The Poker Affiliate Blog

Noble poker recently announced that it was ceasing to give ‘loyalty’ payments. This just means rakeback. I’ve actually forgotton the reasons behind it but there were a few of them something like; Win/Loss ratio and the fact Noble is owned by Party and they felt Noble was actually kind of hurting Party. Anyway it obviously wasn’t +ev for them.

Although I can’t offer under the table deals publically its pretty incredible the amount of people that come to find me after this happens. I mean there are a not of new players looking around for deals and its amazing they manage to find new deals especially completley unadvertised ones such as mine.

It got me thinking that keeping stuff quite when it comes to under the table deals and hoping the skins I work with don’t cease them anytime soon is really the way forward. There is no real rush on that front, so long as I stay consistent the players will all eventually end up under me in someway or another.

On top of the new players a skin like Noble going down also presents a bigger opportunity. All their affiliates will be scrabbling about hoping this source of income doesn’t vanish into thin air. I can help them, set them up with a deal (possibly better than they had at Noble) within 24 hours, get a beautiful looking email out to all their players with the details and tracking link and help save their business. I’ve got 3 different Noble affiliates contact details who I will hopefully contact and propose this to. At the end of the day 1 of them is going to be an extra $1k a month minimum in my back burner so its really a worthwhile process.

What is more important than the cashflow is my power or assets and I really feel this is overlooked a lot. If I bring hundreds of players and several affiliates and am effectivley responsible for a good amount of MGR my posistion as an affiliate is so much stronger. I can negotiate better %s, move about and really have a lot of pulling power. For me its not all about the cashflow maybe one day I’ll want to sell the business. I don’t think I will becuase I’d be like a lost puppy but, who knows how I’ll feel in a year. I mean I’ve made a lot of friends through being an affiliate and obviously I want them to have the best – which I think is me :p and keep chatting to them so yeh maybe selling doesn’t look like an option yet.

Tags: affiliate, Cashback, iPoker News, Noble, Noble Poker, Online Poker, rake, Rakeback, RB, Skin

iPokerVIP.Net is finally live and kicking. After countless updates and redrafts its now in a state I’m happy with although I’ll always find a little something wrong with it. Probably because in a perverse way I don’t want it to go live and fail – I’d much rather keep building and perfecting.

Anyway – its just a question of putting the ads on 2+2 (should be next week) and keeping my fingers crossed. I’m completley convinced the gap in the market is there and I’m equally certain nobody has filled it. The size of the niche and whether I’m the one to fill it remains to be seen. Besides I’m sure there are lots of failed businesses that were in the right niche but, just couldn’t capitlize. Although being in a growth area makes failing a shitload harder I’m sure.

As for my current player base things should turn around from Febuary (and it looks like March’s) horrible low. I’ve been busy with iPokerVIP and a ton of other things and its just harder to get players on these deals nowadays.
VC is running a $375k promotion called Poker Olympics which is going to kill. Its by far the best place to go on iPoker now and the dormant player’s under me (who all have a legitimate chance of doing very well with the promo) would be stupid to not come flooding back.
So I hope they’re not stupid !

April is going to be really busy – which is a good thing. No uni and I’m not really intending to revise for exams then either. 1st one is May 7th so 7 days (if I put my head down is defo all that is needed to pass which is 40%).

April is going to be interesting. I’ve kinda written off March though.

If iPokerVIP goes well I’ve got another affiliate concept ready to go which I’ll write more about later. Hopefully, it doesn’t take me as long to get my head around.

Tags: iPoker News, iPokerVIP.net, poker promotion, race, rake, vcpoker, victor chandler, vip

Aside from ipokervip I’ve got some lower variance investments on the go and just thought I’d type my thinking out loud on some of them and see if it makes any sense. I’m not qualified at all btw so don’t act on any of this pls !

Gold – I try to order gold every month and get it from a site called UK Bullion. Basically I wire them the money and get some in the post which struck me as pretty sketchy at first. I didn’t understand why they couldn’t process a credit card but, I get it the next day and it seems to be okay. Well, I mean its gold.
On a random note don’t be fooled by the pictures – 1oz of gold is tiny, like absolutely tiny.
Anyway, buying physical gold attracted to me as opposed to buying it and keeping it in a vault somewhere because its purpose is really to consolidate wealth. The time when an investor would realise a huge return on gold would be during a time of complete financial meltdown, war or some kind of anarchy. In this, admittedly far fetched situation what good is your gold being in some bank vault or held in shares ?
For me the main point of investing / saving is survival. Profit is nice, but survival is key and gold is perfect for this. Cynics would say in this kind of scenario I’d probably be better with a gun than gold though.
Anytime when there is financial instability associated with fiat currencies gold will rise because it becomes a more attractive way to store wealth.
I guess it doesn’t yield a dividend and its value can dwindle but, at the end of the day we’re talking about a finite resource that is publicly recognised as having its price controlled by the central banks and imf in order to slow down inflation – how can we not be talking about a commodity that will ultimately rise ? and I actually can’t think of a finite resource that decreases in value over time.

http://www.garynorth.com/public/4857.cfm

This guy is pretty crazy but, I’ve got a lot of time for it – probably the sort of thing you’ll love if your into conspiracy theories.
Anyway, I think you can do a lot worse than buying a few oz’s of gold. You can’t gamble them away anyway !

