I noticed the latter when watching the livestream, and the former I saw posted on another forum.

Matt Berkey's Only Friends podcast is a shop window for his Solve4Why coaching, Doug Polk's (+ Andrew Neeme, Brad Owen and others) The Lodge Live stream
is a shop window for the Lodge as a poker venue and also overlaps with being a shop window for his Upswing Poker training site. Neeme and Owen are also
advocates of improving your game through study and coaching and through watching their vlogs.

So is it wise for Berkey and Polk to resort to promoting seriously minus EV casino games through their podcast and live stream respectively?

Is it not the exact opposite of what their brands and their business operations are about, i.e. playing poker, always striving to improve your game, and having a realistic chance of winning.

most people lose at poker. it's -ev for most players. for anyone who is a winning poker player, you should be able to make money off of these legal betting sites very easily through bonuses and promotions. I'd actually bet good money that the percentage of people who have made money off of the legal betting sites the last 3 years or so with all of the money they've given away is higher than the percentage of winning poker players. it's also way easier to make money from those sites than it is to become a winning poker player. you literally just need to know about the opportunities these sites offer, be able to do high school math and maybe a couple of hours training to learn how to exploit the different offers. I've told a lot of friends about these sites, most of who dont even bet sports and they've pretty much all made money from them. With one or two exceptions none could beat 1/2 nl live.

low hanging fruit can make any good boy go bad

Yes a few savvy people will exploit the promotions, withdraw the ~$25 to $50 that is free and never return, but most won't.

If Berkey and Polk were advising their viewers on how to exploit the promotions then that would be different. They are not, they are trying to lure in as many as possible of their viewers into casino games. That is what they are being paid for by the sponsor.

We already know Coinflex Doug will promote scams so long as he gets paid enough. You have to be very foolish to believe his brand is about anything other than getting enough viewers he can sell to other scammers.

From yesterday's Lodge live stream YouTube page:

10,831 views Streamed live on 19 Dec 2022
Brought to you by DraftKings Casino:
Don’t miss out on all the action this week at DraftKings Casino! Download the DraftKings Casino app today! Sign-up using https://dkng.co/lodge or through our promo code: LODGE

The promotion was also verbalised more than once during the commentary, and I think with accompanying graphics.

*** So my mistake, both Berkey and Polk are promoting Draftkings casino, so if possible can a mod please amend the thread title accordingly. Thank you.**

There are only so many companies willing to sponsor poker (gambling) content

Better than promoting coinflex at least

In New York, when sports betting was legalized they were giving match bonuses and risk free wagers up to 1500 on some sites…

I used them all and snap cashed out since I don’t bet sports.

it's hard to argue against you.

sports betting recently became live in my state. I've probably deposited $40 or less and have withdrawn close to $800.

lol@25 or 50. try 250-5000 per site and that's just the initial offer.

So what . Instead they're luring people into training sites. Most of those people won't put in the work needed for poker, and a bunch who do put in the work will fail. Failure can be continuing to lose or even worse- winning just enough that they have false hope they can make a good living in poker some day while they waste years of their lives. And a very small number will actually do well in poker.

That's fair enough and I'm not denying that there is some free money out there, not as much as there once was, but still some, and you are smart enough
and disciplined enough to capitalise on it.

But in your example, you actively sought out bonuses or kept an eye out for them.

This is different, this is Draftkings Casino paying Berkey and Polk to mass market. Granted, Draftkings may have got their sums wrong and perhaps
the percentage of signups via Berkey and Polk that carry on playing and go into the red is lower than their expectations.

But whatever the outcomes are, I think this is bad by Berkey and Polk.

They are portraying winning poker, or the chance of winning at poker, but at the same time promoting probably the worst form of gambling in the history of mankind, online casino.

draftkings had risk free 5,000. and with draftkings you quickly get a host giving you tons of money until you start getting limited.
william hill had a free 3300 cash bonus with a 1x rollover that lasted a few weeks.
William Hill also had a risk free 5,000 in NJ and some other states for a while.
Fanduels public offer just went from 1000 risk free to 2500 risk free through christmas. In Maryland they had a risk free 5,000 last months that lasted a couple of weeks and if you opted in even as an existing customer it worked for a day or too (heheh)

If these sites want to sponsor Polk or Berkey's show who cares.
They're already bombarding us during every sporting event we watch. I've been in sports stadiums even that have ads up from 5 or more competing sites throughout the stadium.

At the end of the day most poker players lose. Even the people who the training sites end up helping, are being trained to take more money faster from other players.
Let's not pretend these poker training sites are nursing schools.

The bonus as I saw it on The Lodge live stream was a $50 deposit bonus with a 1x play through requirement, so it is a good offer for people with discipline.

I'll add though that a lot of these sites, at least in the UK where I am, will make you jump through a lot of hoops (KYC paperwork requirements) before you can withdraw,
so this obviously gives them more time for the bonus seeker to crack and play more than the bonus requirement play.

I do agree with you that the training sites are not being completely straight about the likelihood of using their coaching and then becoming a winning player.

There are so many factors, the main one being if the person buying the coaching has the required aptitude to learn it and then apply it. About 10 other factors too.

Having said that, the central plank of their poker training businesses is that you can make yourself either more profitable or less unprofitable, so IMO their brands
shouldn't be going anywhere near promoting casino games.

This is a major business error by both of them, which you'd have to think was caused by the lure of money overriding common sense.

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They promoted it more than once during the stream, but I have found one example at 4:14:30

Link to the stream is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXm6_feFw_k

It's some sellout behavior. All the celebrities who took a check to appear in a sportsbook ad just look sad af to me. At least Jb Smoovs commercials are kinda funny, but it's still some sellout **** . Some of them are pretty insulting too with the way they push slots and same game parlays and all the avenues that lose you money the fastest.

Books are giving away insane promotions because they are making money hand over fist. Obviously the vast majority of bettors who take advantage of these promotions end up as long-term losers.

Adults are allowed to make their own decisions as to what to gamble on. Nobody is pointing a gun at anyone's head and forcing them to spew on baccarat

That’s ****ed up. Rule number one as a pro is no pit gambling

My favorite commercials are the ones that show illegal behavior. Like there was one FanDuel commercial where someone had an NFL lineman placing their bets for them and another where Ben Affleck is strolling down the Vegas strip using an app that isn't legal in Nevada.

Actually they've been losing money hand over fist,some have closed or become casino only and long term most will never make a dollar.

Well I guess I'm wrong then. Thanks for the info.

You guys are too intelligent to waste another minute thinking about:

1. Whether or not poker vloggers should promote online home games.

2. Whether or not poker podcasts/streams should promote pit games.

It pains me to think of all the EV you guys are missing caring about such silly nonsense.

There’s a million other, more damaging grifts going on.

On a scale of 1-10 these things are like a 1.25 on the damaging grift scale.

These are the hills you guys want to die on? You guys are smarter than to use mental bandwidth this way.

/end woke thread

Good post, but I'd put it as a 0 on the scale of 1 to 10, as it's not even a grift. A grift would suggest deceit or false claims.

I posted this on 2+2 before but one of the goofier advertisements I've ever seen for a casino was on a billboard on I-80 East toward Reno. I think it was for the Silver Legacy or Eldorado. The advert boasted a "98 percent payback" on the casino's slot machines. I guess they had the highest rate in the city, and decided to trumpet this to drivers still 150 miles away.

This ad caused a 10-year-old version of me saw to ask my dad from the back seat of the family car: "Wait... doesn't that mean that over time, you'll just lose your money?"