The Poker Affiliate Blog

Sorry for a lack of post lateley. I’ve got my 1st exam on Friday but, haven’t been revising as much as I should have been – hopefully get cracking soon (using this post for procrastination).

The ads are up, along with the thread and its good to see things going fairly smoothly. I’m going to put Winner Poker & maybe a few other more competitive offers up tommorow and change the text on the home page a little (my bounce rate is alarmingly high) and hopefully that should kick things up a bit.

iPokerVIP was based on 2 premises;
1. Under the table deals are harder to come by – the market is moving.
2. iPokerVIP showcases the best legal deals.

I’d say I’ve got 2 bang on but, for all the time people have speant scrutinising my site 90% of the under the table affiliates could have been cleared out. Its pretty ridiculous and demonstrates that the iPoker network probably don’t care much for the rules themselves – just that people aren’t seen breaking them and the status quo remains intact, at least superficially.

The irony is that there are people in Birmingham who work for playtech whose job it is to catch these affiliates. If 90% of players can find these deals how can’t these spies who work on it everyday ?

I think the main problem is that iPoker doesn’t have a clear vision of what kind of network it wants to be. Its like one week they want uber-aggro deals so they can compete for Euro players on Stars and Tilt and the next week they’re banishing these deals wanting a fishy network and claiming that’s the way forward.

Tough spot. For a company worth over $1bn you’d think they might at least come close to getting it right.

Tags: affiliate, ecoop, ipoker deals, iPoker News, ipoker vip, iPokerVIP.net, online, poker, Rakeback, software

I feel a lot more positive about things. I kept on saying how the negative press from competitors just meant that ipokervip was such a threat but, didn’t really appreciate.

I got a bit too emotional at the weekend about the whole thing and kinda regret some of my posts and their bad spelling ! I was doing this on no sleep just trying to give almost instant rebuttle so that a pile of neg stuff didn’t come up.

I’m feeling a ton more positive mainly thanks to VC being behind me 100% which is really awesome. Although this issue is much bigger than ipokervip for them its really refreshing and certainly not something that they need to do.

A ton of new offers are coming on tommorow and I’ll be getting together some statements for 2+2. From there its up to them whether they will get behind the support thread and at least confirm they have emails from the right people that confirm the legality of the offers.

Hopefully, the new support thread should be up soon with the banners – I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said this.

* VC Poker Olympics *

Here is some great news for all my VC players. The next events in the Poker Olympics will be based to a higher degree on rake meaning that the limit players cant take advantage anymore. I don’t have the full details yet but, this actually means some of my players might take the next events seriously !

So its all positive ! Feel like I’m still growing up at the moment getting huge mood swings… I’m a weirdo.

Jamie

Tags: Bet365, Deals, iPoker News, iPokerVIP.net, Rakeback, titan, vcpoker, vip

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