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.

About a year ago, I first blogged about what browsers our visitors use. It already showed that due to our special target group, the numbers deviate largely from world-wide market shares.

One is that our website is visited by a lot of Russian members, and Opera is immensely popular in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus etc.

The second reason is just that our visitors are very web-savvy and smart - so there is a high chance they will pick their favourite browser instead of just going with the pre-installed Internet Explorer.

Even despite the iPhone and iPad revolution, Safari users are still a small, but growing minority at PokerStrategy.com. Probably also due to the fact that our platform is not optimised for iPad/iPhone - e.g. our videos do not run there, yet. Luckily, that will change thanks to our new platform our gorgeous IT already started developing on!

But now to the numbers: a comparison of all "Novembers" since PokerStrategy.com launched. What's interesting is that while our visitors always have been avant-garde (using Firefox when the Internet Explore still had a huge market share), the Internet Explorer had a short revival in 2009 (I guess due to IE8). But after that, Google's Chrome seems to have been the nail in Microsoft's browser coffin.

Winter Season

Winter season is always very nice for online poker. It's an indoors hobby, so the worse the weather, the more traffic we see at the tables. Usaually, the effect is as high as 30% over the summer slump.

And especially after this bumpy year, we all need a little upswing. Luckily for us, the upswing does seem to go beyond just seasonal effects: Full Tilt poker seems to be on a good way and hopefully, all players will get their money (and a great poker room) back.

A second German Boom?

With Pius Heinz, a young online player from Germany won this year's World Series of Poker Main Event and with it, a nice 8.7 million USD.

This is the story online poker needed, especially in Germany. With such a national hero, media attention on poker switched from "little, and if, negative" to "a lot, and very positive". All big media brought stories, everyone wants to interview Pius and he had attendances in major TV shows.

Here at PokerStrategy.com, we can feel the effects of that - a new poker boom in Germany indeed would be great. Positive media coverage and new players picking up the game might also convince the legislators to finally adhere to European law and positively regulate online poker.

Relative developments of our sign-ups - in week 45, Pius Heinz won his bracelet.

Fuel it with Promotions!

Of course we don't want to lean back and watch. Besides doing PR for poker in the background - that brought our CEO Dominik 'Korn' Kofert a lot of attention as an expert on online poker - we also want to make Winter a cool time for our community.

For the following 8 weeks, we will have a huge array of promotions that give everyone a good reason to come back daily.

Our motto: Play, learn and talk about poker! 

The first week of our 8 weeks of special winter promos.

Well, it's just a secret for some more days - and I can't really tell you all the details. But I can give you some spoilers:

We are going to tweak the Tell-A-Friend system. Partly from November, partly from December onwards.

There will be three changes:

1. Introduction of a 2nd level - means you will earn money if your referred members start referring themselves. We don't really want to start a multi-level system here - but we want to fairly reward that some of you recommend us to website owners, bloggers etc.

2. Change of Tell-A-Friend tiers - overall, we will invest more into Tell-A-Friend, because we feel it should be strengthened. It's just better to reward your own members for spreading the word than getting the same effect for buying ads. But while investing more overall, we are changing the system in such a way that you get more rewards for players that really start playing poker - and less for those who just play for a few days, waste their $50 bankroll and never come back. So, this will be better and more fair. But still, if your brought a lot of players that just played shortly and generated say 20 StrategyPoints in their lifetime (means we lose money), you might earn less. Intentionally.

3. Subscription Revenue Share - some weeks ago, we introduced our Points Shop, which had a surprisingly good first month. Points bought in the shop don't count for the normal Tell-A-Friend tiers, so we thought it's just fair to give referrers a 10% revenue share if new members they referred buy a subscription.

More detail about these changes will follow in a news in the next days, so stay tuned!