ok so you say we get full rakeback
(aka you don't take from the pool of our own personal rakeback but get a profit from the poker site itself right and that is how you make your money?)
ohh before i begin,, it would be nice when looking at your video section and we hover over say the gold section , it would pop up information on how much points it would need, and click here to see how many you need.

i signed up here just a week before may first to explore it. I didnt' get far for it looks like you need many points to move from basic to bronze..

1.
"The best: they recieve all other benefits as well: full rakeback, first deposit bonus etc. is still available to our free bankroll players on all rooms."

so if i pass your test, and pick party poker i can use your code and get a 50 bucks and still be able to say in a year time when i make a full deposit get the full first deposit bonus of a 100 percent ?, without questions from the site?

2.can you rate the poker rooms (no ftp, no stars why?), i would like to see you guys rate the poker rooms by looking at poker sites reviews across the board so say for example (8 out of 10 review sites name this one the top one this month).

3. take advantage of the deal? what i mean is if i go to say everest , use up my 50 dollars for i didnt' study ,, do i get to use another 50 dollars at a differnt site, or is it only one time deal ?

"Likewise, the User is entitled to receive the starting capital only once"
i see that in terms and conditions,, so no bonus whoring eh?

4. the poker training sites I seen seem to have your videos for 30 bucks a month, if i take the test and fail with my 50,, and in order to unlocked more points to get to bronze,, i would have to deposit again and again (if i am not winning ) to get bronze. so i could be wasting a lot of money just to get to the next level of videos.

5.do you have any safeguard method to help with this, like for example you get told about a second deposit, do you offer to give some sort of mentoring or coaching as to help a newbie poker player get to the bronze level ?

6.on a average if someone was to 2 to 4 table 2 to 5 bucks max buy in as that is within the 50 dollar free dollar buy in, and stays at that level for a month going down to 20 moving up to 60 going down to 10..
how long will it take him on average to get to bronze ?
(and we know how often pocket aces get cracked by some person calling,, the flop comes jack 9 6(two suits),, and we bet the rest of our stack only to see jack nine, set, queen ten suited and get drawn out).
and that is if the person follows some sort of bankroll ..
as many i am sure will sit down feeling happy they passed a test and go two tables of 25 , 25 trying to get to bronze and two suck out later, or misplayed aces, kaboom, gone in one hour of playing at new site.

i think there should be some of warning against that,, do you have it ?

7. "In no case, the User has to pay any difference."
so never ever if i sit there on party poker and get down to .59 cents and say hell with it,, i ever have to pay 49.31 back ?

8."the starting capital can be withdrawn by the Poker Site from the account of the User held at the Poker Site (e.g. if the User does not start to use the starting capital after three months of receiving it). "

if i build it up by some miracle to 250, and i dont' use the site for 5 months and come back,, there will be only 200 there as you took it back?

9."any advertisements for other companies (especially other competitors of the Platform), any advertisements giving a negative image/impression of the Platform or comparative advertisements "

suppose I come here and say this ins't working for me,, i can't get to gold, i lost again and i have to deposit as i am halfway in points to gold,

is that consider negative image ? or that mostly refer to your forums over there.

10. the videos order,
I notice you have mtt 3betting, and cbetting, at the gold level, and the basic mtt has 2 reviews. to me that is setting up the potential 50 dollar student for failure..

it should be mtt 3 betting, mtt cbetting at basic and one review,,
then have all your reviews later on.

question what is the difference between the reviews of gold to platnimum level? no bronze mtt level ? what the hell?.

what about stack size, mzone videos, shouldn't that at least be in the bronze.
myself i would have side by side 3 betting cbetting, and save reviews for bronze. (why should someone wait til gold level to learn about something that should of got them to gold level)

11. plo
i dont' see plo starting hand requirements, preflop concepts, post flop concets, and draws.
just reviews.. that is setting up someone for plo failure without the basics which should be in white and bronze.

12. sit and go
i do like your sit and go basic,, but no icm teaching tools videos like sit and go wizard, or icm explorer all the way up to silver upon where i stopped looking.

can you ever lose your status,, aka go from diamond to gold ?

