How Do Poker Media Websites Make Money?

How a poker media website gets paid, just like any blog or news site, has a direct impact on the content they produce. If you are looking to get into poker writing, you need to know how your potential employers are paying the bills and create your content to fit that model.

I know a lot of great writers, much better ones than I could hope to be, who were unable to make a go of poker writing because they didn't understand this simple fact. Often the thing they don’t understand is how what they write could upset a potential advertiser; which is unfortunately the biggest tightrope walk we face in this industry.

I learned the hard way how important understanding the advertiser is in poker. When the Absolute Poker scandal first materialised I proudly was one of the first people to get the story onto a news site, reporting on it when I was a staff writer for PokerNews. Because I hadn't been paying attention to the site I worked for, I didn't notice that Absolute Poker were, at the time, one of our biggest affiliate partners. The management team were not happy with me, they pulled the article, and I almost got fired.

Luckily for me the story got huge pretty quickly anyway, PokerNews dropped Absolute Poker from their affiliate partners soon after and republished my original article quite quickly. I think all that was enough for me to keep my job, but an important lesson was learned. 

Now a lot of people might say that I was right and the management team at PokerNews (It was a completely different management team to the one in place at the moment btw) was wrong. But in hindsight I would side with PokerNews on this one - don't bite the hand that feeds. People who cry about journalistic integrity are the exact people I mentioned before do not make it very far in this industry. I too strive to to write honest unbiased work, but I also appreciate that without advertisers, none of these sites, and jobs, would exist. 

That doesn't mean that everything you read is bullshit on these sites, far from it. There has been a significant move towards transparency in the poker media, particularly after Black Friday. But you need to understand how these sites make money if you want to work for them. Likewise if you are just a reader of these sites, I hope the following will help you understand why certain things are reported on and others are omitted from front pages:

Pay per click/pay per impression - Websites which are paid by the number of page views they receive are a staple part of the online news industry. They tend to get paid a small amount by advertisers for every user that clicks a link, or for every thousand page views.

I mention this advertising model first, because this is precisely what 99% of poker sites DON'T rely on, but many people assume they do. As a result, this has a profound effect on the content.

Blogs that rely on page views are much more sensationalist and prolific. It is in their interest to be the first to break news, expose scandals, and produce a lot of new content every day. Even the biggest news blogs only get something like $4-$12 per 1000 page views. So as you can imagine, they need big controversial stories every day to get millions of hits in order to make it worth their while and employ staff.

This model is good in one sense, because scandals would not get swept under the carpet. It is very bad in another sense because it encourages sloppy work, that is rushed out quickly, not fact checked, and sometimes is straight up lies. If poker went this way, even more cheating scandals would be exposed, but we would also see some really slimy gutter reporting, personal attacks, and unsubstantiated rumours being presented as facts.

The poker market is simply not big enough to attract the type of page views needed to make good money, which is why most poker sites rely on the affiliate model.

Affiliates - The poker media is built on the poker affiliate model. All the big media sites you see today have got where they are from poker players signing up to online poker rooms via their affiliate links. They usually get either a one off fee for each new player who signs up, which is called a CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), or a regular percentage of the rake they pay to that poker room called MGR (Monthly Gross Revenue). CPAs are much rarer these days, although PokerStars exclusively still do it this way. Most of the big poker media websites have hybrids of both models.

The nature of the commission model may give a slight insight into what to expect from the content. In that those on primarily MGR models are more likely to have content that retains readers - so community based stuff, forums, interactive content etc, as well as regular strategy content and other stuff designed at keeping players at the table. With CPAs it is slightly more about attracting a reader and converting them; so possibly more of a standard news blog model could be expected. 

Because sign ups, instead of page views, are the fundamental criteria for making money, the nature of the news reporting changes. You don't need to be as attention grabbing or prolific, but you do need to be constantly directing readers back to your download pages. So although you don't have to worry about printing garbage to rely on hits to your website, you do run the risk of being too spammy with the content you do produce.

