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Although they planned in opening offices in Eastern European countries (including Romania) around September - October, looks like PokerStars is still stuggleing to find out a head office manager for the countries. Maybe it’s hard to find out a man to handle the whole PS concept, have the relations and implement the program for development in those countries, but at least for Romania - it’s enough to take Daniel Negreanu on a trip to Bucharest and let him choose the manager for the branch.

I mean you have such a great poker name on your side, and you let the market that SHOULD be yours to be taken by competition like PartyPoker, UltimateBet and even LuckyAce or some second hand brands …. c’mon PokerStars? What the hell are you doing, you should know to read and react to poker markets all around the world; instead your taking the way to short your chip stack asap, and you probabily will be forced soon to go all-in with BiG Blind.

My opinion: you should need to reevaluate your managers from the London office. Not owning the Romanian online poker and not involving into the Romanian poker / casino events, while having maybe the most famous Romanian poker player on exclusive contract - and much more - skiping Bucharest and making the EPT (European Poker Tour) in Budapesta, while on Bucharest you got access not only to Romanian players but also it’s an intersection of Bulgarian, Israelian, Italian and Russian poker players with some Turks, Greeks and Germans along the casino halls … it means one strong thing to me, as a person who watch and was involved in the casino / poker business for the last year: Major market misreading, wrong development plans.

Poker Stars, after all, is poker stars, but in the Romanian market, there’s Party Poker, without Negreanu. I should feel ashamed for this misfortune.

Communication, Internet General, Poker / Casino, Web sites, software daniel negreanu, poker online, poker stars, wrong poker strategy

Some days ago on Wired, appeard a controversial article about the blogging importance for the internet of late 2008, well written by Paul Boutin. Some say blogging is the news of 2004, and the tool to use for the past 3-4 years, but not anymore, since microblogging services like twitter, pownce and others has taking the face of the blogging programs.

To quote Paul’s original  “Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.“(read entire article here).

My question is what about the country differences? what works for US or Western Europe doesn’t go well in Asia or Africa, or even Eastern Europe, including Russia here. What do you think, it’s better to stop blogging and start texting/ sms ?

Update: opposite view, why blogs will rock in 2009 here

Banking, Communication, Entertainment, Internet General, Personal, Poker / Casino, Web sites blog, blogging, twitter, wired news

Poker world is something amazing from whatever angle you would look at it. The entry is free for everyone, but the tables and seats most of the time are forbidden to those with little knowledge of the game and human faceread. Maybe because World Series of Poker, the world known poker tournament wanted to be sure that the winner of it’s main event is given by the knowledge of the game, they postponed the final table of the 10k event to November 08; have you ever heard of Jamie Gold after his glorious win in 2006? I have seen him in a couple of poker shows - like Poker after Dark on NBC - but on a high stake table I haven’t. Anyways, here is the list of the top 9 runners up for the main title (Nov 9th - so long till then):

Seat 1: Dennis Phillips - 26,295,000
Seat 2: Craig Marquis - 10,210,000
Seat 3: Ylon Schwartz - 12,525,000
Seat 4: Scott Montgomery - 19,690,000
Seat 5: Darus Suharto - 12,520,000
Seat 6: Chino Rheem - 10,230,000
Seat 7: Ivan Demidov - 24,400,000
Seat 8: Kelly Kim - 2,620,000
Seat 9: Peter Eastgate - 18,375,000

There are 4 runners around 20M chips, for the rest seems to be allin time. Everyone in the first 9 is already a millionaire after they will finish the table, and the winner will bring home around 9,100,000 USD. I can’t even spell right that number 9.1M$.

Poker / Casino las vegas, poker, wsop

In the last days, I had several poker and casino discussions with different people in the poker and casino industry, in Romania. To summarize all of this, I have only one unknown question: why do the Romanians consider poker and casino to be a place where you go only when you have money. This is totally the wrong impression, and I think, as I said to some of the Bucharest’s Casinos shareholders, they HAVE to change this perception; ….. of course, nobody denied that a casino is a place where you go with a full card, but it’s also a place where you CAN go to have fun ever with 25 RON (Romanian New ~ 11 USD is the value).

When you enter into a casino, no one ask you if you got money on your pockets, or how much money you got on your credit card; it asks for your name and ID Card, and check it with their database, same as you check your ID when you enter into a hotel room. Of course, they (casino employee) expects that you have money on you, but the fact is that you can enter and play into a casino with 10 or 20 USD in your pocket, and none of the casino staff will tell you that you’re poor broke or just your place is not there.

I really don’t understand why after more than 18 years of “liberty” since the ‘89 Revolution, the Romanian middle class and low class don’t go to the places considered tabu in the communist regim. I know, I mentioned that is the wrong-image of the casinos that still persists, the lack of information and promotional materials, the somewhat dark-stories about some casinos,  but … c’mon, we have internet, we have media that writes almost weekly about Daniel Negreanu, about high-life in Las Vegas and since we’re humans, we have the curiosity. And we have lots of movies, the last one on the silver screen right now is 21, you can see the trailer below.

And, for you, the Romanians who never walked into a casino, please remember: IT’S FREE FOOD AND FREE DRINKS! You don’t have to spend any RON / USD / EUR for getting a free beer or soda, so why don’t you step in ?

Poker / Casino casino, poker, tabu

We have finally finished the marketing planning for the poker tournament we will organize in the fall, Best Poker Romania. We have decided that the best time to have the tournament is between 4th and 7th of September 2008. The location is set for Bucharest, and the tournament entry fee will be 1.000 RON (around 350$). From our statistics, this is be the second tournament that is held in Romania (by tournament I understand that the game is held in MORE than one casino and one city). The first one was Romanian Poker Tour - I can say that I’ve been involved in the first 4 editions of the tournament, and we hope that BPR - our tournament - will gather more than 70 players.

We will have qualifications for the tournament held online on Titan Poker, CD Poker, Best Poker and we hope we will be able to get them on Dracula Holdem, Pokerstars and Party Poker also.

Poker / Casino bpr, casino, poker, romanian tournament