TwoPlusTwo closed the coaching advice today indefinitely due to an abundance of self promotional coaching SPAM. New plans will launch soon.

What are some ways can that forum improve?

2+2 can improve by banning all mention of coaching sites on all of its forums and ending the associations it currently has with such sites, and perma banning anyone soliciting coaching.

People who want to offer coaching services communicate this to a 2+2 mod. They (mods) do a brief "quality control" and then post what the coaches want to make public: background information and stats of coaches, coaching philosophy, prices etc.

The responds could either go trough mods as well or the posts in that forum just would have to be monitored closely,

Yes there could be subforums like "Nolimit" 6max, "Potlimit" HU etc and then subthreads for stakes and then topics created by mods that show name of the coach and prize

Make a new coaching section, have only one thread.

Thread should have coaches listed by type of poker and limits, a brief description, their rates, and a link to their PTR graph. Maybe even organize by lifetime winrate.

No bull**** selected sample size graphs/winrates. No bull**** fabricated reviews.

Solutions involving the unpaid mods on the hook for a lot of extra work are not likely to be implemented.

Anyone willing to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for poker coaching is a damn fool. There are only 52 cards in a deck. Momma didnt raise no fool!

Money for Mods!!

It's a "buyer beware" issue, any coach asking for money upfront or any coach not offering a trial lesson needs to be avoided. As long as verified coaches are quality controlled, I think "I'm looking for a coach" threads and PMing offers is fine as long as non verified coaches and commercial websites are banned for spamming. Really, it's no different than staking, money transfers and marketplace, the student needs to do his HW on his coach or the coach needs to display his knowledge before money changes hands.

And honestly, the whole graph thing is BS to, teachers need to be judged on their ability to teach and the effects of their teaching - a judicious review of their posts on 2p2 for communicative ability is way more relevant than how hot they're running or whether or not PTR is tracking them accurately. You have to weigh 2p2's assurance, posts, graphs, peer reviews and your time with your coach equally, just use common sense and every one is happy.

As far as improving the forum, just creating 2 threads for coach listings and coach requests is enough, you could link coaching reviews to a non thread based page so coaches stop getting their friends/students to bump their own thread to the top where order matters.

Edit:

And yeah, any coach charging more than their own win rate at the stakes their coaching is full of crap.

IMHO there is no coach worth a nickel if that coach is still actively playing the game. They are not going to let all of their secrets out to the public so that they can be used against them, that would be silly.

Another thread asked about them playing in smaller stakes in their vids. I'm pretty sure that they don't want the opponents on the levels that they do play to see the way that they react to situations and their ranges.

Just my opinion...

bottom line on that forum: Closed because it required too much work for multiple people so coaches could have free advertising. This was originally thought to be worth it as a way to encourage more strategy posting. We were not impressed with the results.

Coaches who want to have their own threads in the coaching advice forum will now have to pay for the exposure. More details will be posted when we have made some decisions on pricing. Anyone who has opinions about this should pm me.

For me, it's not about a coach giving away his "secrets." It's more about having a mentor assist in plugging leaks faster and filtering out the overload of information available.

For a small percentage of the profits I can help filter out the coaches in this forum.

Isn't the problem that soliciting/spamming is unenforceable and that coaches who payed to advertise their profile would just be paying for a forum where advertisements were a nicety and the solicitors would continue to be spammed by non-paying coaches? Wasn't this the stox/cardrunner argument that lead to the last coaching forum and rules? And honestly, their argument is weaker than my argument, because poker coaching doesn't necessarily take away from training site subscriptions (99% of my students exhausted them before they approached me).

Why not just use the same approach to coaching as the money transfer thread, affiliate forum or the marketplace?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/10...cement141.html

Mat should just start his own "Ask me anything about the future of the coaching advice forum" thread.

What are peoples thoughts on the changes made to the coaching forum?

Personally I am a very big fan for a range of reasons, but am interested in what other people think.

In regards to some of the earlier comments in this regarding why would coaches "give away their secrets", thats not what coaching is about at all. Poker is not a very complicated game, if you have read a couple Two Plus Two books and spent some time on the forums you know just about as much as anyone else.