This causes two potential problems for a poker writer. First of all, no matter how good the content you write is, your employer might be looking at it in ROI terms, rather than how well written it is. Most poker content like tournament reports, strategy articles and interviews are in theory non profit exercises for the site. In the long term, this of course not true, it is the quality content which gets people on your site in the first place and coming back for more. But you will often find yourself in conflict with the affiliate part of the site over what content is important. Likewise, a lot of poker content, although presented as genuine news, is actually glorified ad copy for your partners. 

The other big problems for poker writers with the affiliate model is exactly what I described with my Absolute Poker story, and that's you have to walk a tightrope of producing good content while also keeping an affiliate partner happy. Writing a story that puts an online partner or one of their sponsored players in a bad light is a big no no. Another problem can come in the form of writing about a poker room which isn’t one of your affiliate partners, positive or not, because it can essentially give them free advertising. The same goes for linking to a direct business rival, ie. another affiliate site. 

These days the biggest sites are less biased as I might make it sound, I am simply outlining what some of the barriers can be. Today there is a much better culture of covering the important stories no matter what potential conflicts could arise, as well as giving proper citations to potential rivals, among the biggest sites.  

There are some other variations of the standard affiliate model worthy of a mention:

Super affiliate - Some poker media sites choose to advertise one poker room rather than a selection. This is usually because they have an enhanced deal with that room, and an agreement to provide some exclusive content. Usually the media site will have an exclusive bonus, freeroll, or other promotion that will encourage players to sign up, as well as an increased commission; both of which is enough to justify them not advertising other partners.

Super affiliate deals usually involve some heavy restrictions on what content the site can produce, and even involves the poker room having some editorial control over the content. As you can imagine, this leads to some heavy biases in the reporting. A PartyPoker super affiliate is obviously not going to be allowed to cover PokerStars news, and might even restrict coverage of the something like the EPT (as Party have the WPT) and vice versa.

In many cases, some big affiliates have a hybrid of a super affiliate deal, in that they can still advertise other rooms, but give priority and editorial exclusives to one major partner room.

Rakeback sites - Rakeback sites understandably operate on an MGR basis, since they give most of what they receive straight back to their players. The only reason I mention them at all is to point out that the nature of these sites means that their profit margins are very small, and as such, you rarely ever see a massive editorial presence on them.

Sub affiliates - Some poker affiliates are so big that they actually give smaller websites the opportunity to advertise their poker rooms for a split of the profits. Although this means smaller profits for the lesser site, it can work out better sometimes because it means they can offer some of the same exclusive promotions, bonuses, and freerolls that the bigger affiliate can boast. PokerStrategy actually have a superb sub affiliate programme btw.

Non poker room options - There are of course other potential ways to get affiliate revenue from poker other than by signing up to a room. Books and software like Hold'em Manager being probably the main two. I doubt anyone makes significant revenues from these because they would take a lot of volume to do so. Online poker room CPAs can be several hundred dollars each and, if you get lucky with the player, a single MGR could land you thousands a month.  So poker room affiliates are the bread and butter of the poker media and the other potential affiliate options are just supplements to their revenue.

Paid advertisements - It is still not uncommon for some advertisers to simply pay to have banners and other advertisements on the site for just an upfront fee. This will often happen when the advertiser has no affiliate plan in place, ie. things like live poker events, live casinos etc. You will also see certain aspects of the website get unique sponsors, for example some podcasts have seperate sponsors, as do some live tournament reporting ventures, forums etc.

Editorial placement - Now on to stuff that perhaps isn't as obvious. Since most of us have in-built mechanisms to mentally filter out adverts these days, media and advertisers get together creatively to make adverts more widely seen. Instead of posting a banner somewhere, they will actually place an article that appears to be genuine news on the site, which is in fact a sponsored post. In some instances these will be highlighted as such, being called "sponsored posts" or some such, but most of the time they are not, and essentially disguised as real news. 

Now, more often than not, you don't need a particularly sophisticated spam radar to recognise which ones are the "advertorial" pieces. Usually editorial placement is for a one off fee, or part of an enhanced media package/affiliate deal agreed with the website. 

