Site changes and some thoughts on Poker Forums

I'm changing some things around about my site after getting a little bit of SEO advice (that stands for "search engine optimization") from the owner of a poker forum I've been trolling a little called cardschat.com. You might have noticed that I tool almost all of my links on the right-hand side of the website down. If we have a link exchange, I apologize if you're being notified here before email. But after talking with Nick, it seems I have a lot to learn about effectively using outbound links. His strong insight into getting web traffic is one of the reasons why I decided to signup at his poker forum.

There are a ton of poker forums out there. NeverWinPoker.com, for example, is a great forum because it's unmoderated. You don't have to worry about Mason Malmouth getting pissed off and banning you from twoplustwo.com. But at the same time, is a complete cess pool and if you frequent NeverwinPoker.com, you quickly become desensitized to seeing photoshopped picture with a black dick.




Cardschat.com definitely has strengths... the major one being it seems like they offer quite a few of their own poker freerolls, and award members who post a certain number of posts the password to their free poker tournaments. Poker forums giving prizes to their members is cool.

It leads to what I see as a weakness, however, and that is that it looks like a decent percentage of the posts are very short and seem to be written more to get into a freeroll than to really add anything substantive or to spark meaningful conversation. But the basic idea is good.

I think the best way that the cardschat.com poker forum could really improve is by really trying to promote QUALITY posts over QUANTITY. They could have a monthly freeroll and limit it to a very small number of entrants... like 9, 6 or even 2. In order to participate in that freeroll, the entrants would have to be voted in by other members based on the quality of their posts... so it would be basically like a "members of the month" freeroll. You could still have a small free texas hodem poker tournament and open to everyone by changing the freeroll password requirements to a single post.

Also, I think every poker forum should have a marketplace. I still have yet to find a good poker-niche forum that I can buy and sell domains off of (if anyone knows of one, please comment). And there have been plenty of times where I've gone bust where I would definitely want a place to sell my poker book collection, or the Card Player magazine complete set, or an autographed Scott Fischman bobble-head doll.

Games With a Purpose

I have a new person that I am extremely impressed with. His name is Luis von Ahn. I'm pretty sure Bobby tried to turn me on to some of his ideas a few years ago but I didn't really pay much attention. Then I was watching some old 90s documentary called Spin and I saw Luis von Ahn's video featured on the right. I took a look and was blown away. Not only is he a super-genius and gives me the impression that he's thinking in different hemispheres. He's also really funny. If my old comp sci teachers had been anything like this guy, I probably wouldn't be a degenerate poker payer today.

Anyway, it starts out a little slow as he explains what captchas are, but then it starts getting pretty interesting when he explains his concepts of Human Computation and "Games With a Purpose". This guy Luis von Ahn is thinking a lot of moves ahead. If you are at all interested in hearing a lecture on those subjects by a teacher that students pay Carnegie Mellon University $45k/yr in tuition to learn from, check out the following video. And if you are seriously interested in this stuff, I'd recommend going to buy this book here called Interactive Computation: The New Paradigm


I've long been saying that a rake-free poker site is inevitable because of the potential vertical conversions you can make from your poker player base aside from just raking their money off. People have always assumed that I mean advertising, but there are other subtle ways to make money off your web traffic. The point that I think people are missing is that time in and of itself is a valuable commodity... maybe the most valuable. If you have hundreds of thousands of people playing poker, that translates into a lot of man-hours. And man-hours can be used.

The whole "games with a purpose" model can be applied to poker and I've been brainstorming the best ways for the last week or so. Maybe I'll give more details as I wrap my head around it.

Boycott the NY Post

I really can't believe what I just saw on CNN right now. The NY Post published a cartoon showing two policemen shooting a chimpanzee and a dialogue quote something to the effect of "looks like we'll have to find someone else to rewrite the stimulus package". They started the CNN news story by simply showing the cartoon. Then, of course, they had to have Al Sharpton on there along with a guy I didn't recognize explain to viewers why the cartoon was inappropriate and offensive. If you're seeing the cartoon below, it means that the NY Post still has it up right now. I really hope that the image below will disappear soon.



I really can't believe we are in 2009 and something as obviously racist as this could have actually been submitted by the cartoonist, let alone PUBLISHED by one of the biggest newspapers in the country. What's even more outrageous is the defensive statements released by the cartoonist and the editor, which continue to defend their choice to publish it and insist that the cartoon couldn't reasonably be construed as racist, let alone a less-than-subtle call to action to assassinate our American President. Both the cartoonist, Sean Delonas, and the editor Col Allen, have reacted to criticism very badly. Instead of making the smart move and issuing a sincere apology for not being sensitive to the possible interpretations of a well-intentioned political cartoon and immediately taking it off their website, they decide to frame the issue another way : as just another over-reaction by Al Sharpton. Col Allen's statement was as follows :

"The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington's efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist."


So to this I would like to say to Col and to Sean that if you think that Sharpton was the only one who was disgusted by this cartoon you are wrong. Your response sounds like the same shit spewed at us by the bigots who printed that watermelon, fried chicken, and kool-aid anti-Obama dollar. But in this case, I can't justify the racist actions away as some fringe Podunk illiterate hate speech. You guys are the NY POST!!!






When I saw that cartoon, I felt like I had been transported back to the 1930s. I felt literally sick to my stomach watching it with my half Filipino girlfriend, who is often mistaken for being half black. She is beautifully exotic enough that fifty years ago we probably wouldn't have been served in a lot of restaurants. For a brief second, your cartoon made me feel ashamed to be an American.