High Yield Deposit Bond – This is basically one of those deals where I’ve said I’ll put £x away for 1 year and take the interest. An absolutely shit investment yielding 2.8% at HSBC. I didn’t actually mean to open the account I thought I was filling out an information form online early one morning. I like this though because the money is safe and it is a better interest rate than their flexi saver which I only use as a mechanism to make sure there is never too much on my card. I’ve heard some good things about some banks abroad and will be opening an account in Gibraltar when I go over in the near future.

Shares via ISA – I’d be dumb not to have an ISA and build it up + they’re putting the limit up to £10k a year in April. So there is an opportunity to save some serious tax free money. I do it via the motley fool share dealing service although don’t have much in there at the moment because of limits. I’ve split it over 6 or 7 shares including; BP, Scottish&Southern, Severn Trent, Texaco and some other similarly boring companies my dad suggested to me that I forget. They’re all pretty solid with 6% + in dividends and they’re all involved in providing essential resources. Severn Trent are water, Scottish & Southern are electric and so on..

That’s really about it – The saving bug only hit me recently but, I don’t want this to end and have nothing to show for it. The least I can do is give myself a springboard for any other ideas I may have outwith the industry.

I’m often worried that my investments are contradictory. An easy example is my payment. Each month I’m paid in $ (so obviously enjoying the exchange rate at the moment). Now, based on some very basic economics and probably shit reasoning I would say;
1. State of USD is representative of the world’s economical climate. If the $ is strong the economy in a global sense can’t really be doing too bad ?
2. Gold needs financial uncertainty to realise healthy gains. If fiat currency is doing well, and people have faith in the market where is the need for gold ? Even as a safety net ?

So I want $ to get stronger.. but gold to go up too. I mean there is tons of stuff like this and although my reasoning isn’t perfect I want to get a sense of direction in my investments.

Buying gold and buying £ for USD is maybe like burning money in commission. Like putting £100 on Red and £100 on black and just slowly bleeding value.

As I said the most important thing is preservation of wealth and one thing I want is to always have diversity in my savings. In UK banks money is guarenteed by the government up to £50k so an example would obviously be having seperate accounts if your savings were in excess of this – pretty obvious lol.

I guess the ultimate investment is property but, nobody is giving me a mortgage anytime soon considering I’m techincally just a student but, in the next few months when I go to Gibraltar that might all change.

Wealth is always becoming more polarised – the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer so tax havens are going to become more popular ? Its got the added benefit of establishing a legit business there too if I own property so that’s something for the future.

My favourite investments are ones I can guide and see through however. So I’m looking really forward to iPokerVIP its getting close.

Tags: Gold, Investments, iPoker News, iPokerVIP.net, Playtech, Savings, Silver

Test page for ipokervip is up although the text for the offers is going to change that is pretty much what your going to see when it goes live: www.ipokervip.co.uk/test

It will most likely go live under the domain name: ipokervip.net although I own most of the major domains aside from .com which I just couldn’t get.

I’ve pretty much not been updating the blog because when ipokervip comes out I want to be updating it daily because of the increased traffic. Also if I decide to feed my latest posts into the site I’d like them to be updating as much as possible and keyword rich for SEO.

The site should go live this coming Wed which is the 24th of March with the ads on 2+2 and support thread following soon after. Really just hope I’ve not made a bad call lol.

The blog is going to get a complete revamp to skin it up as part of ipokervip or make it look similar. Allowing randoms to get at the offers from the blog.

So its all very exciting !

Tags: iPoker News, iPokerVIP.net, poker promotion, race, rake, vcpoker, victor chandler, vip

Just a short post but, basically stats have dropped by like $50k before super affiliates stats. Its pretty inexplicable becuase I think stuff went better in Feb at grass roots level than it did in Jan and I don’t know why.

I’m so tired at the moment but, am going to look over the stats and come up with a short term plan of action – basically personally emailing select players that have obviously left for another skin or site completley and trying to get these promotions into action.