Poker room blogs - A lot of the poker media we see today are actually blogs created and run by a poker room, so their revenue comes directly from getting the readers back onto their site. PokerStars and PartyPoker both come to mind as having pretty good content (Especially live tournament related content), and of course Sky Poker have a fully fledged TV channel to support their room. I would advise any fledgling poker writers to keep an eye out on poker room blogs, as they are fast becoming a great new place to find work.  

Training Sites - One of the more recognisable commercial ventures in poker is the training site. A lot of media sites are now producing paid subscription training content, and likewise, a lot of training sites are now producing their own editorial. 

B2B Services - Established poker media sites tend to have their fingers in a lot of pies, and as such, they now tend to offer a lot of Business to Business type services. It is becoming more common, for example, for them to outsource staff for things like editorial, live reporting, video production to other poker organisations.

It is also very common for them to have their own wing specalising in PR services, which can involve press releases, social media, consulting, and utilising their vast reader databases for email marketing. Most of the time, they can offer a bespoke PR package which can involve lots of the things I have mentioned in these blogs for one up front fee.

Poker Media

 

The State of the Poker Book Industry

I recently heard my friend and poker hero Tony "Tikay" Kendall (For those that know us both, that is not a piss take, he genuinely is someone I look up to) is planning to write a book. I have no idea whether it will be poker related, but I for one will be buying it. 

The whole thing got me thinking that for all the poker media advice I have been writing on this blog, the one thing I haven't really discussed is poker books. 

I have written a poker book, in case I haven't spammed it enough already, I am the co-author of The Mental Game of Poker with Jared Tendler. It was one of the hardest, but most enjoyable and gratifying things I have ever done. I'm delighted to say it has been both a critical and commercial success for us, and we have just started part 2 (It was always going to be a 2 parter). 

In the two or so years between starting the book and now, we have learned a tremendous amount about the poker book industry, a lot of which was as a result of throwing ourselves in the deep end and making mistakes. The following is pretty much what we have learned so far about the poker book market:

Strategy strategy strategy

Most poker books that are sold are understandably strategy books. There isn't a massive demand for anything else unfortunately. Generally speaking, poker players are not a target market I class as great readers of books outside of this genre, I have probably let years of seeing them type "TLDR" in forum posts skew my image of them in this regard. 

There are of course some exceptions to the rule. Anthony  Holden's "Big Deal" and Michael Craig's "The Professor, The Banker, and The Suicide King" are two very enjoyable non-strategy titles which have enjoyed, as I understand it, good sales figures.There are some good biographies out there, but generally they have never been big sellers. I'd expect a Negreanu, a Hellmuth, or an Ivey biography would sell well, but beyond that I think the life stories would have to be fascinating to be a big success. 

To get reasonable sales figures, I think a non-strategy title would need to have a mainstream appeal outside of poker. A Full Tilt, Black Friday, or an UltimateBet Superuser book all spring to mind. I think there is also the slight potential that some 'Funny gambling stories' books could be a profitable subject matter (I myself have started, and stopped, writing 'poker's greatest prop bets' several times).

Back to strategy. It is a very tough market. Despite being the only thing poker players really buy, it is tremendously competitive, samey, and quickly goes out of date.

Traditional no limit strategy becomes dated very quickly, and books are in competition with forums, training sites, and coaching, as well as with other books.

Having read tons of no limit books, it is very hard to filter out the nuggets of difference between each title or find anything truly unique. It is particularly frustrating when poker books trawl through the same old 'hand rankings/explaining position' standard stuff we have read a thousand times already. 

For a no limit book to stand a chance to be lucrative, it has to be vastly different, or more likely, has to be penned by a mega star of the game. And when I say mega star, I mean like Sam Trickett, Phil Ivey, Isaac Haxton, Jungleman, Isildur1 - someone who is either a household name or at least universally respected by their peers. There are so many good players out there these days that 99% of the good pro players would struggle to sell a book. 

