The fourth Monday of January has been established as Community Manager Appreciation Day - a day when people around the globe take a few moments out to say Thank You! for all the hard work to the community managers they have come to rely on over the past year.

Today, I want to give a big shout out to our hundreds of Moderators, SuperMods and HeadAdmins who on a daily basis take care of the needs of the members of the PokerStrategy.com community.

These are the guys and girls who help to create and maintain a positive atmosphere in our forums; make sure that our newest members feel welcome; answer questions that would otherwise go unanswered; deal with members' frustrations and irritations; escalate members' issues to our partner poker rooms; and generally act as the heart and soul of our community. 

Without their seemingly bottomless reservoirs of patience and willingness to help; there simply would not be a PokerStrategy.com.

How to Mark Community Manager Appreciation Day:

If you’re a member, and your problem was solved by a PokerStrategy.com community manager be sure to thank them today. Open a forum thread, post a message on Facebook or on Twitter (use the hashtag #CMAD #PokerStrategy).

• If you are a Moderator, SuperMod or HeadAdmin, take some time out today to relax, and know that you’re appreciated. Thank you for being an inspiration to me and many others.

What does 2012 hold in store for online gaming and for poker in particular? The consultancy company, PwC recently released a report on the future of the global gaming industry. The report outlines a number of major trends that will create both opportunities and challenges for everyone involved in online poker.

Maintaining Liquidity

As more markets in Western Europe and the US look to regulate, the need for cross-border approaches is becoming more apparent. In countries that have already regulated, such as Italy, a critical issue for operators is the lack of critical mass which provides adequate liquidity for serious game play. If liquidity is a problem within a  population of 60 million, then smaller markets that choose to regulate will definitely struggle to be successful unless there is a move towards cross-border and shared liquidity. Precedents have been set in Europe with the EuroMillions lottery across 11 countries and in the U.S. with the PowerBall multistate lottery. Meanwhile, regulators in Italy and France are rumoured to already have held secret discussions about cross-border co-operation. Increased liquidity is good for players, operators and those governments who seek to harvest taxes from online players.

Smart Taxation

Since taxation is the primary motive for many cash-strapped economies to introduce regulation of online gaming, the PwC report suggests that governments look to the unsuccessful taxation regimes in other jurisdictions before they seek to impose heavy taxes on players or operators. In France for example, the unreasonable levels of taxation have led to “disappointing levels of profitability” for operators and thus poor returns for government. Even the French regulator has admitted publicly that the tax regime is not working. Clearly, reasonable taxation on gross profits is a more viable option than directly on players or on rake which inevitably is passed on to players.  Spanish authorities, who have just announced a delay in regulation by a further six months until June 30^th, would do well to address the issue of player taxes before that date.

Differentiating Poker

Most poker players seek to have this game distinguished from other forms of online gaming where there is a complete absence of skill. Poker’s status as a skill-based game is deeply embedded in American cultural life and history. It is therefore the most socially accepted form of online gaming and it is for this reason that many expect it to be the first discipline where online providers will be allowed to operate on an inter-state basis. While there has been a lot of foot-dragging to date, the events of Black Friday together with the DoJ’s pre-Christmas apparent u-turn on its interpretation of the 1961 Wire Act clear the way for US regulation of online poker. US regulation will also set a benchmark for other countries on how to sensibly approach poker (hopefully).

Social Gaming

There is no doubt that 2012 will also see greater strides forward in the integration of poker within social networking platforms. While Zynga continues to insist that it will not expand into real-money poker, Facebook is making its intentions clear that it wishes to cash-in on poker. Furthermore, since social networks are so much embedded in mobile device usage; with these two forces combined we can really expect a surge in the participation in different variants of online poker over the coming months and years.

In spite of a couple of difficult years, PwC predicts strong global growth in online gaming between now and 2015. There will of course be challenges that operators and governments face, across the sector and in particular to maintain a strong poker ecology. In the midst of dealing with these challenges, the consumer must remain at the centre of all considerations. There is an explosion in entertainment choices and if online poker is to continue to grow in popularity then operators and governments must play their part in producing offerings that people are prepared to spend their time and money on.

The full PwC report Global Gaming Outlook: the casino and online gaming market to 2015 is available to download from their website. Also, check out Barry Carter's Predictions for Online Poker in 2012.

