Exactly one year ago I wrote an article about The Expectations of Poker Affiliate Managers For Poker Affiliates over at PAW. Wow how things have changed over the past 12 months with the UIGEA, the restructuring of many companies, and the massive turnover in affiliate departments.

Lately it seems many affiliates have expressed a fair amount of dissatisfaction with several different poker affiliate programs. Just as affiliate managers expect certain expectations from their affiliates, so do the affiliates who are the ones out marketing and bringing in the players. I was inspired to write this post after coming back from vacation and seriously not being able to count on one hand how many poker affiliate programs are having big issues right now with one of the points below.

In this blog post I hope to share some insights into what a professional affiliate expects from their affiliate managers and affiliate departments. Essentially being an affiliate manager and running a good affiliate department is not that difficult. So let’s get right into it.

As you read through this, many programs may come to mind. I felt like being nice today though and not singling anyone out. If you must know just take a quick scan of the forums at PAW, CAP, or GPWA and you can probably figure out real quick which programs are struggling.

1. Communication - This is the fundamental most important element in any business relationship or partnership. Yet in the poker affiliate world lately, it seems to be one of the biggest complaints. Affiliates realize that affiliate managers are very busy individuals and cannot necessarily respond within minutes or even hours sometimes. But a 24 hour response time is more than reasonable.

There is absolutely NO reason that affiliates emails should go unanswered. If a room cannot provide a 24 hour response time to their affiliates, then they are either under staffed, or they need to re-evaluate their staff. Often times what happens is that emails stack up and the non important ones, or the triple replied to open emails get pushed to the side and forgotten. One of the things the PAW affiliate team did was set up a help desk to organize and keep all the documented support issues in one ticket.

I don’t say this to pimp PAW’s affiliate department, instead to help others. I highly suggest every affiliate manager set up a help desk for your main support email address. It organizes the entire departments queries and support issues into one platform. Simply communicating in a timely manner with affiliates can double or triple your business very fast. And vice versa, ignoring emails and being non-responsive can decimate your program. Not only do affiliates expect an open line of communication, most medium sized and all big affiliates demand it.

2. Payments - With the UIGEA it understandable that some programs may have stumbled upon some payment issues initially. However it has been long enough that there is surely a way out there for every program to pay their affiliates. None of the big rooms have any problems paying U.S. affiliates anymore. Affiliate departments must realize that many poker affiliates depend on their affiliate payments as their main source of income. Delayed payments or getting the run around is just bad business. It’s no different than if your two week paycheck from a traditional 9-5 job bounced or was delayed. This would be unacceptable to almost any traditional worker in any country. Affiliates expect to be paid on time and properly for the players they refer each month, this shouldn’t be that difficult.

3. Tracking - This has been and will always be an issue in the poker affiliate industry. I tend to side with the AM’s many times on tracking issues. Often a tracking issue is not the actual programs fault, instead it is the affiliates. Yet at the same time, affiliate managers have an obligation to the affiliates to check if players tracked when asked.

Likewise in many instances, if a player didn’t track but the affiliate is legitimate and the player looks legitimate, what is the big deal about adding them under the affiliate tracker. Believe me, it will usually pay off dividends in the future versus losing 100% of this affiliates business. Sure if the affiliate is brand new and it is their first player then maybe investigate it more.

Again, tracking is an issue in every affiliate industry. But affiliates have the expectation that the players they send should be tracking properly.

4. Avoiding Issues Does Not Make Them Go Away - I bring this up because over my years as a full time poker affiliate, I have seen this happen countless times. A major issue will come up either from an individual affiliate, or even worse in an industry forum. And the affiliate managers or affiliate departments completely ignore the issue or don’t offer any explanation. This is bad business and it amazes me that it happens so often in our industry.

If an affiliate program or affiliate manager wants to be respected in this industry, they need to realize that it is O.K. to admit a fault, fix it, and then move on. But ignoring issues and thinking affiliates will simply forget is pointless. Affiliates simply expect their affiliate managers to be honest.