Differentiating from no limit

For any other poker strategy book to sell well, it has to deviate from the norm. This is an area where I got very lucky hooking up with Jared Tendler - a mental game expert who essentially teaches something nobody else does in the game. I simply would not have got involved if it was instead just some guy who was crushing no limit hold'em, because even if it turned out to be a great book, it has a limited shelf life and lots of competition. Jared's work has no competition and (hopefully) is the sort of thing that could sell for years no matter how the game changes. 

So what else could sell in the crowded strategy market? I think we are due a good mixed games book for the modern era, and stud, 2-7 draw etc all could have a shot at selling well. One thing I think has been vastly overlooked so far is a strategy book for winning poker satellites. PLO still could sell, but that's getting competitive too. There is probably a decent short-stacker book waiting to be written, but there is plenty of information out there online for that. 

Then you have some really left of field titles that zero in on one aspect of poker skill. Books like Dusty Schmidt's Treat Your Poker Like a Business, which is more of a self management book than a strategy book, and of course the titles on physical tells and poker maths. I think there is possibly a (small) book out there on game selection waiting to be written. 

Making money from poker books

I've mentioned getting good sales figures, but what constitutes 'good'? The following figures I have got from some fellow authors and publishers in the poker industry. As I understand it, a good lifetime figure for a typical poker book (And by that I usually mean strategy book) is about 10,000 sales. That was at the height of the poker boom. 20,000 is considered exceptional. The average book in any industry or niche only expects to make $500 in sales these days, so if you think those figures are small, think again.

There are some books that comfortably surpass the 100,000 sales mark, but these are usually the real classics; SuperSystem, the Harrington books, the Theory of Poker, Gus Hansen's book, and probably a few other twoplustwo titles. The above titles are still selling very strong today despite being relatively old in the market (You can tell by looking at their sales rank on Amazon) so for the truly exceptional titles, they can prove a great long term winner. 

But most poker titles won't continue to sell after a few years, because they date so quickly. One way around this is pricing. Poker is one of the few niches where you can charge over $1,000 for a single book and people will buy it. You can still buy Tri Nguyen and Cole South's "Let There Be Range" for $1,500+ on Amazon. This is because bridging a knowledge gap in poker is perceived to be much more immediately damaging to the author than in other industries. Selling such a book for such a low price, it could be argued, could have an immediate negative impact on the authors earn rate if the wisdom within it is so good it could turn the readers into the new Isildur1. 

In reality, pricing the book so high is really a short term strategy designed to make a quick buck (No pun intended). It is actually more of an insurance strategy against the content getting outdated than it is a way of keeping the knowledge within a select few. When you price your book that high, you are basically asking for people to pirate it. All you are hoping for is that 30, 50, or 100 people buy it before every poker player has it emailed to them. Ironically setting a price so high probably guarantees more people see it than they would have otherwise. To stand a chance of getting a large number of  people buy your $100+ book, you have to be truly crushing the game (Cole South was at the time) and these days only a handful of players can claim that. 

Self publishing

But what about those of us who are not crushing the game, and essentially just want to write a book? Well first of all, I'd hope seeing the above has shown you there is some merit in offering to ghost write a book for a big name who wouldn't have the time or inclination to do it themselves. Secondly, I would suggest that you almost certainly should self publish your book. 

Although the potential to write a poker best seller is not great these days, we are living in a wonderful era for self published authors. Getting your book on kindle takes a few minutes, and you now have so many print-on-demand options that getting soft cover copies of it is also very cost efficient. The biggest thing that publishers can offer these days are exposure and potentially a cash advance. 

The advances I expect would be very small in poker, if they even exist at all any more, and after that you would likely only get something like 10-15% royalties AFTER your advance has been recouped in royalties. This is fine if you have no way of marketing your book on your own, but the poker world is exceptionally small, and if your book is good, people will hear about it. 

Build a ‘tribe’

There is a little maxim here which suggests you only need 500 people to love your book in order to make it a success. After that, word of mouth will sell it for you. This is what Jared and I have discovered with our book. We marketed very hard between the book launch on April 15 2011 (Yes, we released the book on Black Friday, sigh) and the end of the year for the Christmas rush, then we put the brakes on. Our biggest month at the time was Christmas, as you would expect, but after that we expected a drop in sales, because we had stopped actively marketing it.

