An ongoing review of poker blogs, near and far.
5.
http://pokermonkeytalk.blogspot.com
Posting Frequency: Promises a return
Design: The long Blogger column
Writing quality: Ramblin’ On
Overall rating: Holiday Letter
This is the guy who got banned from Caesar’s properties and was featured, if I recall correctly, as one of the human interest stories in the TV coverage at some point. This blog has a lot of potential but its writer needs a kick in the pants. He can really churn out content, which is good. However, it’s mostly unimaginative and overwhelming in its banality, even when not regurgitating tournament hands:
Which leads me to another topic. Pedophiles. How any man could ever bring oneself to have sex with a child is beyond me.
Okay, enough about tattoos. But yeah, they freak me out..
Ok, thanks for the insight, bro. However, this guy’s weakness can also be his strength, as he is unafraid of any topic, and his thoughts on politics are is best moments:
Are we really THAT fucking tuned out to what is going on right under our noses? Then it got more ludicrous this week…as the UN nuclear inspection people announced that the Iranians…yes, the FUCKING Iranians…would be responsible for conducting their OWN inspections of their most scrutinized nuclear site at Parchin! That isn’t even ‘questionable’ that is a fucking joke of the highest magnitude!
Now he’s showing some spirit. If he can refocus and maybe reformat, this could be an entertaining and readable one.
6.
Posting Frequency: Faithless
Design: Excellent
Writing quality: Myopic
Overall rating: Irritating
I only reviewed this one because it takes up a great deal of poker blogging bandwidth. If you type Poker Blog into Google, this poorly updated, beautifully designed website comes up on the first page, along with a bunch of other dated debris. (This project of mine really does show how the poker boom has passed: as I write in Variance, we’re the guys who did not get the memo.) However, the writer has done really nothing with it for years. He writes with a lot of exclamation points, as if texting, and could probably sum up the extent of his thoughts with that format a lot easier. We do get a gratuitous number of selfies of his teenager-forever face.
7.
Posting Frequency: unsatisfying
Design: Deceptive
Writing quality: Modulated
Overall rating: Potential
Like the “atkinator” (ffs), this one, probably because it is a privately designed website, is search engine optimized and comes up right away on a poker blog search. However, this writer has a unique voice to go with his marketing savvy. Bill Rini is a WSOP executive who says a lot, could say more, and be quite interesting. For instance, he offers modest opinions on topics without fanfare or pointless rambling. He takes photos which show more skill than the interminable headshots do on Pokernews. He has influence and brings in guest writers. If you are going to have one of the most accessible poker blogs on the web, I suggest you post more than three times a year, however. The design is almost as good as the f’ing Atkinator’s, but the staggered tiles aren’t friendly to follow for date or content, so the sense of continuity, essential for a genre based on a journal, is lost.
Probably not the right place to comment about this, but I just subscribed to your blog, and I was wondering if this was a feature from this blog site? Or did you add it in yourself?
This blog is through WordPress.org, which is different from WordPress.com, and very different from your Blogger account. I have access to endless WordPress.com “widgets”, of which the subscription menu bar is just one.
I would start by looking here for some guidance for Blogger widgets:
http://helplogger.blogspot.com/
However, I don’t think subscriptions are the nuts for growing your blog following – social media is. You’ll want to link your account to Twitter, which is popular with poker players, for a start.
Also, you have one distinct advantage in using Blogger – you’ll find that there are many other poker blogs on it – as you can see from the very start of my reviews here – and it should be easy to swap links with them. Take a look at the sidebars of their blogs for reference. This is the other very fast way to get an audience.