Tonight, we will make use of the beautiful weather and do a little barbecue here at our office. Even though it will be in the evening, I guess for me and some other people it will be a kind of lunch, as our day rythm is somewhat late these days. Especially our poor IT team leader Tom has his hands at night - that's about the time when he does his 2nd job, taking care for our web servers. Luckily, we have a full-time admin here in our team in a matter of weeks!

But back to the barbecue: in our company there are a handful of vegetarians - even vegans! I have to admit that I am not, but I could call myself somewhat like a borderline vegetarian. Although I like bacon so much, I might become a vegetarian some day and I strongly believe that in like 200 years, some western societies will be mainly vegetarian.

So I will use tonight as a ride into this happy vegetarian future: I set myself on the list of vegan customers for today's barbecue. I hope I will enjoy the soy steaks and tofu sausages not only because I will be so hungry!

The bad thing about writing on topics like food is that I always get hungry - and I missed ordering lunch (or should I call it breakfast?), as I arrived at the office as late as 11:30 a.m. today. Don't hang me for it, it was just because I worked so long yesterday - of course just for you! ;)

Now I will get back on drawing some wireframes for the user interface of... no, its not the infamous private messages! They are already in development, wireframes & concepts finished weeks ago!

Soy Ahoy!

Size isn't everything. But still, it represents. So I catch myself time and again checking our Alexa.com traffic rank – and comparing it to sites like twoplustwo, once known as the biggest poker community by far.

For those of you who don't know: Alexa uses their toolbar and a lot of other data from their partners to estimate a ranking of all websites in the Internet. Of course this isn't perfect, but just like polls before elections, such data tends to be correct to some certain degree. And for the top 10,000 websites in the internet, the results tend to be comparably precise.

Luckily, both PokerStrategy.com and twoplustwo belong to the Top 10,000. Half a year ago, we were happy when we catched up some major poker news sites around, but still were far away from the big, bad american forum. But thanks to our growth, in the past few months the two charts really looked like struggling for the #1 spot of all the poker information websites & communities around. 

If I look at the long-term trend, I tend to answer this question with yes. And of course, our content is much more sophisticated and our community much friendlier! ;) 

Most of you will already know that PartyPoker introduced a new VIP system. And probably most of you will at least have tried to analyze & understand it.

I have to say that it wasn't easy to get though it for us, as well. And even after understanding it, I'm most curious about the implications for the future.

Indeed, the new VIP system is worse than the old one from the view of a very active player. But as we all know, rakeback is not everything when it comes to the pros and cons for playing on some specific network. I do not say that the new VIP system is good, but it could have some good side effects if you look at things mid- to long-term!

Now, the best you can do is playing the same amount in every single week from now on until they change the system - being Deuce-4 ideally. If you play less than your weekly goal, you lose vested points, i.e. rakeback. If you play more than your weekly goal - you lose vested points, too! Yes, its true: you can't chase these points in any week in the future. That certainly reduces rakeback. And certainly it is annoying, if you want to have the maximum rakeback possible on PartyPoker.

But now imagine: you know that. Not all Deuce-4 and especially not all the average players will consider that. Just because the system is camouflaged in this complicated wrapping. Most people will chase their weekly targets, increase them, play their peak weeks at PartyPoker. You don't have to. Just play your weekly X hours at PartyPoker and if you got twice the time to play in some week: play it on another network partially!

That way, you will have the maximum rakeback you can still get at PartyPoker - that should amount to ~85%-95% of the rakeback you got before the change. But most other people will only get around 60% or even less!

And what will be the indirect consequence? PartyPoker as a public listed company cannot afford losing market shares. So they have to reinvest the rakeback saved into marketing and other ways to increase the networks liquidity!

If you act correctly, you are not paying that bill - but all the PartyPoker players that don't get the new system will! Additionally, maybe some annoyed winning players will leave Party in the next days or weeks. So we as individual players might even profit from this whole strange VIP reform: we might still get 90%+ of the rakeback and get an even fishier network than Party already is.

Yes, it might be that I am a little too optimistic here - but it is always important to see both sides of the medal. The ecology of poker, which makes it so profitable for us as skilled players, is just not easy enough to favour rakeback over other factors.

After all that writing: do you think that this analysis may contain some truth - or am I just doing propaganda to provide PartyPoker with a better image? The decision is up to you!

The poker industry tends to like winter – because people play more when it is cold outside. Maybe also a reason, why northern europe brings so many strong poker players. Guess up there in Bergen or Helsinki you have less alternatives to playing poker than in Malaga or Thessaloniki.

But of course it is not the players alone whose morale sinks when summer comes: this weekend is quite quiet here in the office. I hope the general activity in our team increases again once they all get used to summer again. But always see the upside! Whereas an emptier office may speak for lower morale, the sun might increase general happiness and thus the quality of work again for the next weeks!

And this seems very desirable if you consider the big work that lies ahead of us. We have to revolutionize our web technology, launch partners like Ladbrokes, implement new features and of course above all improve our intelligent content around poker in all aspects. We need to push our No-Limit videos & articles on at least the same level as our Fixed Limit branch. And even though we are still by far the world's #1 in Fixed Limit, we can improve quite a lot there, too!

Enough sun now – get back to work, my dear colleagues! :) 

Thanks to the New York Times for this beautiful photograph of Gibraltar. Can you see the window where our community managers work on PokerStrategy in 14 languages?