But the strangest thing happened, January 2012's sales were almost as big as Decembers. February's sales were big too, and March, and so on. In fact June this year was our biggest month ever and it has seen no sign of slowing down. As soon as we stopped marketing our book aggressively, our sales have been at least 50% higher than every non-Christmas month in 2011 where we worked our asses off marketing it, and in some cases it has been 100-200% higher. 

We still do the odd bit of marketing here and there when a good opportunity comes up, but the reason the sales have been high since we stopped is because enough people have the book now to be talking about it. Every week I get people asking me questions or telling me what they think of the book on forums or on twitter, and on the occasions where I myself will tweet something about the book, I can always expect a reasonable amount of retweets from fans of the book. In fact, there have been a handful of people who loved the book so much that I feel we owe them a commission for promoting it for us for free. We are lucky also that quite a few influential figures in poker like the book, so when they do retweet or otherwise complement the book, they do so to a large audience. 

Word of mouth is genuinely the most powerful form of marketing in the world today, now that everyone has a twitter, Facebook, and poker forum account. For that reason, I would advocate all poker authors self publish their books and just concentrate on building up a small following, and giving that following the chance to talk about your work. I think one of the best things we did was engage with everyone our audience on twitter and Facebook and develop relationships with the people who really liked the book. The poker forums are also golden, possibly better than social media, and I think we owe a lot to the likes of Blondepoker, the PokerStrategy forum and 2+2 (The only paid advertising I would advocate is the latter's commercial marketplace). 

Beyond that, another easy way to market your book is by offering free content and excerpts of the book to blogs, websites, and magazines. As I have mentioned in several previous blog posts, poker editors are always on the lookout for free content and will happily let you promote your book as part of a free, non-spammy, offering. It is much more effective than having a paid advertisement ever will, because not only do most of us filter out adverts when we see them, but it also gives your target audience a great sneak peak of what they can expect, with a direct call to action for where they can go to get more. 

Business cards

Even if the book doesn't sell well, there is another advantage to writing one, and that is it serves as a great business card. Interest in Jared's private coaching skyrocketed as has his personal brand in the industry. He is a very well known and reputable name in poker as a direct result of the book. I myself have seen lots of doors open because of the book, I seem to get invited to more fun things, and my twitter following has increased significantly. 

So if you are thinking of writing a really niche poker book but worried it might be too niche, this is a reason to do it. If you know a lot about poker affiliate marketing but fear the audience is low, having a book on the subject might secure you a new job or consultancy work. If you are an expert in badugi, writing the book on the game might secure you some coaching work. I myself have been toying with writing a small book on the poker media industry, which I doubt would sell more than a 100 copies lifetime, but it would look great on my CV.

It sounds clichéd, but just the achievement of having a book out there is worth doing it for. It may be tough to get a best seller in this increasingly competitive market, but it is so easy to self publish these days that it shouldn't really cost you much more than your time.  

More Poker Media Advice Blogs

The State Of Print Magazines In Poker

This week a thread was posted on 2+2 where a writer was outing WPT Poker Magazine for not having paid him for 7 months. It now looks like he is (hopefully) going to be paid as a direct result of him doing this.

I can see why a lot of people would think that 7 months was a scandalous amount of time to be paid, but I spoke to several of my fellow poker writer peers, and well all shrugged our shoulders and said “meh, pretty standard, I wouldn’t worry at 7 months”.

7 months was a long time to wait, but not as long as you would think. Most poker magazines have a policy of not paying until 3 months after the article is printed, and often it takes about 2 months between submitting the article and before it is printed. So even though I think 7 months is long, I wouldn’t even be chasing for the first 5.

I used to solely rely on magazines for my income. It once was a gold mine, but over the years I have watched that part of the industry change dramatically. I'm glad I got out of magazines, unfortunately I have done so with three magazines still owing me money to this day (Only one still exists).

I should also say that I have a great relationship with the guys at WPT, and I am quite confident that the guy will get paid. The following is not really a comment on WPT magazine, but most poker magazines I have dealt with (other than the B2B magazines).

