Archive for January 2014

A New Twist on Poker

Just when you thought there were no new ways to reinvent the Poker Wheel, Everest Poker has come up with a new TWIST in the form of TWISTER POKER!

Bringing it down to its basics Twister is a Sit N Go, a 3-handed sit n go and it’s played in a turbo format.

This winner take all format sounds pretty normal until you read the fine print, it’s a jackpot tournament.

 Based on the buy-in , either 1€, 2€, 5€ or 10€ you can win anywhere from 2 times your buy in all the way up to 1000 times your buy in. What this means is that at the worst you can double your money but at the best you can score and score big. A 1.00€ buy in can win you up to 1000€ and a 10€ buy in can win you up to 10,000€.

There’s an excitement factor as well. You don’t know the payout until all 3 players are seated and the action is about to begin. Then a wheel appears and where it lands determines what the prize pool will be.

Hit that 1000 times slot on the wheel and you can turn 10.00€ into 10,000€ by beating just 2 people

We think Everest Poker has hit the jackpot with this promotion and believe it will be a great success.

Sign up with Everest Poker here and let the wheel spin

Hope that Helps!

Warren “PokerMD” Karp

What fraction of online poker players are winners? (Part 2)

Its been a few years since we posted a highly popular article dispelling the myths on what fraction of online poker players win money over the long term, so we figured it was time to give out some updated statistics.

The general gist of that article is that for a number of reasons the amount of winning players is far higher than people expect. However within that there is a huge variation between different networks. Some of it is caused by regulatory factors, such as high taxation on the operators forcing higher rake jurisdictions, some is caused by some networks heavily investing in freerolls and guaranteed tournaments which will boost players tournament profitability, possible at the expense of other types of promotions, and some of the causes are simply unknown. Whatever the reason though the data is still quite interesting to try and interpret.

One of the limitations of our data, other than it only including tournaments, is that we only include players with at least 100 games played. For the larger networks we’ve found that this limit has little effect on the fractional results, but it does tend to boost the smaller network probability as you have to be dedicated on these network to even find 100 tournaments to play.

The other thing to remember is that these numbers do not exclude any external promotions such as rakeback or deposit bonuses.

So the headline figure is that 22% of online tournament players are profitable which is down from the 26% we saw in 2009.

Here’s the data by network:

Network % Profitable Players
iPoker.es 70%
PartyPoker.es 51%
Dollaro 43%
iPoker.fr 37%
PKR 35%
Revolution 31%
Merge 29%
PartyPoker.fr 29%
PokerStars.es 28%
IPN 27%
PartyPoker 27%
SkyPoker 27%
Ongame.fr 26%
MicroGaming 26%
SvenskaSpel 25%
Winamax.fr 25%
Gioco Online Italia 23%
Ongame 23%
iPoker 23%
FullTilt 22%
PartyPoker.it 22%
PokerStars 21%
PokerStars.fr 20%
MicroGame 18%
PokerClub 17%
PokerStars.it 15%
Ongame.it 14%
iPoker.it 13%

The top 2 networks iPoker.es and PartyPoker.es are clearly effected by the 100 game small network bias, although generally the Spanish markets fair well overall. This is possible due to it being the newest major regulated market so the different sites are still competing hard with aggressive promotions to win early market share. Other than that most of the trends remain consistent to the data seen in 2009. Italy is still bad place to play winning poker and it appears the unregulated sites such as Merge and Dollaro are able to funnel their lower tax burden back into their players profits through lower rake and better promotions (though remember withdrawing from the unregulated sites is always a gauntlet).

SharkScope announces Leaderboard Winners!!

Well, it’s that time of the year, closing out the last minute details and thinking about next year’s resolutions. Was your resolution last year to be on top of the SharkScope leaderboards? Time has flown by this year, slower for some and faster for other but for those atop the leaderboards the number 13 couldn’t have been any luckier!

There are so many categories and so little time, so we’ll focus on the main categories that you all see when first arriving on the Leaderboard page.  That’s not to say that many of the other categories aren’t significant and in fact important, especially if you’re on top of one of those but we can only write about just so much.

If we’re going to start anywhere it has to be with “SkaiWalkurrr” playing on PokerStars who represents the Netherlands. Talk about go wire to wire and wining by a mile or any other cliché you can come up with! This player was heads above the rest in SNGs for 2013. In fact the number 2 player Jorj95 is about 300,000 behind. However this isn’t the whole story.

Back in August I interviewed the leader at that time “mrGR33N13” because at that time he was over 1 million in winnings. Since then he’s chosen to block his stats and we don’t know how he ended up. I will tell you though that in that interview he told me that “Taking everything into account, I believe I’m the best in the world at them”(meaning SNGs). It would be interesting to see a heads up battle between these two players.

Now when you win the Main event of the WSOP you’re a World Champion forever. Looking back since the year 2000 it can be said that many ME players haven’t stood the test of time. This is where our category of “COUNT” comes into play, because when you are playing every day for many hours and are a consistent winner you’ve stood the test of time. Our congratulations go out to “v4b=yp” playing on PokerStars  also representing the Netherlands. Well over 250,000 games played. He is followed closely by “Brezi26” representing the Czech Republic but after that the count drops off by 100,000. That’s huge (no pun intended)

Streaks aren’t an anomaly, they occur! Maybe it’s a confidence that comes with winning the previous game, maybe it’s ego, I’m not sure but the leaderboards show that it’s fact not fiction and heading the list of Best 100 Streak Avg. Profit is “zangbezan23” with an Avg profit of a whopping $1419 representing Canada. That’s 500 above 2nd place.

Stretching it out to Best 500 once again is “SkaiWalkurrr” with an Avg Profit of $462 which once again crushes number 2 by 200.

We want to thank and congratulate all the leaders from all the categories and for opting in so that we may share and enjoy your results with others.

So where will you be in 2014? Will the return of poker to the US challenge the leaderboards once again?

Here’s to wishing you a very Happy Healthy and Prosperous New Year and to hoping that next year I’ll be writing about you

Cheers