When looking on the Flickr stats for the galleries from the Black Member Party in Munich, one thing surprised me and one thing didn't.

The surprise: it's more than 500,000 views in total - amazing number!

The not-so suprising observation: the Top10. I think that gives outsides some tells about the structure of our community. But at least Korn is on one of the pics, as well! ;)

...Gibraltar. What could that be?

According to Alexa, PokerStratgy.com 'just' makes it to rank 7. Rank 3 indeed goes to our internal forum, where a lot of the communication inside of our company takes place. In February, we recorded more than 400,000 page impressions on it so far.

Activity in our internal communication platforms is a good indicator on how big and complex our organisation structure has become. It's a totally different story to work in a company of 200 compared to a company of 20 staff - which we were just two or three years ago.

By the way: my personal challenge lies in remembering all the names of our new employees. Because I think it's awkward if you have a chat at the coffee machine and could not even greet all the others with their names. But I was never too talented in this name game. What about you?

Time spent on PokerStrategy.com

One other indicator I like a lot is the average time spent on PokerStrategy.com per visit. Of course there's a lot of different types of visits: extensive forum or video sessions by senior members - or the first stroll-around by someone who accidentially stumbled upon our website. 

But still - in large numbers, the average is quite stable and as of this, I think that improving this figure is a nice indicator that we still manage to keep our website interesting for our visitors - even though there's of course a lot of room for improvement.

Whenever one of you vists PokerStrategy.com, some page impressions / page views are generated & counted by our Google Analytics account. This month, we crossed a flabbergasting mark: one billion page views - 1,000,000,000 times someone of your loaded a page in their browsers.

With currently 15 million page views more every week (and hopefully some further growth), we could even reach the two billion mark yet in 2010. 

Thanks to all of you using our website - we hope to continue making your time & visits worthwhile!

Adorable Rake Races

We already announced that directly after the Black Member Party, our event sponsor 888.com will hold five consecutive weekly races of $10,000 each. $50k in 5 weeks - this is an incredible chance for our skilled mass players to grab a nice additional reward.

What we didn't announce so far & I leak now is that in March, we will do a $50,000 rake race at PartyPoker - also additional to all other promotions running (e.g. our Top250). So be prepared for some carnage at PartyPoker, who reclaimed the #3 spot in the world ranking of poker rooms some weeks ago.

In 2009, the top 300 posters really did the astonishing amount of 1,000,000 forum posts. That's an average of more than 3,000 per head - or 10 per day and head. Our communities are so active nowadays that even my 2.4k posts just brought me rank 193.

Here's the top 10:

# posts - nickname
17,414 - Jesus80 (Spain)
10,135 - MoneyMovedWorld (Russia)
9,491 - MiiWiin (Germany)
9,312 - xuchying (China)
9,224 - winmoreandmore (China)
9,174 - bnielzen (Venezuela)
7,405 - rafaelaugustop (Spain)
7,276 - samy4ever (Spain)
7,272 - jilei (China)
7,217 - guidosuller (Argentine)

So the Spanish & Chinese community - although still smaller than the German & Russian in terms of total posts - clearly dominate the yearly top10 this time. Good job, guys!

That thought also brought me to the question: "New free $50 players from which countries are the most active in our forums?" - and from that, I generated the following top 10:

share of free$50 players with forum posts - country
15,1% - China (PR)
7,7% - Italy
7,3% - Poland
7,0% - Netherlands
6,6% - Russian Federation
6,5% - Brazil
6,4% - Finland
6,4% - Belgium
6,1% - Argentina

Again, China leads the pack. Another chance for me to repeat one of the most important mantras I can think of for any PokerStrategist: "Being active in the forums, especially in terms of hand judgements, is one of the most benefitting factors for your success at online poker."

Hello everybody - for the last time in 2009, which was an interesting year here at PokerStrategy.com and in the poker industry in general. I hope it also was a good year for you and your bankrolls!

The best thing in 2009 for us was of course the ongoing growth. Even though doomsayers started to forecast the decline of online poker as early as 2006, our beloved game is still prospering. For the last 12 months, online poker grew by a whopping 30%!

Outlook for 2010 is good, but mixed. The US market seems to be stable in it's current situation - but regulation and thus a real opening of the market is probably still at least 18 months away. In Europe, some countries legalised and regulated online poker - such as Italy. This is a good sign, as the more regulated markets there are, the harder it will be for any EU country to crack down on our industry.

But as regulation also meant partial isolation, there's still a lot of improvement. The goal is still clear: a regulated, but internationally open online poker market - with lots of competition. One good step towards the right direction is the growing awareness of poker networks that they must change their own internal regulation to foster growth. If you want to know more about this issue, I suggest you to read the example described in our promo policy.

Luckily, the economic downturn had comparably small effects on the industry. Of course - it hit the stock markets, where big firms such as PartyGaming and 888.com fetch in fresh money for expansion. But they steered well through 2009, as the following 12 month chart of their stocks implies:

Inside our Community

This year, the PokerStrategy.com family grew to 18 languages. We added Bulgarian, Romanian and also Hindi and Japanese. Especially with the latter, we want to help online poker to open up new markets.

Thanks to the new languages and also growing activity in all others, we could grow:

Forum Post Count
2007 - 1,400,000 posts
2008 - 3,700,000 posts
2009 - 5,000,000 posts

News Comments
2007 - 16,000 comments
2008 - 92,000 comments
2009 - 138,000 comments

Website Traffic
2008 - 320,000,000 page views
2009 - 560,000,000 page views

2010

First of all, I want to wish all of you a happy new year - and also some successful New Year's resolutions. But here at PokerStrategy.com, I need to especially want to wish you good luck at the tables.

Besides luck, we need skill. This is an issue, where your resolutions might help (such as posting more hands ;)) - but mainly, that's our job. Please tell us where we can improve to help you even better in the following 12 months!