There were some comments in the thread about the wait time was indicative of the magazine being close to bankruptcy. I don't agree with that, but I do confer that many of them live on the breadline. Lots of them literally rely on the same advertising revenue from issue x to pay for the freelance contributions for issue  x, with no spare budget waiting around for situations like this.  

This is not all magazines of course, for example I wouldn't expect this to be the case at PokerPlayer Magazine, because they are part of a larger publishing network, Dennis Publishing. But most of them are part of much smaller publishers, in some cases standalone ones.

It wasn't always this hard for poker magazines, there was once a time, right after the boom, where they had money to burn, and paid ridiculous amounts (I’ve never been paid better for a single article than I was the first year I started writing them). But the UIGEA hit the advertising budgets hard, and more recently, Black Friday did the same. Even non-US magazines felt the impact as hard, despite not being directly affected.

While the freelancers are being delayed by the magazines, the magazines are being delayed by the advertisers. This doesn't make it ok for the magazines to string the freelancers along in the meantime, but it is important to know they are part of a long an arduous chain, and often get screwed out of money themselves (Sadly, advertisers not paying is a frequent occurrence in poker).

This may seem odd to many, that poker magazines are so dependent on advertising revenue. The fact is that most of the time, poker magazines don't rely on sales, or at least, they only make up a small part of their revenue which is deemed a bit of a bonus at best. In fact, many advertising packages are based on the presumption that the issues will be distributed for free in casinos, guaranteeing lots of gamblers will see them.

To give an extreme example of this, I did some work for GX magazine, who never paid me. It turned out that they weren't a real magazine at all, they just printed a few hundred copies of their pretend magazine to show advertisers, so they could hoard in the ad revenue without worrying about the printing costs. Check out this blog from Nick Pryce, someone who worked for them, to learn more about them.

The last frustrating part of the process with poker magazines is that the editor is not the boss, not in the traditional sense at least. Most freelancers expect the buck to stop with him, but in reality they often are pretty powerless when it comes to payroll. Editors are often in an impossible situation here, where they have to take the flak when people don't get paid, but can't do anything to influence it.

They only thing they can, and should do, is create realistic expectations with freelancers from the start. 

Times are tough for print magazines in general, and even harder for poker magazines. Most of the best content these days, or at least the most up to date, is available online and advertising revenue is getting tighter by the day.

Most magazines these days rely on free contributions from people with something to promote. Strategy articles from sponsored players, news articles branded with the logos of a news site, tournament reports provided by the people organising the tournament. The few bits and bobs I have done for magazines in the last year or so has been to promote my book more than anything.

Anyone looking to freelance for magazines these days, in my opinion, should be very aware of this. There is still a future for print magazines in poker, but it will be on shoestring budgets. There are still people out there that will pay you to write for poker magazines, but it is not necessarily the guys that publish them.    

More Poker Media Advice Blogs 

Get The Mental Game of Poker Audio Book For Free

A genuine free offer here, no rake requirements or anything else. You can actually get the audio book version of The Mental Game of Poker for free, if you do not have an account at Audible.com. Here's how:

• Go to the audio book page on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
• There should be an option to start a free 30 day trial at Audible.com or Audible.co.uk - click on that.
• Sign up for the free trial and choose the book, which you can download on a number of formats including PC, Android, and iPhone.
• Then cancel your free trial within 30 days.

If you want a softcover version of the book for free, you can also do that this way. 

Mental Game of Poker on AudioBook

You can now buy The Mental Game of Poker on a number of AudioBook formats.

Audible.com – Amazon.com – iTunes
Audible.co.uk - Amazon.co.uk


A lot of people had asked about whether we would do it, and I must admit I was surprised there would be a demand for it, but early sales suggest that this is a big demand for audio poker books. We actually already are at the top of most "poker" searches at these sites. I think now it is really easy to download and listen to an audio book on your phone, which is probably why it has got off to such a promising early start.

Because 98% of the book was written in Jared's voice, my own narration in it is literally about 10 minutes long, I'm very glad I didn't have to slog away for a month like Jared did to get this finished.