I Read that if i pass the test, and use the 50 dollar deal, i get bumped up to the bronze level so i should watch all the videos before playing.

umm can you move the cbetting and 3betting mtt down to bronze please

yeah you can go from diamond to gold

Hey MASTERHOLMES,

thanks for your questions!

We have both revenue share and one-time-payment deals with the poker room operators. This is our main revenue stream.

Yep, this is a good idea.
There's loads to do website- and usability-wise - our IT barely coped with our growth, diversification of languages and poker rooms in recent 12-18 months.

We're currently heavily hiring new IT people to improve our website / usability quicker than so far.

If you get the $50, you're immediately bronze.
On a self-deposit, you're bronze on your first StrategyPoint.

You can never lose bronze status.

Yes, we make sure that even as a free bankroll player, you still have the first deposit bonus available.

We do offer FTP & Stars, but on our English website, they are just visible once you are logged in. Reason is that we are really cautious in not targeting U.S. customers.

Reviews are in general not a bad idea - and we have them in prosa text:
http://www.pokerstrategy.com/online-poker-rooms/

Rating rooms numerically is a hard thing - and I guess most affiliates do it just to fake a ranking that ultimately comes down just to "what is most profitable for the affiliate".

For people that have a hard time deciding, we always suggest them to consult our community - where players and moderators can share their opinion.

It's a one-time deal.
You can play tracked and gather StrategyPoints on as many rooms you like, but you can get the $50 bankroll only once.

The reason is that we really can lose money on the $50 offer (that's why most affiliates don't offer it).

First deposit "bonus whoring" is still possible of course.

We try to make sure that you get all content you need to beat a limit on a status you can get comparably comfortably on the respective limits.

Examples:
- micro limits: Basic & Bronze content is sufficient to beat them => you can never lose Bronze status (and you have it just by getting the free bankroll)
- NL100: all NL100 videos, the respective professional hand evaluations in the forums, and many articles are available for Gold status. Gold status you hold for approx. $200-$300 rake a month, which is not too hard for an active NL100 player.

We acknowledge that for some players that play very little, the statuses are not easy to reach - but we need to balance "incentive to play tracked" vs "player needs", as we can only finance our free offer to players this way.

As said, Bronze level is lifetime granted. With that, you can e.g. view all content relevant to NL10 (videos, live coaching, hand evaluation etc.) - and if you are not yet beating NL10, you should not play higher (if you are ambitious - it's different of course for recreational players that play poker for fun, knowingly losing their money).

He will already have Bronze on getting his $50.
Silver is easy to get on nearly all limits - you just need $20 to $50 of rake in 4 weeks (depending on the poker room).

We encourage bankroll management, i.e. playing on limits where the initial $50 are most of the times a sufficient bankroll to ward against the risk of bankruptcy.

And even if you fail with the $50, you hopefully gained experience - and you still have the deposit bonus left just as if nothing happened.

We warn players not to play on higher limits than say NL2 or NL5 with their $50. Currently, we even implement a kind of forced bankroll management:

Unless you reached $X bankroll (i.e. won something), played Y hands (i.e. are experienced) or deposited on your own (e.g. if you are more experienced already), you can not play higher than NL5, $2 SNGs, .5/.10 Fixed etc.

This is not yet there on all rooms, but it will do two things:
1. Protect ambitious beginners from adventures on higher limits with just $50.
2. Offer an incentive for recreational players to deposit own money and use the first deposit bonus (if they want to play higher).


Yep, absolutely! PokerStrategy.com takes the full risk on the $50.

We have criteria such as "generate $50 rake within 120 days" (slighly different depending on poker room). If these criteria are not met by the player, we will revoke the $50 bonus - but never more.

No of course not.
We just want to prevent people posting ads, insulting others etc. - pretty much like on 2+2.

Might be true - could you explain which videos you exactly mean?

We strongly suggest $50 beginners not to play MTTs, as the variance is really high there. Even the best player could not cash in 25 $2 MTTs in a row.

But we probably are going to offer basic MTT content soon as we appreciate the players choice.

It's never 100% clear on which content should be silver and which gold. And it's not written in stone. Most of the times, there is arguments for both sides, such as: "a beginner already has XXX stuff to work through - so better keep him from more complicated stuff."

But if you have specific suggestions, they are very welcome!

