About a week ago, the 777,777th member registered at PokerStrategy. He's from Hungary and he already passed the quiz. I wish him all the best for his career here at us!

Of course not all of these hundreds of thousands of people are active poker players. A lot of people e.g. do not want to read the articles to get through the quiz. I can understand them, because when searching for pas-time on the Internet, I am lazy, too.

But still, this amount is a huge success, especially since PokerStrategy started not before 2005 - and back then, it was just a small forum for some poker playing Germans. And there even was no poker boom in Germany at all!

I take this event as a reason to provide you with a small piece of infotainment: which are the top 20 countries our new registrations since January 1st 2008 came from? Here we go!

Top20 PokerStrategy Countries*
Germany
Russian Federation
Hungary
France
Brazil
Ukraine
Belarus Republic
Poland
Finland
Canada
Netherlands
Belgium
United Kingdom
Romania
Austria
Italy
Switzerland
Argentina
China
Spain
*: by the number of registrations between Jan 1st and May 13th 2008. 

Welcome, everybody! :)

I'm happy to leak that there will be two nice promotions coming on PokerStrategy this summer! One will be themed by the Euro Cup in Austria/Switzerland, but of course won't be around poker.

We will do a promotion where bringing your friends to PokerStrategy until the end of the Euro Cup will mean a lot of advantages for you - I hope that we will meet your taste with this promotion, which is thought as a part of our "thank you" towards you, who as members of the PokerStrategy community are the most important factor of our common success.

The other promotion will be around creating events local for the English speaking community of PokerStrategy, so that the feeling of "us" increases, which makes a community a nice place to stay at. 

By the way, did I forget to tell you how important your feedback is? We are in the happy position to be so close to our members, so we have the responsibility to take that chance and listen to you! 

I think that is also what we need to do more: not only wait for your feedback, but go to you and ask you for it. That, after all, is our job - and I will be darned if I do not try to do this job as good as I can! A first effort to learn more about what you would like to see us doing is this news. Maybe you also want to add something?

"Think strategic" - that could be the GPSTS in a nutshell. I hope you already heard about the GPSTS? As a poker player, you should have!

GPSTS is short for Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society - sounds more complicated that it is. It is Harvard Law Professor Charles Nesson's Child: a society to "legitimize and teach poker and the value of strategic poker thinking", as Wikipedia puts it.

The goal of Mr Nesson and his academic companionship is to show people that poker and the way it makes you think is a valuable educational tool. The strategic and probabilistic way poker makes you think is something that even western education systems seem to lack - otherwise it would be odd that even a lot of clever, graduated people would take out insurances that just don't pay off - that are -EV, as a poker play would say.

Besides shaking the pillars of the UIGEA and teaching poker to students, they want to internationalize their efforts and even do great social projects like teaching poker to prisoners in Jamaica. The idea is that a good poker player will know that working within the boundaries of legal rules will make you find a way back into a successful and legal life.

At gpsts.pokerstrategy.com,  you can see a first, yet empty, common project of GPSTS and PokerStrategy. Together, we want to support the ideas and goals of the GPSTS and build up a discussion platform and learning environment for the idea of using poker as an educational tool that could (and should?) enter schools all over the world.

We met Mr Nesson and Mr Woods personally in London back in February, where we formed this idea of a mutual cooperation. Seeing poker not just as a form of gambling and as an industry makes us share the idea of viewing poker as a great strategic game. We all love this game and the people around it. And we hope that not only that the society shares our view upon poker, but want to help the society through what we do best: teaching poker & building communities around it. 

Even though I already had the honor to visit PartyGaming as well in the main office in Gibraltar and at their IT facility in Cyderabad, I did not have these experiences in my mind when I wrote the headline.

Some days ago, PartyGaming released their annual report for 2007 – which is most probably the single document at the moment that contains the most deep information about aspects of the poker industry. So if you are interested in such topics, it is a must-read! (Or at least a must-look-through.)

It is much too vast to be convered here in a single blog post, I will just go into 1-2 aspects and leave the rest up to you: if you have any questions or are curious about something - just leave me a note in the comments and I can write about it in my next blog posts.

One thing that catched my attention is the curve that displays the amount of players that do not play only one "game". As game relates to the products of PartyGaming, this means that someone does not only play poker, but also enjoys the PartyCasino or plays bingo.

As we can see, the rate of people that play multiple products fell since the beginning of '07. While that might have al lot to with new customers and the marketing channels of PartyGaming, I immediately though about all the poor (or just undisciplined?) people that come to our forums and crying about their money lost at the roulette or black jack tables. Maybe this curve is a shimmer of hope? Maybe it is our players who stick to the rule "do not play casino games" better than ever before? Well, in the above graph it is all about player numbers, and not the revenues. And we certainly do not have a large part of the more than 900,000 players that decide whether to play one or multiple games. So let us have a look on the revenues, where our active & strong players should have a larger influence:

Gosh! The revenues of PartyCasino increase much faster than the poker revenues? In what world do we live? Could this even mean that some of our successful high-limit players contribute to the success of PartyCas... no, I certainly do not want to think about that!

So an honest advice, even though most of you do not need it: do never ever play casino games!

But before I get back to work with thoughts on silly roulette tables, let us have a look on the large scale results of PartyGaming:

As we can see, things are looking bright again for PartyGaming overall. A small gain in poker revenues is more than I even expected last year, because the UIGEA certainly was a huge pain for the Party people. Losing your biggest market and thus market leadership is never funny.

So they are back in business with even a nice increase of revenue and profits in poker! I hope this gives good signals for their marketing team to increase efforts and bring in a lot of new fish in new markets like Russia or Spain or even some asian countries?

About casino, enough was writtin in this blog post. Gamblers never die out - and we should be thankful for it, because not only poker players switch for gambling, but also casino gamblers start playing poker. And there its not only the house winning, but us!

The stock markets reacted positively on the report - the shares are on a new high in 2008: 36 pence. But of course that is still far away from the old days before the UIGEA crippled PartyGaming's gold rush.

I hope you enjoy your weekends - I will be here for you in case you're bored enough ;) 

"We are red, we are white, we are Danish dynamite"

Danish fans chanted this a lot 16 years ago in '92s European Championship in Sweden (soccer of course!). Sadly, they beat Germany in the finals - but they were so likeable and enthusiastic that it most probably was the best final defeat that Germans ever felt.

Nowadays, Denmark feels more like the Gallic village of Asterix & Obelix to me! From Danish Dynamite to Lacking Language, one could say.

Sorrounded by PokerStrategy countries, it is one of the few white spots on the European PokerStrategy map.

We would really like to build up a Danish section (and a Norwegian, too) - but somehow we still did not get applications from anybody who feels up to the challenge to be our Danish Community Manager. Maybe they just feel so well at home so they won't leave for Gibraltar?

Besides this totally lacking piece in our puzzle, we of course lack a lot of man power in nearly all areas:

• 2nd & 3rd Community Managers for our existing 14 languages
• Web developers & web designers for our IT team
• Financial accountants and a controller for our business department
• ...

Only if we manage to fill in these gaps, we will be able to reach the best we can for our community. But in the combination of classical recruiting and searching in our community (like here or in the news), we will manage to do so!