Welcome to the new and improved SharkScopers. It’s much like the old sharkScopers, but simpler, cleaner, and more refined. We’ve freshened the site up on both the front end and the back end, so you’ll see some visual changes and new features as well. Here’s an outline of what’s new:

Communication and Comments

One of the areas I really wanted to improve on is communication/comments. The SharkScopers forums now have their own unique design, so the lines between forums and blogs are no longer blurred. We made the forum posts wider, increased the size of the user information on posts, and added an optional comment subject.

For the blogs, news, and videos, we found that many of the comments needed individual attention from the author of the post. To make this easier, we set up threaded comments. Now, when you reply to a specific comment, your reply will show up indented below that comment. Try it out!

Navigation

SharkScopers has a lot of content! We have users, forums, blogs, news, videos, and more coming soon (coaching and competitions, to name a few). On one hand, we don’t want to overwhelm new visitors with endless menus, but, at the same time, we want everything to be easily found. This was a tricky area to tackle, but I believe we’ve reached a good solution.

Each section now has it’s own menu on top of it. So, for example, if you’re viewing a news page, there’s menu items for SharkScope news, SharkScopers news, and all news. Each user also has their own menu now. If you’re viewing one of fultip777’s videos, you’ll see his avatar and that he’s an instructor. You’ll also see links for his profile, blog, videos, (and coaching details in the future).

Further refinements in this area will continue to be rolled out over the next few weeks.

Design

My goal is to under-design SharkScopers, keeping it clean, simple, and light weight. Less gradients, less drop-shadows, less colors, and less attention grabbing flashy things, means you can focus more on what’s important — the content. Keeping design simple, with a solid foundation, will also keep SharkScopers flexible for future change.

New video from PimpinDonks

Along with all of the new upgrades, we’ve also posted a new training video from PimpinDonks. If you’ve been following his blog, PimpinDonks set up and ran a live poker training group, consisting of SharkScopers members. Over the course of a few weeks, his students have made more then $30,000! Using the members of his training group as an example, PimpinDonks’ latest video teaches you how to play when you’re faced with a table full of sharks. If you’re a PimpinDonks fan, or you haven’t unlocked any videos yet, this video is a must have.

More to come

In the short-run, you might notice a few features missing from the previous version of the site. This may be on purpose or because we haven’t had a chance to integrate them yet. Over the next few days we’ll still need to do a few tweaks and modifications, but nothing major that would require the site to be taken down.

In the long run, we will continue working to build SharkScopers into the best community of its kind. Coaching, accepting new instructors and videos, running promotions for members, and further integrating with SharkScope is on the list of priorities.

And in closing, I want to give a big thanks to everyone who’s been actively participating in the community during our beta/early stage. All this work I’ve outlined above is only to provide the community platform. You guys are the ones who shape the site and push it forward.

The results are in. okayBLAM has won the NON-US leaderboard competition and GottNuttz is the victor in the US leaderboard. Coincidentally, they each finished with a streak of 12. okayBLAM and GottNuttz will receive $400, 1 hour of coaching from PimpinDonks, a 1 year SharkScope membership, 30 SharkScopers credits, and a diamond Star Icon.

Overall, our first competition was a great success! A big thanks goes out to PlayersOnly and SunPoker for adding to the prizepool and allowing us to do this on their network.

NON-US leaderboard results

US Leaderboard results

Here’s the latest status of the prize payouts:

• SharkScopers credits have been credited to your account.
• SharkScopeAdmin has credited winners SharkScope accounts with subscriptions
• PlayersOnly and SunPoker have been instructred to pay out cash winnings. Players only has paid.
• I’ve sent Mark a list of the coaching winners to contact. Mark has contacted all the winners to schedule a coaching session

We’ve moved our videos over to a streaming server, which means that you can now scrub anywhere in the video without it having to load first. In the past, if you want wanted to open up a video and jump to the 30 minute mark, you would have to wait for 30 minutes worth of the video to download. Now you can just click on the timeline at the 30 minute mark, and the video will play from there.

Give it a try.

We’re now accepting poker videos from our italian members. You can go here to submit a video. Salsa-vb has posted up the first video in italian, which You can watch it here.

We hope to begin translating some of our existing videos in the future and getting more videos from our motivated italian members.

We’re opening up our doors to new video instructors. We’re looking for sng players who are dominating sharkscope leaderboards, cash game players with a history of long-term success, and multi-table tournament players who continually defy the odds and final table in large fields.

If you’re interested, now is the best time to get started. During february, we’re giving 55% of earnings to all instructors that publish just two videos. We’ll also be introducing new membership methods, which will bring in more viewers to your videos.

Visit our submit a video page to find out how to get started now.

Come join the first ever SharkScopers leaderboard challenge. We have tons of prizes up for grab for the top 10 finishers of both the US and the non-US leaderboards. The challenge for this leaderboard will be to win the most double or nothing sng’s in a row.

The prizes include (6) private coaching sessions with PimpinDonk (Mark Schmid), monthly and yearly subscriptions to SharkScope, SharkScopers credit bundles, and cash. In total we’ll be giving away more then $3,000 in cash and prizes between the US and non-US leaderboards.

PimpinDonks has coached several students, who have went on to become very profitable poker players. In his recent coaching group, his students have earned more then $31,000, not including rakeback. Here’s his description of how he coaches students online

“We then do 1 of 3 things. First, and most popular is to go over hand histories of sngs/mtts that the student has already played. I explain the hands I would have played differently and fix any mistakes I see right away. So they get leaks fixed after 1 session with this method. Second, we can go over hand histories of tournaments I have played and it tough spots I ask them what they would do and explain why I did the plays I did. Third, we can have a Q&A session. They prepare questions ahead of time or tough hands they played and I answer questions they have about any poker related topics. We can also discuss poker concepts or go over areas of the game they struggle with.”

Sign up Now for either the US or Non-US Leaderboard Challenge

We’ve implemented a new blogroll feature so that bloggers can display a list of their favorite blogs. This was requested feature (by our member, TripleAceIRL) that we agreed is an essential option for all blogs. You can add either bloggers from SharkScopers or other websites — no restrictions. This optional feature is located on the sidebar of your own blog.

Adding someone’s blog to your blogroll is considered a big compliment, and visa versa. It’s a way of telling that person that you follow/support their blog, and to encourage your readers to check their site out. If you have friends who blog, you should also encourage them to link to your blog, to gain more readers / commentors.

We also brought back and slightly improved the blog archive feature that we used to have on the beta site. You can now see a summary of each users posts per month and read all of their monthly archives.

We’ve added MoneyBookers as a new payment option for Purchasing credits on SharkScopers. Moneybookers is a similar payment processor to PayPal, but they’re available in a lot of places where PayPal isnt.

If you already use PayPal and are happy with the service, then stick with PayPal. If PayPal isn’t available to you or if you’re looking for a different option, MoneyBookers is probably the best choice.