It is you, Col Allen, and you, Sean Delonas, who have revealed yourselves. You have revealed yourself to be at best embarrassingly stupid for not being able to see how this would have looked to the reader. At worst, you are racist hatemongers. Either way, you both should be fired.

If you subscribe to the NY Post or ever buy or read their newpaper or online website, I encourage you to start getting your news from another source. And if you live near New York City, I think it would be admirable to make a sign and go join Sharpton and picket the NY Post.

Headsup Poker

I saw a press release today that said that NBC is going to start airing the invitational Headsup Poker Championship in March, and that GoDaddy is one of the sponsors, which is pretty cool news. GoDaddy is my favorite domain name registrar and I think they're a pretty forward thinking company... and the CEO Bob Parsons really seems like a character.




I was actually fortunate enough to hand register HeadsupPoker.com several years ago. I recently had a pretty sweet logo made up for it and now I'm thinking I should probably do something with the name.

If you have an article or any content related to headsup poker, get in touch with me at dutch@jacknames.com.

Dear Tony the Tiger...

I've been playing a ton of poker with the FTOPs going, but I decided to take a little time to write an email to Kellogg and let them know that I'm boycotting them for not sticking with Michael Phelps. The media attention that Phelps has been getting for his bong hit at the college party is pretty lame.

Anyway, if you're ever reading this Michael, just take a little bit of comfort in knowing that the only reason this is a headline is because America loves you. If there's a time and a place for everything, that was probably a good time and a place to take a bong rip. I think you're right to promise never to do it again, if by "it" we mean taking a bong hit at a college party with a bunch of strangers in South Carolina. That probably was a dumb idea, because you've got to start expecting people to start taking advantage of opportunities to snap a five figure shot, but it probably has only recently sunk in how famous you actually are. You really gotta start being more paranoid and careful and not putting yourself in potentially bad situations with people you don't know. I hope you're still getting high with your friends, but I hope you stop trusting them to see the snapshots coming. It sucks having your mom fret out, but I think in the future she'll see that things have a way of playing out for the good. And who knows... maybe in twenty years you'll be smoking a joint with her on a rooftop somewhere. If you don't, maybe the scene will go down with some other kid in the future because his own mom lightened up a bit after seeing her favorite Olympian smoke herb.

I read about this guy named Tyrone Brown who served 17 years of a life sentence for testing positive for marijuana while he was on probation. Think about how sick that is... I hope every day that Obama does something about the "War on Drugs", like maybe pardon everybody who is serving time for a non-violent drug related offense.

The place to send Kellogg email is media.hotline@kellogg.com. If you're lazy, you can just copy and paste what I emailed to them. Here it is :

"
Dear Kellogg Employee,

You. The one person in the world at this moment reading this line. You know you've smoked marijuana before. Your last name isn't Kellogg, and I know you are just doing your job.

Maybe you haven't smoked weed before, and if you haven't kudos to a life less lived. But your brother has. Your best friend from high school. Half of your exes. The guy you have to report to. All of them have hit a joint. It's no bigger deal than taking a shot of Patron.

After the bong hit media attention that Michael Phelps has gotten in the last two weeks, he is more famous in America and the world then ever. Look what Paris Hilton's sex tape did for her... and she was just some party-girl with a trust fund. Phelps has brought home Olympic gold. He is the only Olympic gold medal winner that I would recognize on the street and you had him. After all the attention he got, he would have been a great image to increase your brand image and awareness.

You should fire your Public Relations people for not understanding the marketing value this would have had. Michael Phelps on a commercial with Scooby Doo, Tony the Tiger, and the Keebler Elves chilling out in a living room eating Apple Jacks late at night and watching television would have gone down as one of the all-time most memorable advertising campaigns in history. If I was a young marketing guy at Kellogg, I'd be sending out resumes to "cooler" companies.

I heard of a guy today who was sentenced to life for just testing positive for Marijuana. His name was Tyrone Brown. A lot of people are sick of the ridiculous criminalization of marijuana and your company could have stood up and been a hero to the Tyrone Browns of the nation by issuing a statement in support of Phelps. Instead, you drop him like a bad habit.

Yesterday, I bought a box of Michael Phelps corn flakes. It's the one where he's pointing his finger up while swimming. That's going to be the last box of Corn Flakes I ever buy. I'm going to make an honest effort to avoid all Kellogg products for all of 2009 and encouraging people to do the same.

I encourage you, the bored guy just going about your day doing your job at Kellogg, I think you should do something proactive... like send out some resumes to another company. You know you don't really like your job. You're just doing it to pay the bills. Kellogg doesn't really appreciate you. It doesn't value you. And let's be honest... if they fire Michael Phelps so easily, you probably don't have a lot of job security. With the stock down two points this week, someone is probably already thinking about outsourcing your job overseas. Maybe it's time to start that business you've been thinking about.

I doubt very much if your company could find a graceful way to reverse the poor business decision that it has made. But hopefully it will suffer enough backlash to demonstrate to other companies which are in the same position in the future that consumers do not appreciate it when you abandon our heroes.

Cheers,
Dutch Boyd

ps - Tell Famous Amos that I'll miss him."

"Ahhh see... Right see the thing that's got it all
fucked up now is camera-phones. How the hell am I
supposed to be able to do a line in front of
complete strangers, when I know they've all got
cameras?" - Mike Skinner (The Streets)