Coaching is all about mentoring a player, targeting their specific problems and helping correct issues both on and off the table. There is no magic tricks that coaches give their students to help them win, its all about hard work and development.

I coach double or nothing sngs and am just getting going with this side of poker. I teach a very niche game and don't charge much and paying $200 a month would be a big chunk of my coaching profits. I believe I provide a great service for the 2+2 community, and following that logic, shutting me down hurts the community as a whole. I won't bother with ideas on how that forum could be fixed as the decisions are already made, I just wanted to voice my sadness that coaches like me are being marginalized and only coaches charging a large fee will be able to continue to offer their services to the community, and probably pass that cost on to the students. If this were really just about the community I think some other solution would be found, but obviously money talks, I just liked to believe this forum was about more than that.

so would you be willing to manage all of the coaching forum for free? listing and updating all the info. for your competitors every time they ask? going through 100 plus coaches to make sure they are contributing to the community on a weekly basis? making sure they don't spam the forums?

You should put all available payment options in that announcement sticky Mat.

I would be willing to help mod that forum for free, obviously me doing it alone is implausable, but if some other coaches similar to me would be willing to help I think that could work well. I think enforcement of the previous policy of coaches posting in their respective strategy forums in exchange for free listing would in fact work best with some of the coaches being the ones to police that policy. We could split it up by the type of coaching (i.e. I could work with a couple of people to monitor the STT coaches). I feel a system like that is much more the 2+2 I know and love that does so much for the development of up and coming poker talent. I hope this has been constructive and either way I'm very appreciative of what 2+2 represents and has done for me and the online poker community as a whole.

What's protecting my 200$/month investment from being free rolled by non-paying coaches spamming the solicitors? And 200$/month for nothing more than a thread in a forum is a joke, even Skype and Facebook have better advertising for the dollar. This is going to backfire, because it looks like you're just trying to put your hands into the pockets of the coaches, you need something like custom titles, settings, banner adds etc. if you're going to justify that price -at least it had better be something more than what we were getting. I believe our services are way, way more helpful to the community as a whole compared to the affiliate spammers, and they get away with that for nothing; so why punish the coaches and the students who are actually dedicating their time and energy teaching and playing poker compared to people who do nothing but sit back and collect rake?

I've started coaching small and mid stakes MTT's in the fall and it has been a great experience.

While I understand the rationale for the changes - especially the work load involved in modding the forum - I hope we can find a reasonable way to restructure the forum without charging $200 a month for a listing. I work full time, play MTTs, and have other side business projects along with coaching. I coach because I truly enjoy doing it and the money is a bit of an afterthought - and my pricing is adjusted simply as the best way to moderate the demand.

However, if I coach 8 hours a month at $75, then 33% of my income is going toward my "marketing budget" of twoplustwo.

A poster mentioned this above, but offering free coaching listings are a great service to the community - in addition to the coaches. I would be happy to mod the MTT coaching threads in the forum if we decide on a model similar to what robhimself described. I'm sure this sort of "call to action" would inspire most of the coaches to self-police the forum.

Finally, have you considered a match-making service? Perhaps instead of charging a listing, you could hire a intermediary who receives all inquiries for coaching, and matches them with the appropriate coach for what they are looking for. Coaches then pay a percentage of their first session to the site for a finders/matchmaking fee and that fee sustains the rate of the mod/match maker of the coaching forum. This position could be commission only, so the pay matches the workload. This allows part time coaches to stay in the game while charging those who get the most use from the site to contribute the most financially, all while allowing each coach to contribute a fair amount of their coaching revenues to their "2p2 marketing budget."

Mat - thanks for being open minded about the future of the coaching forum. Certainly there are problems. I hope we can find great solutions for the future.

Im sure from that long list of coaches you could have found one or two trustworthy people who could act as a mod, or something similar, who would have been more than happy to handle that workload. I know a few people in this thread have already stepped up to offer to do it, and you can add me to the list. I have helped alot of 2+2ers in the short time I was listed in the directory, and I think the community wants and enjoys all of our services. Putting a price tag on a thread for the coaching forum is just going to deter many coaches from wanting to participate, leaving less options for people coming to 2+2 looking for 1-1 help beyond the strategy forums, and that isn't good for anybody.

Wait, what? I'd like to hear more about this...