Yep, we also do not yet offer PLO as an option for $50 players.
For PLO, we just offer more advanced content from silver upwards.
This might change in the future, if we find an easy PLO strategy where you can become a winning player from a $50 bankroll.

Good point. We should do more videos about poker tools. Especially as we have an ICM tool on our own:
http://www.pokerstrategy.com/software/8/

Hope to have answered your questions - if something remains unclear, don't hesitate to ask!

Best,
Lutz

for the first point,, how about going by some own criteria like
1. volume of players this site in our view has the most players
2. micro stakes, this site has the most micro game, (razz, plo budugi what have you)
3. the type of games in general, like if you want mtts this is the best site (especially since poker stars and ftp isn't on there )
4. the graphics, (example you say party poker is redesigned, so how is it ,)
5. why is part of the "Part of the iPoker network" important?

---------

for point 2.

C-betting in MTTs
Fullring 35 min. by JonathanLittle Description: Jonathan Little talks about continuation bets. He shows you different spots and shows you, when to c-bet and when not.
Tags: Contibet, Theory Video

3-betting in MTTs
41 min. by JonathanLittle Description: JonathanLittle talks about 3betting in MTTs and analyses certain hands.
Tags: 3bet

are both gold videos.

but

MTT $215 - Sunday Million Session Review - Part I
$215, Fullring 37 min. by JonathanLittle Tags: PokerStars, Session Review

$500 Pokerstars Sunday Tournament - Session review - Part 1/2
$525, Fullring 44 min. by PokerNoob Description: This is part 1 of a Poker Stars Sunday tournament session review presented by Pokernoob for Poker Strategy.com. This video shows you only the…
Tags: PokerStars, Session Review

is basic.

AND NO BRONZE VIDEOS.

it is very important to think in terms of stack size, mzone after the antes kicking in and should be at least one or two videos on that in the bronze(or one in bronze and one advance later on for higher stakes videos).

lots of people are going to reply on tournies to build up their bankroll that may join in the future as that is what is being touted a lot. 2 bucks becoming 1400 is a big increase .

Diamond: 7,500 StrategyPoints
Black Member: A total of 500,000 StrategyPoints

there is a big difference of points between the two and so that would suggest to me that black members are designed to be at the higher stakes.

how about a free coaching 1 hour session, either stats, teamviewer or which ever to help the member get from diamond to black member. (only after the client has watched all the videos, read all the articles)

and one more at black member status to prepare after watching all videos and reading all articles for the big game (for that player)
and after getting half that points (and additional 250,000) one more hour of coaching.

that could be the big selling point , be like icing on the cake, froot loops instead of oatmeal for breakfast.

you could even turn
Platinum: 3,000 StrategyPoints into a stats analysis, hh submitted and 25 hands annoated for some emial coaching to help them get to the diamond mode.

Hey MASTERHOLMES,

regarding Poker Room Descriptions:

I get your point - and certainly, we can improve our information giving on poker rooms. I.e. we also should give more infos about currently running promotions (be it ours or their's) there.

Playing volume / table choice is also a good point - but also a topic of continuous change. But at least we should give something like a traffic light system (much, some, near to none) for traffic on game type/limit.

Judging things like graphics will be difficult though - as this enters the area of personal taste, where we do not think we know it better than the players themselves.


Regarding MTT:

I agree to you that probably, the reality is that a lot of $50 players will ultimately play tournaments - no matter whether this makes sense as an unexperienced player with a small bankroll or not. So yes, we should offer more basic content for beginners regarding MTTs. Will take that to internal discussion!


Thanks,
Lutz

Hey MASTERHOLMES,

this is Tobias and I am Head of Education and thus responsible for the content at PokerStrategy.com

I would like to go through the points regarding content you mentioned.

PLO for beginners:
As Xantos stated we do not offer PLO for absolute beginners. However we clearly realized a demand for beginner content.
Thus we created a 4 part series PLO for beginners (http://de.pokerstrategy.com/video/11089) which will be available for Bronze. The series is created in german but will be translated to english as soon as we can. Please be advised most of our coaches are german but we are working on increasing our native english speaking coaching staff. We hope to present further english speaking high quality coaches within the next weeks. We are in contact with some former stoxpoker coaches.