Peace

Tags: iPoker News, ipoker vip, iPokerVIP.net, poker affiliate, vcpoker, victor chandler

It bothers me that without the UIGEA coming into action on June 1st that the prospects for networks like iPoker, OnGame, Microgaming and in some respects Party are pretty bleak. I guess at the bottom of it is the fact that if a network makes a bad judgement its practically irreversible becuase of the complexities involved – mainly the sheer number of licensees in the case of iPoker.
So basically I’m just going to list some problems here and in all honesty I think many of them will never be adressed / its impossible to address them.

1. Various conflicts of interest: As a network your primary interest is in recruiting licences and serving them well and not in providing a good gaming experience for the player. Often, these are the same thing but, unfortunatley not always. Pokerstars and FTP have a link to the players whereas ipoker and the like do not have the players contact details and so on.

2. Hung Parliament – Not sure if this is a good metaphor but, when a hung parliament occurs in governemnt i.e. 2 parties have an almost equal number of seats / power nobody is in control. I guess on the surface it sounds fair enough. You would be forgiven for thinking “Oh well that means things will really be discussed and evaluated before they become law”. History unfortunatley tells us this is not the case. Things don’t get done and no progress is made.
Poker networks arer a bit like this -Too many cooks, too many decent sized skins and cages all with differing opinions. Its a lot like government in the way that all skins are working to the same end while competing with each other to get there. I mean when you have 30 + skins or whatever it is, some of them probably run out of someone’s bedroom (or definatley in the case of OnGame skins) its hard to imagine how things would get done. Or when they get done people feel pretty pissed off. This isn’t necessarilly because of the system but, becuase iPoker isn’t equally transparent with all the skins.

Conflict of interest b)i) Playtech owns a pice of Will Hill and all of Titan Poker ii) BWIN owns ongame iii) Party gaming owns Party Poker
This is inevtiable since networks start off as skins or independent sites but, again its not exactly ideal.

3. PLC – Playtech & Party are both PLC’s. I know nothing about the stock market but I’d imagine with publically documented accounts these networks would never be prepared to go over a facelift at the risk of damaging short term figures because that damage itself would have a negative impact for the company.

4. Backwards Development
These networks all have sub-par software. Someone gave me the analogy of ‘its cheaper to repair an old house than build a new one from scratch’ – I’m not sure if that’s always true or at least it depends what kind of repairs you need doing :p ! I’ve seen a new network with hardly any players whose software blows every other sites out the water (apart from Stars – although I think I prefer it to stars personall). Its more functional than ipoker, lighter than ftp and just better to look at than all the rest. How can Playtech, a company in excess of $1bn not knock something decent up ? I just don’t get it.

5. Mass Marketing
Simply put: Running even a dream marketing campaign on the TV or sponsoring a big tourney would be a huge loser for any skins on a network (with the exception of Party possibly.) These campaigns wouldn’t necessarilly be losers for Stars or FTP though which is why they’re growing rapidly and the networks aren’t.
If I’m the owner of an iPoker skin and I decide to invest big in a TV campaign say $1 million what can I expect in return ? Well completely guessing lets say I get 10k signups ( I really don;t know if that’s realistic but, the predictions don’t matter too much for the purposes of this example). Firstly, these 10k players are not going to be the high raking variety – any serious players will hunt about the network for better promos for what is effectivley the same site. Secondly, these players are going to be bad and bust their $50 deposit pretty quickly.
So let’s say these 10k guys rake $50 a piece – after support, deposit / withdrawl costs, the 20% for the network the skin is maybe left with $250k which is nice.
The problem is the value in fresh fish is the liquidity they add to the games, your current players will rake more and win more as a consequence and the money will flow around your sites economy. This is fine if you’re pokerstars – you will enjoy the ripple effect from this liquidity injection but, if you’re an ipoker skin with 15% of the network 85% of the liquidity of the fish is being enjoyed by players on other skins.
Furthermore, its not as if iPoker would be capable of putting network ads out it would just confuse people.

6. Finally we have the networks giving away licences like they’re going out of fashion. They’ve realised this is -ev now I think but, it doesn’t make things easier it just further complicates them.

I’m tired now but, I could go on forever. I’m not even going to get into win/ loss or the lack of RB cap. Basically a lot of these problems are never going to be fixed and the answer lies in a new network that has learnt from the mistakes of ipoker. Again this is easier said than done and several large skins would need to jump ship in sync. If stars and ftp don’t go down I really think this is what needs to be done. Based on pokerscout they’re just running away with it and its not even because they’re amazing or unbeatable. Its simply becuase the alternatives are pretty flawed.

Tags: iPoker News, ongame, poker networks, promotion, rake, titan, titan poker, vcpoker, vip deal, will hill