New York/Married

Last week I got married in New York to my long term partner Gina. I am clearly a thrift king, as I managed to turn the week into a wedding, a holiday, and a chance to meet up with my old buddy Jared Tendler (Who was also my best man) all in one. It was probably the best week I've ever had, and I certainly hope to go again. 

It sounds flippant, and I certainly don't mean it to be, but New York did not surprise me at all. It is so iconic on film and TV that the whole place is strangely familiar from the moment you arrive. This predictability is by no means a bad thing, because every one of my expectations were very positive, and they were all met. 

Maybe the biggest take away from this, one which I have also encountered in Vegas, is just how good American customer service is. This is purely because tips make up such a big part of the wages out there, and it really does show. You really do feel like your waiter is desperate for you to have the best time ever, which made the whole holiday so much better. I am a big fan of incentivising employees like this, and think it is a sure fire way of improving quality of service. I love the UK, I think it is one of the best places to live in the world, but I think this is one area where we can learn a great deal from our cousins over the pond. 

Originally our plan was to get married in Central Park, but we picked the one day it went and rained of the whole trip. New York customer service to the rescue, as the manager of our hotel let us have the ceremony in the Casablanca Hotel. It's a fantastic hotel with a pretty unique decor, and I think it actually made it a little bit more special. After the service we went out into Time Square as husband and wife, with a photographer, and had one of the most fun, manic, 30 minutes ever. Time Square is one of the craziest places in the world, so throwing a Bride and Groom into the mix seemed to fit. Everyone was shouting messages of congratulations at us, and it was the icing on the cake of an amazing day. 

Outside of the wedding, we did plenty of cool things. We went to a Yankees game and despite being 7,000 miles from home, managed to bump into Dusk Till Dawn director Simon Trumper with his daughter. The poker world is very small indeed. 

Maybe my favourite (Non wedding) part of the week was The Book of Morman, a Broadway musical written by the guys from South Park. It was as immature, offensives, and as funny as South Park can get and really fit well with the musical format. I've been to tons of comedy clubs before, but I have never heard roaring laughter as loud as I did that night. We also went to the Comedy Cellar, the club from my current favourite show Louie, and that was pretty cool too. 

There really is too much to say about it all, I could never do it justice to how good a wedding and honeymoon it was. It is the longest I've had off work in probably a decade and I do feel much better for it. I don't feel different yet being married, other than getting used to this new chunk of metal on my finger, but I do feel a renewed sense of enthusiasm towards my work and the future in general(Which in some part, will be from the relief it is all over).

Speaking of which, The Mental Game of Poker was released yesterday as an audio book. 

Photo Dump:

Still don't understand it, but had fun at the yankees

Jared, myself, and Matt Kaufman

Anyone over the age of 26 knows what this is

Top of the Rockafella centre

The Book of Morman

The Seinfeld cafe

An artsy shot from our photographer

Me, Gina, Corey (The future Mrs Tendler), and Jared

Getting Married Next Week In New York

I hate posting when its been over a month since the last post.

The reason has been I have been really busy. Things are going great at PokerStrategy.com and they really have been keeping me busy with lots of fun stuff. It's certainly the most interesting job I've ever had and I am learning so much working alongside so many talented people.

The other reason for the low productivity with the blog is because I get married next week, and as you can imagine, planning for that is taking up all my time. I'm super excited, I can't remember ever looking forward to something as much as this. It's a win-win-win because not only do I get married, I also get to have the holiday of a lifetime, and my old mate Jared Tendler is going to be doing the best man duties.

Two weeks off in total, which is the longest I have had off ever since I started working in poker. I can pretty much guarantee that means that Stars will buy Full Tilt in that time, or some other major news scandal, which I will miss out on reporting on.

The journey starts on Saturday and I am praying that my beloved Sheffield Wednesday get the ball rolling for an amazing summer by winning against Wycombe and securing a place in the Championship. If they don't, at least I will be on the other side of the world before my Sheffield United mates give me stick.

So hopefully the next blog post will be a round-up of how awesome New York is.