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  • Poker Tournaments vs Cash Games

    Posted on July 25th, 2010 admin No comments

    Online Poker Tournaments vs Cash Game

    If you play online poker then you must take into account different aspects  . What to choose ? Which game to learn  ? Why should i play this ? You will find a lot  of games to choose from. Lets not get into detail and lets just talk a bit about cash games and poker tournaments  .

    Why Poker Tournaments?

    Online Poker tournaments usually have big prizes  which ofcourse rely  on the buy-in. If you are looking for tournaments with a $5 buy-in then $50,000 prize pool is not bad at all  . You could win about $7,000 there. 5$ buy-in and $7,000… What a great opportunity  ! But the issue is that you could  play 1,000 tournaments and never win one . But still  , you could play 5 and win 2 of them. Online Poker Tournaments are by all odds a good choice because you could  be looking at a big paiday  , you could even retire after you win a certain tournament! Ofcourse, online poker does not always have tournaments with that big volume  . You should choose online poker tournaments if you want to play for a certain amount  and would like to control how much you spend on a given day . It is said that you should  have at least 100x the buy-in in your bankroll to be able to play securely  . Meaning for a $5 tournament you should have  a $500 bankroll. But that is just a basic guideline.

    Why Cash Games?

    Cash games are very good if you know how to play , know how to read your opposition  and how to maximize your profits. Most important aspect of cash games is knowing how to pick a game  . If you play aggressively  then definitely go for the tighter tables because it is simpler to steal then  . If you play tight then look for the looser players, they will definitely pay you if you have the nuts ! If you play 20 tables at once then staying focused is VERY IMPORTANT. I never propose this to a  novice because you just don’t have enough time to decide correctly  and eventually youstart making mistakes. Online Poker Cash Games usually have about 20 second window for decisions , some feature a time bank for extra time. If you are experienced  then cash games are the option for you as it is the quickest way to maximize your bankroll.  With cash games, another important aspect arises,
     Poker Rakeback which maximizes your earnings  . Think about rakeback as tax refund, you pay rake to a poker room and they refund you a part  – Rakeback.  If you play 10,000 hands per month then rakeback will definitely maximize your  profits. Noxwin Rakeback for example, you get a minimum of 30% rake back, if you rake $3,000, you get $1,000 back! Even governmentsdon’t have such great tax refund! Cash games usually require a tight game style if you play every day, so you would minimize your losses. Do not misunderstand me , you can’t win every single hand, but in the long run you will be in profit . By long run i mean a week, or a month, or a year. Online Poker Cash Game is my suggestion for all people who know a bit of poker  .

    Perfect your game, learn the angles, study all that is necessary and beat them all ! 

  • How to play Omaha poker online

    Posted on July 25th, 2010 admin No comments

    Omaha Poker

    comparable to Omaha Hi/Lo Poker and Texas Hold’em, Omaha, required its two to ten players to create the best five-card combination from a total of nine cards.The pot is won by the strongest combination . Because the nine cards are made up of four hand cards and five community cards , the resulting combinations are stronger than those in other Poker Games.

    How to play the game

    The game begins with the players from the left of the dealer by posting the blinds . The player on the Dealer’s left posts a small blind and the player on the Small Blind’s left places a big blind. Each player receives four pocket cards .  In the first round, the player to the Big Blind’s left plays first and can either Fold/ Bet/ Raise.The flop is dealt in the second round then  a round of betting follows and the players can either Check/ Fold/ Call/ Raise. In the third round, the Turn is dealt . Another betting round follows . The final round of betting begins after the River is dealt . After the betting ends, the remaining players, can use 2 out of their 4 pocket cards and any 3 community cards out of the five from the table to create the strongest 5-cards possible hand

    Tips:
    You can use the following strategies to improve your winning chances :

    1. Watch out for the low cards, you are looking for a high hand only ;
    2. Flushes and straights are very common here due to the five community cards that you can select  .

    Omaha Hi/Lo Poker

    Omaha High/Low is a popular interpretation of Omaha Poker, is also known as Omaha/8.The lowest hand and the highest hand split in halp the pot in this game . The low hand must contain an 8 or better, and pairs.. For these two hands you can use different cards , and it is possible to win both the high and the low  pot. If there is no qualifying low hand, then the high hand wins the entirely pot. As in Omaha, you must use two cards from your hand and three cards from the community cards, but you can use a different two cards for your high and low hands.

    You can read more poker articles on any online poker community .

  • A Summary of Opportunities for Affiliates in the Online Poker Genre

    Posted on July 25th, 2010 admin No comments

    Online poker represents a unique arena for affiliates.  On one hand, the competition is intense, with poker-related keywords and conversions contested at levels approaching pharmaceutical websites in some instances.  On the other hand, no other online industry offers the massive CPA payments and the opportunity for lifetime recurring revenue on referrals that online poker provides.