5. Small Affiliates Can Become Big In The Future:

PokerNews

PokerListings

RakeTheRake.com

Affiliates expect to be treated with professionalism and responsiveness no matter what size they are today.

6. Communication - No this is not a typo. This is also #6 because it is just that damn important. And as I mentioned, it IS the biggest thing lacking in this industry with respect to the affiliate programs. How can any affiliate department simply just ignore emails? And trust me, I am aware of PAW Network or PokerNews accounts that do several thousands of dollars per month in revenue, and even we occasionally have a hard time getting responses. Answering emails and providing support should be the foundation of any affiliate managers job. Not to mention, out of all the poker and casino affiliate programs, how many AM’s post in forums on a regular basis or even monitor the forums? I have never worked as an affiliate manager, but if I was consulting a company on the most important tasks for their AM, this would be at the top of the list. An A.M. showcasing their customer service and knowledge in a public forum can go a LONG way.

At the end of the day, affiliates have a tremendous selection of affiliate programs to choose from in this industry. Of course the main rooms are always going to get the lion share of the business. And it amazes me that none of them have stepped up and became the Gold Standard of poker affiliate programs. If a room like PokerStars, PartyPoker, Absolute, or FullTiltPoker really wanted to, they could dominate the poker affiliate market and probably increase their revenues by over seven figures each month. The ingredients are all there, yet not a single program has baked the cake. Affiliates are waiting for one program to surface as the “Gold Standard” of poker affiliate programs.

In many cases, the executives of these poker sites need to stop seeing the affiliate programs as a “marketing expense”, and start seeing them as a profit center. To the defense of many affiliate managers, this is often the overall problem. However I think every poker and casino affiliate at all the industry forums would agree; there is no excuse for poor or absent communication.

As always I encourage both affiliates and affiliate managers to leave your comments here.

Jeremy

Oh I suppose I better give an obligatory plug to the PAW Network.  Our A.M. Mitchell in Australia is one of the best A.M.’s in the industry.  In fact he has been known to send out cases of “undrank” Australian Fosters to our top affiliates.  <———-Fact of the day…..Aussies hate Foster’s but actually like Budweiser.  Strange world indeed!

Well, we finally made it back from Michigan. I had full intentions of blogging each evening of the days events however the campground did not have wireless internet. If anyone has ever went through the “Full Nascar Experience”, then you can probably imagine the “internet” is most likely not what is on other campers and Nascar fans minds.

More important than any other story or excerpt in this post, let me start by saying I just won the prop bet with Jimmy Johnson destroying Dale Earnhardt in todays race.

Oh hell, I don’t even know where to start when chronicling the weekends events. But the picture on the left should get you into they right mindset if you choose to continue reading on. (This picture was from the first days practice and qualifying) There are so many good stories from this trip, I am not going to be able to cram them all into one blog post. But I will try my best to share the good ones. We showed up Thursday afternoon and were the second R.V. at our campsite. The next people to show up rolled in on a old beat up Holiday Rambler R.V. packed with around 14 people.

These fine Nascar fans were from a small town called Swisher Iowa. Never in my life have I seen 14 people get a campsite and tent put together so quickly. It was almost as if these people were on a mission to get to the beer drinking and loud music as fast as they could. Needless to say about 30 minutes later they had assembled a huge tent filled with a full DJ set-up and a restaurant style grill. This was the beginning of a long weekend.

That evening was somewhat tame. We sat by the fire with a few drunks from Swisher and a gynecologist from Ohio……Nascar brings out all types I suppose. One of the guys names was Jimmy, and he kept the entire weekend interesting. How this man is alive or has a liver anymore is beyond me….more about his antics later

Forget about the rambler and tent campers, here is a picture of how baller Nascar fans roll…..actually not really, but it’s a picture of me and a losing Nascar gambler.

