A network of poker sites is an infrastructure that interconnects several poker sites, forming a larger user base. All participating poker sites (also known as skins of the poker network) benefit from belonging a network, since they can guarantee a larger variety of games and a never ending flow of opponents to play with. Nobody wants to join a small site if it cannot guarantee a certain amount of traffic, no matter how good their sign up bonuses may be - ultimately, the user wants to be able to play poker anytime, at any stakes, being it short handed, full ring, or heads up, in either cash games or tournaments.

Ongame is one of the largest poker networks. At peak hours, it gathers up to 27,000 simultaneous players, according to non-official statistics gathered by flopturnriver.com. The most well-marketed brands that participate in the Ongame Network are PokerRoom and bwin. Some other participating sites are Holywood poker, mansion poker, and europoker.

So, I found this interesting paper that analyzes the positive role MySQL in both PokerRoom and the Ongame network. As the paper exposes, in the early days of PokerRoom, the founders sought to use high-quality yet low-cost available tools, and, as many others, decided to rely on the typical Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP setting, a configuration so popular nowadays, that it has its own nickname: LAMP.

The paper also offers some insight in the use of MySQL in the Ongame network, which it used during the actual game playing. The paper mentions the need for security in a system, which is always important in a site where money continuously changes hands, and, if I may add, in a system that is so susceptible to break-in attempts - after all, being able to see the opponent’s cards would make loads of money for an intruder, and would be difficult to detect if done carefully. Understandably, the paper does not offer much insight on the cheat detection (collusion detection, I understand) algorithm that it mentions, which would be based on a neural network.

The second point on which the paper focuses is performance. As already stated, the number of simultaneous user can go up to 27000 as of today. It is easy to imagine that this leads to a high stress on the database infrastructure. The paper mentions a mean load of 2000 MySQL queries per second with peaks of 4000, and that was back in 2004, which was at the time handled by a Dell 2650 with 2.8GHz processors master node, plus two slave nodes. The game servers and clients run on a dozen more Dell 2650 machines. The systems run Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Overall, while slightly outdated, the paper makes an interesting read for the geekish poker players, even if it is just a marketing paper aimed to convince you that MySQL rocks. PostgreSQL lovers, though, can also find their favorite db in use in the poker world since pokertracker uses it for hand information storage.

Download the paper here. There is a slightly different version of the paper here that focuses more on the use of HP technologies and does not mention Dell servers anymore.

A third alternative, which is best suited for webmasters and bloggers, is promoting online poker rooms. There are a variety of affiliate programs that webmasters can sign up to and generate some income to support their sites. In a future blog post I will discuss my (overall positive) experiences with the pokeraffiliate.com poker affiliate program, that I have signed up with, which covers pokerroom, europoker, and an online casino, casinoroom.

Poker affiliate programs are all about recruiting new players on behalf of the poker rooms by promoting them, usually by the means of banners or text ads in their sites. Forums, blogs, and all kinds of sites related to poker are all full of ads of the poker rooms, with shiny banners that display the benefits that each site offers to new players (usually bonuses, e.g., I currently display a 100%-up-to-$250 first deposit bonus at pokerroom in my blog).

Success in poker affiliate programs comes from web traffic - the more, the better. You ideally already are the owner of a popular poker-related site: poker forums, blogs, etcetera are a great place for placing their banners. In fact, I’ve yet to see a successful poker-centric web page that has no ads from a poker affiliate program. Otherwise, banners on gaming sites may also generate some interest from the users - in fact, many players come to poker from other games (either card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, or others such as backgammon, where betting is part of the game). If you own a popular site that is not poker-related, you may want to investigate the interest of your users by placing some poker ads and see if they catch some attention. If you do not own any website, then I may suggest that you start a blog for free. The raw material you will be working with is user traffic - no users, no clicks. No clicks, no sign ups. No sign ups, no money. Two ideas: either offer some unique content that users can find from search engines, chiefly google, or offer some eye-catching content to hook people to your site.

As I said, expect a future blog post discussing my experience with the pokeraffiliate.com poker affiliate program, which has been helping me build up my bankroll.

There are two principal uses for this nice tool. The thing I like the most is to be able to track my own performance. I do not need to write the results down after any sng or to use any pesky spreadsheet to calculate my global wins (or, god forbid, losses), average winnings and global return over investment. They also provide nice graphs where you can see how you’ve been doing across time, your current trends, and your performance in each level of stakes (e.g. you may notice that you win at $5 sngs but you lose at $10).

Here is a sample of the information I extracted from a shark, whose nickname I won’t disclose:

The second use, and probably the most spectacular is that you can check the stats for your opponents with the same amount of detail I showed above. This can lead to a great advantage. For example, if your opponent is strong, you know you must be more careful. If your opponent is a fish, you can avoid risking too much in every hand since you want to reduce the variance - you will show a profit sooner or later - or you may concentrate on finding an obvious weakness.

As usually happens, things are not so good and easy as they seem. Sharkscope place a limit of 5 free daily searches. Therefore you can not search for all the opponents in a tournament (let alone all the tournaments you play during the day). That is, for free. If you pay, you get more. The other major complaint about this site is that they do not have a 100% accuracy. That is, sometimes they miss some data and the graphs are not accurate.

However I do not agree with this complaint, because the important thing is not to have precise data, but a general idea about the strength of a player, his current form, trends in your results, etcetera. And you can achieve this by having incomplete data.

• The hand I enjoyed the most from High Stakes Poker. An enourmous pot is built by Daniel Negreanu and Gus Hansen after both make good hands. Slowplaying and poker faces involved. Also, I like the comments.

• Unbelievable cold deck. Not to spoil the vid but.. AA KK QQ 77 55 on the table!

• See Tony G’s acting, apparently he manages to make his opponent play bad, and afterwards he just can’t stop the show! Hilarious for some, disgusting for others.

In this blog we aim to collect information and useful links regarding poker - that is, general strategy, online poker reviews, links to stuff you can buy, etcetera.

We hope that the information here will be useful to you!