Regarding the assignment of the status to videos and articles.
It is true that there are inconsistencies and I am afraid we will never be able to completely avoid that.
Basically there are three "rules" for status assignment.
1) The content should not be harmful for beginners or distract them. An article about bluff squeezing would distract a beginner or even harm him rather them help him as he might not be able to understand these concepts.
2) The difficulty should not overcharge beginners. Even if a topic itself is relevant for beginners and not covered in the beginner section, we do not offer advanced articles which e.g. use mathematical calculations a beginner would not even understand. We want to avoid frustration. Any exceptions you might find are for advertisement purposes. We sometimes set expert articles to basic to give non customer the chance to get an idea of the high end content we offer.
3) We of course want to create a motivation to keep your status and thus the access to the material or a motivation to achieve a particular status.

In the Limit or BSS section we have lots of articles and I think the distribution to different status is quite good. Each status gets everything you must know to beat the limits.
However for MTTs we have fewer articles and I agree that there are some inconsistencies. But just moving some gold articles would not solve that as these articles might be too complicated for beginners.
On the other hand you are of course right that some principles (e.g. 3 betting) are essential even for beginner as well. We have to close that gap by providing a basic version of the 3 betting article. This is imo the better solution rather than "overcharge" unexperienced player with articles they might not understand.
A series named "MTT for beginners" is highly priorized on our to do list.

Regarding some basic videos you mentioned (e.g. Pokernoob). As mentioned above these video are set to basic for advertisement purposes rather than being part of the basic learning plan for beginners.
By doing these advertisements we want expert players provide a sample of our high quality content. Thats why a selection ot high quality videos is set to basic status, e.g. this one from somnius: http://de.pokerstrategy.com/video/8825

Best regards,
Tobias

thanks for your reply.
I will wait for your mtt for beginners and also for your quiz for if I can pass that then i will be looking happily to take the deal for a site(and to watch the bronze videos for mtts before palying).

I like a more basic version of the 3betting article however i think the cbetting would be better, and leave the 3betting in the silver and say add a stack size, dealing with beginner myths about the mzone.
example do we really push at 5 m or is there some basic tips to max a push.
every article online talks about pushing at 5m .. but it would be nice if you had a beginner video on this situation is good, but this one should be good but is bad.
a good video is what is a mzone and why is it necessary for tournies and articles on it. (it should be a requirement in your random mtt quiz if you make it).
so if you can give me a timeframe, aka 2 months i can happily wait.

I greatly do appreciate your answer here tobias(onkelhotte)

Hey again,

I just have to clarify that my announced of a "MTT for Beginners" video series does not imply that MTTs will be implemented as game type for new customers to pass a quiz for the free 50$. Sorry if I caused confusion.
We are still hesitating to advertise MTTs for absolute beginners including the quiz as BRM is quite hard with 50$ taking the huge variance of MTTs into account.

As I stated we do not want to "guide" beginners to MTTs but on the other hand we can not force new players not to play MTTs if they want. Even if you chose a gametype in the beginning you can still decide later to play any game type you like with your 50$.
What I read from you so far leads to the conclusion that you are at least an intermediate or advanced player?

So, if I were you: Study the SNG-Basic-articles as SNG-Skill could be considered to be the basis for a successful MTT-game and pass the SNG quiz.
Once you get the free50$, play SNGs according to the strategy, study the bronze MTT-Material, use your professionally maintained hand evaluation boards at PokerStrategy.com in parallel. Maybe just try some 1$ MTTs.
You will quickly realize that you will improve quickly and that 100 Strategypoints in 4 weeks required for silver status it not that much and once you have silver status you can read the advanced MTT-articles and can choose from there whether you want to play SNGs or MTTs. Many successful player mix both game types.
The problem is, that I can hardly give an exact timeline for an MTT beginner series. Even if we find a producer, the list of things that can go wrong during these projects is almost infinite, that's why I am very very cautious with making promises including deadlines. You can give 100 deadlines and meet them all, once you miss one time everybody hates you:-)

MTTs just recently moved more into our focus. We meanwhile offer plenty of stuff for at least intermediate players. The supply for beginners is for sure improvable, I am sorry not be able to provide perfect service in that concern for you right know.

Best regards,
Tobias