The following day we headed down to the track to watch practice and qualifying. This was pretty cool as Mr. E got us pit passes. Being that close to the races and the cars was pretty amazing. Even more amazing were the amount of vendors both at the track and across the street in one of the campgrounds. Just about anything Nascar you could ever want is here.

Allow me to go off on a business tangent. Although Nascar has the reputation of being a hillbilly sport, the actual business behind it is quite savvy. Neither the NFL, MLB, or NBA can top the branding or marketing of Nascar. Every single fan has hundreds of dollars in gear for their favorite driver…. Not too mention all the crap they hang on their trailer (And in Swisher, Iowa…..most of this probably gets returned to the front yard). Then they are smart enough that each car brings in millions upon millions of dollars in sponsorship from every major company in the world.

Nascar in general is raining money. One thing that was really cool however is that the entire sport is there for the fans. I could go on and on about this, but to give you one prime example, the fans are allowed to bring coolers into the track with their own beer and snacks. No other professional sport that I am aware of allows this.

Okay now back to the drunken stupidity. The first night I decided at 1:00 AM to sleep outside in my hammock. When I bought a hammock this summer I told my wife I was going to sleep in it outside at some point in my life. Cross that off the list of things to do. Sleep Outside in Hammock. It was actually quite peaceful and I got a good nights sleep.

Did I mention the camper neighbors had a DJ setup with two huge speakers. Every night once the rest of the campground was sleeping, the speakers got cranked up and we were treated to a little Neil Diamond. If I never hear this song again, I will be O.K. with that.

Although the Cup race got rained out on Sunday, I did get to see the Bush Race on Saturday. It is crazy how loud and fast these cars actually go. You really have to attend a race like this live to get the true feeling of what 43 cars going 200 mph looks, feels, and sounds like.

R.V. gets hit by a golf cart:

I had to bold the title up to this because it is just so unbelievable. On Saturday night we polished off a few beers and called it a night around 1:30. I am laying in the camper and half asleep when all the sudden a huge BOOM hits the trailer and actually moves it. For a second I thought I was just drunk dreaming it, you know like when your half asleep and you get startled and wake up.

Well a few minutes later Mr. E gets up and says “I’ll be damned, I think our trailer just got hit”. Sure enough we get up, go outside and our trailer got hit by a drunk on a golf cart. Not only did this guy hit our trailer twice, he then continued down the hill and went into a pick-up truck. He avoided a telephone poll, a guide wire, and a bunch of other dangers. Little did we know when Mr. E and I were checking out the damage at 2 something in the morning, the driver of the golf cart was passed out under the pickup truck he hit.

You’ll never guess who it was that hit our trailer. It was Jimmy. The best part was the next morning when we confronted him, he was laughing and telling us about the whole thing….. I guess that is how they apologize in Iowa. The good news however is that Jimmy did fix all the damage.

Where was Karl through all this you might ask? This dude slept right through out camper being struck as well as myself and his dad getting out of bed and going outside to check it out. You tell me, does this look like the type of Nascar Fan that would sleep through an incident like that.

From Saturday night through Monday night it pretty much rained non-stop. The race did get canceled on Sunday and we never made it back to the track. We did make the best out of it though as we had an awning on the R.V. and the neighbors had a fully equipped circus tent. Not too mention we had a cooler full of beer and a load of firewood.

The Poker Game:

On Sunday Night we found ourselves in the middle of a 1-2 NL game in the circus tent with the boys from Swisher. All I can say is fuck….these people were really bad. I started off on a nice run and rolled up around $170 or so. But then I lost most of it to “Kenny” when my K8 (trip 8’s) got beat by his A8. And holy shit when Kenny won that money you should of seen his wife. One would think this man just won the Iowa State Lottery. I proceeded to play very drunk and very badly the rest of the evening. At one point I became a credit player playing on $60 from Karl. I think my net loss was around $200.

The good news however though is that Karl took these guys for around $500 or so. He was on fire to say the least. This is pretty amazing considering Karl is usually a donkey at poker. I am just glad it wasn’t me that took these poor individuals house and car payments.

