...between Gibraltar and Kentucky. 

A few weeks ago, I already wrote about the dear judges in Kentucky, who try to seize domains like PokerStars.com. Funny of course, because Kentucky would need to think it owns or at least controls the Internet. But sad, if it would work.

Yesterday, the responsible court "ruled" that the dozens of big gambling / poker sites on their list have to expell Kentucky residents – or face forfeiture of their domains. Still, I don't believe they could – but is Kentucky with its population of just 4.2M worthy enough as a customer base? Will they be worth going a 1% risk for big companies like PokerStars or Full Tilt Poker?

It may seem wise for them to obey the court's decision, and we won't suffer too much, because Kentucky should be at best .5% of the world-wide poker market. But the signal could be bad! What if bigger states like Texas or California would follow their example? Let us not hope that the indian heritage for the name Kentucky, Ken-tah-ten, meaning "land of the future" will not mean a negative future for the poker world.

 (Image: Wikipedia.org)

To get past these thoughts and over the ocean, let's talk about tiny Gibraltar with its tiny 28,000-odd population. Other than Kentucky, Gibraltar is great for Poker, being home to companies like PartyGaming or Mansion – and us.

If there's not a once-in-ten-years-storm like on last weekend, Gibraltar is a very nice place to live. Especially if you're used northern Germany, the 20°C plus sun we got here now in mid-october is nearly tropical.

Here, we are planning for the next stages of your PokerStrategy.com experience: social networking features, new navigation, user-to-user-chat, new forum software – quickly followed by relaunches of all major parts of PokerStrategy.com (video section, coaching area, news hub etc.). And we will do even better once we move to our new office, where we will be able to fuel our development and improvements even better.

A last few words: I know, I'm not the most active blogger amongst all, but that is mainly because I don't want to write nonsense, but only stuff that I guess might interest you. So vice-versa, if you could think of an interesting topic, I'll be more than happy to read your suggestions in the comments! 

As our social networking module nears its completion, navigational & usability issues pop up. To integrate the new features without making your user experience more complicated we thought about many different ways and finally came up with two new navigational elements.

1. The Top Bar
At the top of the browser screen, there will be a Top Bar. With that top bar, you can not only search quickly for people, groups and other things going on in the social network (and of course, we will also integrate a content search there in the future!), but also have quick access to the key features.
The icons for chat and personal messages will change the moment you get a new message or one of your buddies wants to chat with you.

2. The Second Level Navigation
You all know that our main horizontal navigation is full of interesting stuff, but a little cramped. It could not carry much more, and a consistent navigational structure is sometimes missed within the main sections of PokerStrategy.com.
In the future, every main section (the ones having their own menu item in the primary navigation bar) will have a second level navigation in a consistent style. The most important things inside the section will be easily accessible from there. An example: in the coaching section, you will be able to switch between the coaching calendar, a coaching guide and informations about our coaches & private coaching in the second level navigation.

To illustrate the changes a little, here's a sample:

In about a week, our top players – the Black Members – will meet once again at a big party, this time in Berlin. It will be the fifth Black Member Event, and the group of our black elite grew to above 50. Besides that, we had our first live event in Moscow, with our Russian Diamonds meeting for the first time.

The fifth Event will not only be a kind of jubilee, but also unique. This time, the event goes on for two consecutive days, and we got some special guests: the upper echelon of PartyGaming, the billion dollar company behind PartyPoker, will honour us with their presence. We think that bringing together important people from the company that is still our players' favourite and our top players is a very good idea and will not only increase the bond, but also lead to important feedback given and new thoughts on how to improve.

At such a time, it seemed right to have a look back and see who our Top Thousand are and what they achieved on PokerStrategy.com. The Top Thousand are in a way the long tail of the Black Members, as they are the Top50 within that Chiliad.

Some facts about them:
• 50% of them signed up after June 2006, the other half before. This shows that you can be all means achieve that within the first two years of your poker career.
• They wrote a total of 866,306 forum posts
• Only 41 of them did not write a single forum post
• two-thirds of them still visit us daily – gives us the good feeling of staying attractive even to successful players!
• 50% of them posted in the forums within the last two weeks. Compared with the online activity, this isn't even too high. I guess we should make our forums more attractive to our greatest?

I hope, many of them will show up on October 4th in Berlin – since many of the Chiliad are Diamonds, who are very welcome to join the Blacks on their second night! 

If you ask me, I'd prefer to remember Kentucky for their Whiskey than for megalomania. But seemingly, they want to change the world, or at least the poker world.

A court in this lovely US state just issued an order to seize 141 internet domains, all related to online gambling in general and specifically online poker. The list of domains includes the two world market leaders PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, both favourites of our community.

If they would succeed, it would of course not mean the end of online poker, but certainly it would be bad: especially rank-and-file players who tend to feed the industry (including our players and us) will probably miss the domains, and not all of them will be clever enough to find a navigational work-around. (Such as visiting other redirecting domains.) 

But honestly: I bet they won't prevail! The Internet itself would be at risk as an idea if some random North American province could seize big and valuable domain because of violations of their law.

I wonder what would be next? China seizing Wikipedia.com? Okay, they would have a harder time, as "the Internet" is more probably to be effectively controlled by US authorities than anyone else. But still, it would be a very bad signal, rendering even the Chinese effort to block thousands of sites with the Great Firewall of China comparably harmless. 

I for myself will now, as a token of my solidarity, play some symbolic hands of cash game. On both Full Tilt and Stars. And pray for Obamas victory.

Summer seems to be over, which means that people start to surf online more. Our community is not an exception here. The months from March to August sometimes can be frustrating: you improve things and still, statistical activity does not go up like you hoped. For the next months, the seasonality will work for us, again. You all will visit PokerStrategy.com more often – statistically. So before that naturally positive trend begins to make data fuzzy, I will take a last look into some summer numbers.

How did our forums develop in the last six months? To make the charts look nice and easily understandable, I did not neither include DE (German) nor SV, FI and KO. The latter are comparably too small (yet) to be interesting in such a pie chart.

Weekly post numbers: last week vs the week a half year ago.

The total number of posts in these 10 languages went up by 71%, which would nearly mean tripling on an annual basis.

The best performers: PL (Polish) +131%, NL (Dutch) +127% and ES (Spanish) +124%.

Your opinion: from which number of posts per week does a forum become attractive (i.e. worth a daily visit)? Of course this also depends on posting quality, but let's just assume the posting quality would be average.