Finally, we made comments countable!

Until last week, comments were just hanging around at the commented objects like videos or news. Now we made the first step to improve the option of commenting into a more helpful tool.

The final goal will be to enable you to mark your comment as a question you want to get answered by the author of the commented object. The author will then get a message and replies to your comment/question – the answer will be highlighted and put directly under your question.

By that, commenting even older videos will become useful. Nowadays, not many people will read your comment / your question attached to a video or news that is older than a month.

Even though it might still take time until we implement that feature, we got the first improvement from making the comments being objects related to the commenting user: they are countable, and as such we can do rankings of them.

In short time, there will be an advanced poker ranking page that will offer top poster and top commenter rankings in addition to the current monthly strategy point rankings that show who'll probably get the $100,000.

The example on the right shows the ranking of top commenters on the german news section. I'm #4, ha! 

I recently joined a short debate in our Diamond Forum on the English site. The main question debated was whether the poker boom will go on or not within the next five years.

Before I begin some thoughts on this, let us have a look at the last year at its development. One of our newest features, the network statistics, helps us to shed some light onto the poker industry.

I will roughly compare last September with this July/August, whereas this even slightly disadvantages the present, as generally, there is much less traffic in summer than in winter (so September is a better month than August). I will just have a look upon the "Big Four" amongst the poker networks to make things easier: PokerStars, FullTilt Poker, PartyPoker and Titan Poker / the iPoker network. Together, they make up for well more than 60% of the world's cash game action. SNGs / MTTs are excluded!

First the classic: Texas Hold'em 
(values are the average of active cash game seats) 

September 2007
PokerStars 8,000
PartyPoker 4,500
FullTilt 4,500
Titan/iPoker 3,500
Sum 20,500

August 2008
PokerStars 10,000
Titan/iPoker 6,000
FulTilt 4,500
Party 4,000
Sum 24,500

A very nice increase of 20%!
This shows that the Poker Boom and Texas Hold'em are far from coming to an end. Even though the situation in the U.S. is still not too good for online poker players, the emerging markets like Russia or still Germany are more than compensating for that.
Additionally, we shall be optimistic about Asia: Macau is – in terms of gambling – bigger than Vegas, and it seems very likely that poker will earn its place in the asian gamblers' hearts. With our Korean and Chinese sites here at PokerStrategy.com, we try to repeat the job we did so well in e.g. Russia and Germany: make poker recognized as a strategic game of skill rather than luck by many. The success stories of our Asian members will carry the word, and bring new fishes in their wake.

But now let us have a look at another success story: Omaha! In the past years, it seemed that Texas Hold'em would monopolise the poker market, which is the main reason why we concentrated on this game type 99% of our resources – until now!

Even though still the vast majority of all cash games see Hold'em's two hole cards, Omaha is winning quite well. Here's the combined values of Omaha and Omaha Hi/Lo:

September 2007
PokerStars 1,350
FullTilt 750
PartyPoker 300
Titan/iPoker 300
Sum 2,700

August 2008
PokerStars 1,900
FullTilt 1,200
Titan/iPoker 400
PartyPoker 350
Sum 3,850

An increase of more than 42%!
Maybe you already noticed: we're catching up on Omaha content quite fast. Expect a lot in the future! :)

Right – in the past, communication with each other was not as easy as it could be on PokerStrategy.com. Private Messages have been gone so long that most people didn't ever see them. But this is about to change!

I will first write a few things about the new forum, as Gofa asked me for in the comments.

One of the most important things that will be possible is recombinding different parts of the forum for different overviews. That will make it possible to use e.g. the English VIP forums and the high-stakes hand rating forums also for smaller communities that do not have enough high-status users yet to fuel these on their own. This might also bring some of the now strongly seperated language communities of ours closer together. There will be a lot of synergies, as a kind of "international" forum will mean that there is plenty of reason to get you even better and more hand judge.

Other features include:

• Restrictable moderator status on certain boards including avatar (so a "small talk" moderator won't look like a moderator in a strategy board
• Read-only status as a soft punishment for spammers / flamers
• Improved optics & layout
• More custom status groups like "video producers"
• Customizable user titles to make a better distinction between certain staff functions
• Ability to feed out individual data streams like "my threads in hand rating forums" that can be included on home / strategy portals
• ...

Well, a lot of that stuff doesn't sound spectacular, and partly this is true: a lot of the current work flows into a more modular and performat system, so that the forum will be faster even for much larger user groups / post counts and new features will be easier to implement.

Second topic: our "social networking" features!

Work is in good progress there, and we should be done in September. Then, you will be able to connect with your friends at PokerStrategy.com and interact with them. You might ask: "What's the use of another social network?" – and that is a good question.

In fact, we do not understand these features as being a new social network on its own. We rather learn from the social networks and the things they invented to make the Internet richer and more communicative.

So you will have a buddy list not only in your profile, but also everywhere – implemented into a kind of top bar (see picture below). So no matter where you are on the site, you will be able to send quick messages to your buddies. That makes it much easier to discuss videos, strategy articles or news, especially if compared to "simple private messages" like you know them from forums.

Another big topic on social networks is data security. We will handle that very cautiously. For most data, it will be your choice whether you want to share it with your friends, with everyone, or no one. And for some data (like your street address or your surname) we do not even allow you that. Goal is to protect you from people abusing your personal data or gathering information on your without you noticing it.

There is much more to tell, but I'd rather stop here because I have some reports to finish for tomorrow. Otherwise, Stefan will get angry at me ;)

Enjoy the night! 

Even though many statistics are just numbers, some give you the feeling that things go into the right direction. One of those statistics is the surge in journalistic activity throughout our more than a dozen languages. I tried to make the numbers visible for you in the graph below. It shows the number of news per week on our different language sites with a gentle moving average over seven weeks and a hopefully not too confusing colour-coding.

I hope that my readers from Poland, Germany, Portugal & Brazil are not too upset about my choice of colours – but in the end it is not my fault that there is such a limited number of easy-to-distinct colours in the world. And that most countries' flags even restrict to such a small number of them. Red-White-Blue anyone?

Yes, it's true: yesterday, we hit the mark.

The russian user DarkVenom grabbed the user ID 1,000,000. Even though this is just a symbolic number, it still is a great feeling. The fact that still so many people from so many different countries sign up to PokerStrategy.com convinces me that we are on the right path, even if there is so much to be done and improved... I sometimes even lose the greater picture with all its details.

Especially the past few weeks were burdensome with work – most of it under the hood so there are no direct results visible for you –, and this was amongst the reasons why I didn't update this blog for such a time. But as I got a camera from next week onwards, I will finally be able to pack some photos from the office into my posts to make the confidentials a little more vivid.

On the map below you roughly see how much traffic is coming from which country. Germany still marks the #1, but our internationalization is a great story, as well. When I marked our headquarters in Gibraltar with a red dot, I noticed that this dot is nearly in the centre of the map. A sign?