    I was commissioned by a client to prepare a summary study on the various sub-niches existing in the online poker market and to compare and contrast these opportunities.  Once the report was completed, I asked for permission to represent, thinking new affiliates might find usefulness in this brief but inisighful anaylsis.

    There are a few basic profit opportunities for affiliates in poker online.  I’m going to review each and give you a quick sense of the general quality, along with the overall potential, of each.  Hopefully by the end of this article you’ll have a better sense of what arena will work best for you.

     

    More About: Rakeback

    Rake back dominates the online poker affiliate landscape .  If you’re not familiar, rakeback is essentially the online poker equivalent of rewards points or cash back.  Rake is how poker rooms make their money – it’s the small fee attached to a tournament entry or the small amount of money taken out of most pots in cash games.  Rakeback is a promotional tool rooms use to attract and hold players.

    As you might surmise, rooms are in no hurry to offer rakeback to all players.  The resolution is that they allow affiliates to offer rakeback, providing affiliates with an instant hook for visitors (earn thousands at this site!) without requiring any upfront expenditure.  It’s not a cost-free model, plainly – if you offer rakeback as an affiliate, you earn far less on the players you refer than a standard affiliate – and that long term cost (or profit ceiling, if you will) is rightfully a large disincentive to potential affiliates.

    There’s also fierce competition for a limited pool of players in this market , and entry from scratch (especially with a small team or limited budget) will be a uphill battle for sure.   The search engines are all dominated by a cadre of established sites , and those massive players have also contracted with several rooms, using their leverage to secure exclusive promotions that make it even harder for a small operator to compete.

    One potential point of entry : A small operator could gain a foothold by operating sites that focus on a smaller room and attempting to secure search engine positioning for those terms, as they’re likely to be less hotly contested than terms for major rooms such as Full Tilt Poker.  Don’t want to build a site from scratch?  Then an alternative is to identify a mid-tier room you’d like to work with and search for rakeback terms related for that room.  Go through the results and attempt to identify sites with decent ranking that appear to be abandoned projects and solicit the owner for purchase.  You’ll get an aged domain with a few backlinks and will save yourself a ton of work and trouble.  For example, a quick search for Carbon Poker Rakeback (a medium sized room on the Merge Network returns several sites that appear to be no longer maintained or updated, much like the linked example above.

    Conceivable Affiliate Opportunity:  Poker Software and Data Products

    Online poker has really developed as an industry , and as the market has matured, so has the sub-market for ecosystem products (currency trading, software, support, training and so on).  What’s more, with the low production price of many digital products , the affiliate cut is often quite generoussignificant relative to the product price.  One top manufacturer of poker database programs offers affiliates as much as $38 per sale on a $90 product – not bad for a top-flight product that coverts easily.

    Identifying the proper product niche can be frustrating, but the popular niche in online poker at the moment is data.  Hand histories, opponent data, tournament data, you name it – if it’s a piece of data related to poker, players want it, and they want as much of it as they can get.  Sites such as Pokerlistings offers substantial affiliate commissions on data sales, and are a low-effort avenue for entering the market.

    The tough pill to swallow here is that making money with an small average commission of a few bucks per sale requires some serious traffic to generate any kind of serious income.  If you don’t have a model that will produce such traffic, or at least convert at a unusually high rate on a smaller traffic base, you might want to try a different opportunity

    Poker Affiliate Opportunity: Free Gifts

    The third popular model for profiting as an online poker affiliate is through a free gifts set up.  The model is elementary: rooms pay you a certain amount for referring qualified players, and you return part of that payment to players via a system that allows them to claim various gifts (or cash) depending on what room they sign up at.  In it’s most complex form, this system essentially translates user sign ups into a currency that users can then redeem for various items.  In a simple form, the system simply ties specific gifts to specific actions.

    This affiliate model is quite popular in other arenas but especially so in online poker.  While there’s certainly a real appeal to this specific niche, that appeal is somewhat mitigated by the serious competition at present.  One idea is to operate as a second-tier affiliate, attempting to monetize traffic by referring visitors to the top free gifts sites.  The other option is to operate a hybrid free poker money site that combines internal offers and some external offers, and to let that site develop slowly, using the data to evaluate where your efforts are best spent.

    This final opportunity is probably the superior choice for affiliates just testing the online poker waters, as it requires little specific knowledge and allows you to push the tough work off on the major affiliates in the genre.  You can simply focus on your core skills at content management and SEO, skills that translate well from one arena to the next, and outsource or ignore the more specialized aspects of the market.

    This is by no means a comprehensive summary, but ideally it has provided potential affiliates with the broad strokes of the market, and provided them a starting point from which to plan their entry into this fiercely competitive, yet richly profitable, affiliate marketplace.