually mean a few at all. Seeing if someone wanted to go out for a ‘few beers’ would be an invitation for at least twice that many – and then probably on to the smaller, and much stronger stuff. Now, I’m partial to a couple of beers myself… and reading about another affiliate’s big plans for a deep and big website got my mind wandering off in a few different directions.

Submitted by Planet Mark on Thu, 03/22/2012 - 14:05

March Planet Corp Update

Taking a trip to the sunny southern hemisphere must have softened me up… I’m currently sniffing away the last of a pretty nasty cold which struck at the end of last week and lasted through the weekend…. Grrrr. Anyway, enough about that, this post is one of my intermittent updates on the business. Summing up current projects and future plans.

Submitted by Planet Mark on Tue, 03/20/2012 - 15:02