Even though it is over five years since Dominik first started teaching Starcraft players how to win at poker, we still consider ourselves to be a start-up. We operate in a rapidly evolving industry where the rules change on an almost weekly basis. We ourselves are constantly expanding our offering into new markets. Very soon we will also launch new products in new sectors.

Under such circumstances, the start-up approach is the only viable option for us. We need to rapidly adjust our offering to meet our members' ever-changing expectations. Otherwise they will simply go elsewhere. A project that might take six months to implement in an Apple, Microsoft or Facebook gets implemented in PokerStrategy.com in six weeks.

We operate in start-up mode both at a company level and at a team level. For example, we have 19 language teams serving customers in nearly every country across the globe. Each team is like a mini-company within the overall organisation. The teams have responsibility for ensuring that their community is completely satisfied with our offering in their language market. Each team is responsible for its own costs and ensuring that we grow our community to a sustainable level.

Within this environment we need a different type of person than the average company-man (or girl). We need people who are passionate about what they do, who are incredibly smart and who are able to learn and adapt quickly to each new challenge. We place high demands on our people, but we reward people well who deliver for their team and their community.

We've put a name on the type of people that we want to work for us. We call them 'intrapreneurs'. These are people who work within an organisation but who think and act like entrepreneurs; developing and implementing strategies that deliver great product and service offerings for customers.

We can never have enough intrapreneurs and so we have opened up new positions for Intrapreneur and Intrapreneur Intern. If you have ambitions of becoming either an intrapreneur or entrepreneur in the online gaming sector then one of these positions could be just for you.

Plus, if you are truly entrepreneurial you should definitely check out our employee referral programme, where you could earn $5,000 by simply sending another smart intrapreneur-type in our direction.  

This year, we wanted to send Christmas Cards and some choclate to our VIP players.

The first hassle already is defining the target group. Obviously, we'd love to send such a card to every member - which is just logistically (and financially) not possible. So you have to draw a line somewhere. Is this line going to be fair? Well, in a way no: someone with X SP in Period Y gets it, while someone with X-1 SP in Period Y or even X*2 SP in Period Y-1 does not get it. But it's fair in the sense that we decdied for drawing the line without looking at the players affected. Still, someone might always be upset, but that's a general problem about nearly all goodies you give out.

But even more work is actually producing, labelling, packaging and sending out thousands of cards and small packages with choclate.

That's just one of the three 'sets'.

Yes, these poor girls had to package & carry all your choclate!

Do you find Korn?

In the comments my last week's blog post about the browsers our community uses, I promised to add numbers on the different operating systems. I said I'll add a graph, but looking at the numbers, I think a short table will do the job pretty well.

In the numbers, it's pretty obvious that while Android and iOS are growing, the pre-dominant operating system for our community is and stays Microsoft's Windows. Partly, of course, iOS/Android is not super-strong in these figures because our website (yet!) is not optimised for smart phones. But that will change!

Microsoft Windows - 92.5%

Macintosh - 2.7%

Android - 1.4%

iPhone - 1.2%

Linux - 0.7%

iPad - 0.4%

Windows again splits itself up like follows:

Windows 7 - 55%

Windows XP - 35%

Windows Vista - 9%

CEO Interview

We recently interviewed Dominik 'Korn' Kofert - founder and CEO of PokerStrategy.com. In the interview, he talks about the early days, how an average day looks like and also about some of our plans for the future.

Here's the links: Part 1 - Part 2.

If you speak German, you can even listen to the interview.

How our IT hires Developers

A big part of the plans Dominik lays out in the interview is the development of a fully new technology platform for our website. First, we will use this new platform to launch our new trading school. This launch will also be a kind of 'public beta' for the technology, so that we can gather experiences on feedback on it before migrating PokerStrategy.com over.

It's a massive project - but thanks to the big steps forward both our IT and our Product department did in recent months, we are confident to deliver a really great piece of technology that will not just improve the core parts of what PokerStrategy.com is today, but also introduce some new ideas to allow us and our members to administrate, navigate and discuss content much better than it's possible today.

If you are curious about our IT subsidiary in Hamburg, the ICANS GmbH, you might want to have a look on the following infographics (download as PDF) that illustrates how new developers are recruited. That way, we ensure every new hire fits to the team, is passionate about what we do and delivers a great performance.