GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 26 - October 2013

we had known more about business we might’ve tried to scale up from day one, but the business scaled fairly evenly with our limited experience in this market. It’s a niche, so it’s not like we have an unlimit- ed amount of customers to tap into. These days we focus more on making HUSNGs appeal to new players, to grow the game and our market, but we didn’t have the ex- perience or vision to do that on day one. What traits do you look for in an affiliate manager? How about in an affiliate pro- gram? I first look at a poker room. I need a room that is reliable. I don’t promote rooms that don’t pay players in a reason- able time frame, and if a room goes south, I stop promoting them and keep my play- ers informed. I’m not in a passive mar- ket; we’re front and center in the HUSNG community in a lot of ways, and it’s a re- sponsibility to keep players informed. As long as we remain a leader by doing good by our customers, we’ll always make mon- ey, so it’s important to just focus on qual- ity poker rooms and honest information. In an affiliate manager, I look for people who are accessible, can solve problems quickly and basically make it so that my job is to bring them new players, not work on fixing problems or navigating hurdles put up by the poker room. I don’t want to have to follow up with three or four re- minder e-mails to get an issue resolved; I want an e-mail within 24 hours either solving the situation or stating that it is being solved, then a follow-up when it is solved. That’s how I see the best people in this industry operate and it is the model that I follow myself. I look for affiliate programs that offer my players good deals. PokerStars has the lowest rake and most populated games for our game type, so we feature them first and foremost. From time to time, other sites offer soft enough games that the higher rake can be worth paying, and we’ll work with other programs that can appeal to certain groups of players within our niche. Winning Network has been a great company to work with. What advice can you offer people who are just starting up in the industry? Just execute. As the years go on, I see more and more people pitching ideas or talk- ing about their next big poker business. The best guys in this industry don’t always have the best products, but they always execute an idea, rather than sitting around talking about it endlessly. Networking is big as well. If you only know one affiliate manager, one poker business owner, one poker professional, one agent, one mar- keting man, one Web designer . . . imagine picking one of each of those fields at ran- dom. What are you left with? Subpar qual- ity. Know as many successful and hard- working people as you can. Find ways that are mutually beneficial for you to work with them and just watch your business grow by leaps and bounds. What prompted you to join the GPWA? How has it helped you? If I recall correct- ly, I found the site while researching the link value of different poker sites. I found a link in someone’s profile and stumbled upon the site that way. After reading through the forums some, I signed up. The magazines are valuable. The SEO advice and the interviews with owners in particu- lar interest me and build my knowledge and perspective. You’ve been a member here for more than two and a half years, but have yet to make a post on the forums. How of- ten do you visit, and what do you think it would take to prompt you to make your first post? It’s true. The only forums I post on are HUSNG.com and the 2p2 forums. On 2p2, I believe we’re the only site to ever sponsor a strategy forum (the heads-up SNG forum), so it makes sense for me to spend a lot of time there engag- ing directly with my community (and it carries over into some of the more popu- lar industry subforums such as Internet Poker and News, Views, Gossip). In the past I’ve tried to post more on forums such as PAL and foreign communities, but it’s just too difficult for me to find the time. The GWPA is a forum I read from time to time on my phone, and I don’t post on any forums on my phone. It would probably involve improving my delega- tion skills so they can catch up to my ideas for me to have enough free time to begin posting outside those two areas today. If the GWPA had a heads-up SNG forum, I’d probably be moderating it already, that’s how involved I’d be, so it’s not a reflection of the quality of the site, just where my time needs to be focused while online. What do you like about the industry? The industry is diverse and some of the better people in the industry are really good at what they do and very enjoyable to work with. Poker, heads-up specifically, has taught me a great deal about decision making. Working with incomplete infor- mation, spotting emotional bias, looking for opportunity, evaluating different ideas and decisions . . . I feel I’ve improved quite a lot in all of those areas due to being in the poker industry. If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be? The na- iveté of the average player. Sites like Cake or Lock Poker should not be in business. These types of sites fail to pay their player base in a reasonable time frame, and in some instances the lies that go along with this are so ridiculous. Yet players keep depositing. It comes down to two things: 1. Regulation. It is a double-edged sword, since most governments seem purely in- terested in sucking as much tax money as they can out of poker, not helping ac- tual players. But until you have regulators that aren’t just a rubber stamp (the LGA – Lotteries & Gaming Authority, Malta – in particular is terrible), you’ll see sites like these operating. 2. The bigger affiliate sites seem to care more about funneling players into sites that pay them the most money, rather than sites that are operat- ing in a legitimate way. By the way, credit to PokerListings for dropping Lock re- cently. I don’t think the average person in the community sees how important these major sites are to keeping a bad poker room afloat. Unfortunately, when money is involved, our human minds seem more interested in finding excuses for our poor decisions rather than recognizing them for what they are. You see all sorts of busi- nesses involved with crappy poker rooms making terrible blanket statements and comparing minor issues in other places or irrelevant issues to the serious issues of the poker room paying them money. What do your family and friends think of your work as an affiliate? While I do a lot of different affiliate work and make it a habit to be informed on poker rooms, I’m probably known more to the average family or friend of mine for run- ning a teaching/educational poker site. It’s not something that people outside the poker industry can easily understand right away, so you really need to educate them on what you do. I find that real- world comparisons help a lot. Something 55 GPWA Affiliate Interview Series