This time just a short update with some interesting links on industry trends & other stuff that might influence the future of our beloved online poker:

Rome
Maybe you already read about it in our news: Italy is trying to ring-fence it's poker market. PokerStars.it makes the start with offering a seperated network for Italian players. That's a two-sided story. Of course we're convinced that ring-fencing is not good for the players and the overall development of our market, but at least Italy goes with the soft way of regulation. Let us hope Berlusconi will allow shared networks between his fellow citizens and the rest of the world, one day!

Rakeback
Finally, the poker industry seems to understand the dynamics of rakeback and other monetary incentive systems. Rakeback can be a great tool to reward loyal players and make the most of it for both the player and the operator - but it can also be harmful. Today, in many cases it is harmful, as more and more operators switched focus from recruiting new recreational players to battling over existing VIP players.
Why regulation on rakeback matters is good for the players themselves in the long run is explained by the iPoker boss Danny Frishman who also attended our last Black Member Party.

Regulation
An interesting articleabout the development of the poker industry and how regulation benefits countries and society was published by The Economist already some days ago. Maybe you'll find it worth reading!

Acknowledging the fact that PokerStrategy.com grows virally, we decided early on that our community should be able to participate directly from our growth. That is why we have our successful "Tell-A-Friend" programme since years.

To offer a more convenient way to bring in some of your friends, we are currently redesigning the Tell-A-Friend section. You will be able to find explanations about the system, guides on how to bring in friends, statistics and the payout screen much easier.

On the basis of this redesign, we will also be able to implement advanced features such as multiple tracking links and advanced statistics for our power referrers. Still, it might be several months before we can start these projects.

Bringing in your friends to PokerStrategy.com serves different purposes:

1. You help to improve the quality of our product - as it increases with every member who is actively discussion poker and other topics in our forums.

2. Learning together with some friends you know from outside the Internet can be even more motivating and challenging than learning it 'just' inside of our online community.

3. Your friends can get a great chance with our free $50 starting capital - and you up to $100 from our Tell-A-Friend programme.

In essence, our Tell-A-Friend approach replaces big budget marketing with another win-win situation. We just prefer money wandering in your pocket than those of some random TV stations.

Question to you: do you suggest PokerStrategy.com to friends/others more because you're convinced of it - or because there's the monetary incentive of Tell-A-Friend? I think, ideally it's a combination of the both. Because who wants to suggest a bad product to his friends, even if he can earn some money with it?

With our new job section, we try to give you a better understanding of who (as a team / company) we are, where we want to go and how work & life is down here in Gibraltar.

Being as community-driven / customer-centric as we are, we think it is important that we show a little more than the results of our work to you. We would like to think of you as a part of our team - even if you're not here in our office physically [but maybe some of you will? ;)]

After more than six months, I think we also finally settled in our new offices. It's now better than ever & our thanks to our 35 new employees since February, the new coffee machine has reached record levels in output.

We hope to make a big leap forward organisation-wise in the coming 6-12 months to be able to squeeze out even more tangible results for you in the forms of features, content & services. We currently introduce quality metrics to guarantee high standards in our product in all our currently 15 languages (three more in the pipeline: Japanese, Romanian, Hindi).

Co-operation with the operators also improved drastically. We hold regular meetings with PartyPoker.com to push forward common projects and beefed up our offers with partners such as 888 and bet365.

Living "inside the system", though, I would really like to hear your comments:

1. Do you feel we already improved over the last 12 months?

2. What do you expect from us in the next 12 months?

Feedback to our new job section would of course also be welcome!

Thanks for all your past, present & future contributions!

Okay, maybe the title of this blog post is a little over the top - but I could not come up with something more creative.

In the German community, there was a lot of heated discussion about a change in forum rules & moderation guidelines we did for the BBV forum in early May.

Before I start looking into the numbers, first some basic information:

What's the BBV?

BBV stands for "Beats, Brags & Variances" and was originally intended and used as a kind of fun forum for things happening in your poker life and sometimes outside of it. Over the years, it developed to become something very special to our biggest community: the humoristic gravity centre of PokerStrategy.com, even creating it's own memes.

To the right, you can see one piece of creative output, featuring Fenris photoshopped in a poster of the movie "Downfall" along with a dozen minor details that is a great illustration on said change management and the conflict it created.

To see more of the movie posters with community celebrities like Korn photoshopped in them, click here.

Why the Rule Changes?

We had the feeling that even though the BBV forum was great fun, the old rule of even flames being kind of legal inside of it's boundaries had negative effects on the whole mood in the forums. Even though it cannot be proven, we also counted a lot of the aggressive tone especially towards beginners in the forums on that issue.

Thus, we changed the rules to ban flames / insults and intense spam from the BBV. As it was to expect, this change resulted in some kind of a rebellion amongst the BBV forum regulars who felt - understandably - like one of their freedoms was taken away from them.

Even though the two side of the argument did neither win nor lose the opinion war, at least the daily life situation nowadays is kind of okay. Maybe a kind of a cold war between the hardcore BBV regulars and 'us' (i.e. admins / mods).

Effect of the Rule Changes

Our theory was that even though banning flames might lead to the loss of a certain aspect of the chaotic humour created in the BBV, it will ultimately lead to even more of the real fun stuff that does not relate to insults/flaming directly. The ratio behind this theory is that the 'old' BBV also kept a lot of intelligent, humorous people out of the BBV as they did not want to be insulted/flamed etc.

I accept anyone who has a different opinion on that matter - people and their tastes are different, of course. Still, I was curious on the numbers: as quality of the posts / humour is hard to measure, could we at least measure the quantitative aspect? And wouldn't someone who really likes the 'new' BBV come more often and vice versa?

Well, here's the page views on the forum overview of the BBV on a monthly basis:

Month - Page Views - % of total
January - 348.445 - 2.09%
February - 375.639 - 2.26%
March - 391.956 - 2.19%
April - 458.423 - 2,85%
Mai - 609.711 - 3,77%
Juni - 563.400 - 3,37%

Even though this proves nothing really, it is a relief for me. The growth in May was of course due to the big discussions going on over the change management (May 11 was the day of days), but the positive numbers in June make me feel that the BBV still thrives.

"Downfall" poster by schmeiss, "Lord of the Kings" poster by MrTef1on

One of the big future hopes of the poker market to keep up it's double-digit growth in the next years is Asia. Traditionally the gambler's continent, there are two hurdles: 1. poker isn't popular yet; 2. the markets are very regulated, hindering advertisment and the accessibility of poker operators.

From our traffic numbers and general popularity of poker in the big Asian markets we can estimate that the first hurdle is about to fall - but the second may be even tougher as popularity might be close to irrelevant if the poker fans cannot join the world-wide online poker circuit.

The TIME magazine published an intersting article about the eventual rise of poker in Asia - and other online games who are extraordninarily popular in Asia seem to come in handy. Quote from the article:

To get around these marketing challenges, promoters across Asia are sponsoring rising talents and relying on word of mouth to popularize the game. In South Korea, gaming company AsianLogic is hoping poker will take off among the legions of video gamers in that country. "We're converting Korean [World of ] WarCraft players into poker players," says Tom Hall, AsianLogic's CEO. "If we dangle $5,000 in front of them, they'll blog about it."

We're still very optimist as poker proved to be strong enough to climb over cultural hurdles - but regulation and authority policy can still play a big role - maybe we will have a 30% boost of the online poker market due to Asia alone next year, maybe it will take another 3-5 years.