I admit – I'm a weak person.

Not an hour after Dami sent me a link to our new partner Betfair (offering poker & sports betting alike) and reading my first strategy article around sports betting ever, I placed a €50 bet.

And no, I did not even listen to the article: I just listened to my heart – and placed the bet on Germany. But to be honest, I think that the odds are pretty good: 5.1 to 1! So I get €255 with a chance of roughly 90%. Don't I?

By the way, I hope the company stays calm during the EM. We are just so multi-national! Even here in my office I've got a Polish and a Spanish fan. Well, as long as our Italian community manager Marco does not explode with Italy failing to survive in the group stage.. ;)

For the Euro Cup, we will have some specials for all of you – even if your country might not be European or did sadly not qualify.

For one, we will have a tipping game - but it might be that we cannot translate the technical solution for it from German to other languages, even though I still hope. There will be a quite nice prize pool for the winners of the tipping games.

Secondly, we will place incentives to play especially on the days where there are no Euro Cup games, so that you won't lose your status because you enthusiastically watch a lot of games ;)

And as a third part of the thing we will have a new "first post" promotion that is supposed to bring passive members to become active in our forums. I hope this will especially work well for the smaller communities where we still lack some forum activity.

And as PokerStrategy.com never sleeps, I will get back to work now - the internal reports for all our languages need to be done :) I hope on their basis we will be able to improve our operative excellence to your use!

Although some of the forums in certain languages are not still the best possible success, the overall story of our forums is a great one, also in 2008 so far!

In March we hit the 70k mark for the first time – that means more than 10,000 posts per day! In the yet biggest forum, the German one, they are distributed nearly equally to the two main pillars: 

1. Straight poker education
Here we have of course the back bone of the hand ratings that are so important to a poker players understanding of the game and thus his carreer – but also strategic discussions or topics like "which poker room is the best for NL100" make our forums a vivid source of information and insight for any poker player.

2. Community talk
Here, also a lot is poker related. E.g. telling other people about your biggest success or biggest worries. But also topics about homegames in your home town or even your favourite car / computer game work, if the forum is active enough. And this is also important: the option of a little mind-distracting pas-time in the forums. A little small talk, some laughter – all that belongs to your "online poker world" if you want to become really happy with it.

Downsides
As you can also see in the graph, not everything is that shiny. So the post count of basic & bronze members decreased – the new blood that is so important for the future development of our community (some day they might be the ones talking to you about your NL600 hand ;)).

How do you think could we suggest our forums to new members in a better way? So many of our members don't even try our forums out or every post and discuss a single hand – we'd be greatful for ideas to improve that! 

As you might have noticed in the last weeks, we try to improve our blogs. Blogs can be entertaining, motivating and informative - all of which is important for us poker players in different stages. Example: if I'm in a downswing, I really enjoy some pas-time or read about other peoples downswings and stuff.

Of course we are not yet totally successful in improving our blogs to a top level – but I think the redesign is a big step in the right direction. But still, the most important thing about blogs is activity. First by the bloggers, second by the readers. So let's have a look into the numbers!

To the right you can see the traffic development for our two major blogs (from a German point of view, sorry that I did not include the Russian, Spanish, French, ... blogs :)

The most successful blog is the Pro Blog – it has the highest traffic and is very constant. This is especially due to HoRRoR, who is a really entertaining blogger and also has a lot to tell, e.g. from his live tournaments. Sadly, we do still not have many successful live players in our English community, but I'm sure this will follow ;)

The Queens Blog took #2 from black, mostly because our queens are really active and the blackies are currently not. Last and maybe even least, there is this blog here – but I'm glad that at least some people read about what I write, thanks a lot! ;)

Our German community has become so large that sometimes it is hard to get a complete overview. A good example for that is the sheer amount of sub-forums in German: more than 100!

But still, there are even more topics to talk about – even though they might touch only a small part of the community. So there is the need to balance out good usability for the "standard" user with flexibility for all those who like to talk about special topics.

One of the more important special topics is private coaching, may it be paid (by professional coaches) or free (within learning groups). But to integrate another 20 German forum would mean the collapse for new visitors who want to get used to the forums.

Social networks can be something to learn from, here. They organise their forums more locally by topic – often times called groups or networks. This also bears danger, as it spreads activity to many small areas and often needs to less real communication compared to a centralised forum solution.

So we will try to take the best of both worlds with our new forum software and our social networking module that will be released in the future. Up to then, we will help ourselves case-by-case.

For the German coaching this means that there will be a whole new forum with subs for each coach and the larger user-generated coaching groups. We will try to combine that with some nice features in our coaching player, but that will probably take some days longer :)

By the way, if you wonder about the photo to the right: it's just a sample photo from our barbecue I wrote about two weeks ago. Hope to provide you with better and more photos – also from our office at Gibraltar – in the future!