Overall the Nascar Experience was something to remember and hopefully a trip I will make every year. Getting the opportunity to hang out with Karl and his dad for a few days was priceless and I can’t think of a better way to spend a few vacation days. I will post a few more pictures later, I think I have a good one with me sitting in the stands wearing the headset. <——–Hardcore Nascar fan right there.

Winning the bet is actually quite nice too. I am looking forward to inviting some friends over to sit at my house and watch Karl groom my yard as well as wash my vehicles.

I hope Karl enjoyed the $500 upswing you had against the Swishers Karl. Because sometime in the next couple weeks he will be my bitch for the afternoon.

Although being a gambler I would allow him to make me a double or nothing bet for the race in Bristol……………………or even worse let it ride on the Green Bay Packers. It feels good to be a winner today.

Next up I will be posting my thoughts on the ridiculous mess that is going on at ChipLeader.

And let the games begin. Karl stopped by tonight to give me a glimpse of this fine piece of machinery we will be spending the next 4 days in.

It looks pretty impressive. When it comes to Nascar, these fans don’t mess around. We have a pretty tight schedule tomorrow. Apparently these guys that work in the real world think leaving at 7:00 A.M. in the morning to go on vacation is a good idea. Obviously they do not work poker affiliate hours.

Actually getting up early will be fun though as I can properly plan ahead and get to bed with the wife early tonight.  My wife is awesome, she did all my laundry for me today and even helped me pack.  Just because of all this hard work I told her in cousin Eddie’s voice “Sweetheart, I got something real special planned for you tonight”.  She sounded thrilled…………

We are going to the grocery store at 7:00 to buy all the food and beer. Buying beer at 7:00 A.M. That will be a first.

I am really looking forward to getting away for a weekend and doing nothing but sitting around in t-shirts and shorts, smoking cigars, drinking beer, playing poker, going to the track, and generally just being a hillbilly. And believe me, I have a feeling I may cross paths with a few interesting people.

I promise I will get to some more business related and motivational posts next week, but this is just going to be too much damn fun. I am hoping one of these rich Nascar billies has wireless access I can jack. With all the RV’s in the trailer park….sorry campground, I imagine someone will. If I get access I won’t answer any of your emails or PM’s, but I will do my best to post some good pictures.

See you next week!

Here’s the preliminary pics:

Jeremy & Karl…….Do I look fat in that t-shirt? I’m so nervous, I want to look my best at this event.

“That there is an RV Clark”

Cousin Eddie 1990 something

She looks pretty happy for a wife that is going to be stuck at home by herself with 2 kids for 5 days……… now get out of our bus sweetheart.

Okay, I will preface this entire post by stating that I am not a huge Nascar fan. In fact until this year I had never watched a single race. However one of my best friends is an avid fan an follows Earnhardt Jr. each week. Amazingly enough, my buddy Karl is not that much of a hillbilly from the outside either. One would think that anyone living in Rockford, IL who watches Nascar each week and occasionally chews cherry skol would surely be a bit trailer, if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, this weekend I am hopping into a huge RV with Karl and his Dad and going to Michigan Speedway for the races. I have heard that going to a Nascar race for an entire weekend is actually an “experience”. I am going to have to be the judge of this first hand. I really don’t have a driver that I follow closely, but Jimmy Johnson seems to be trendy and he has a hot wife. I’ll take him.

So anyone who knows me knows that I like to gamble just a little bit. While watching the Bears per-season game last week with Karl, we had a few beers and came up with the following prop bet:

If When Jimmy Johnson beats Earnhardt on Sundays Cup race, I win. If Earnhardt somehow beats Johnson in this race Karl wins…….. Here’s the bet.

If I win, Karl will be coming to my house on a weekend day and mowing my lawn, trimming my shrubs, and doing some general landscaping. After he completes that he will be washing and detailing my Lexus inside out. While he’s here I am going to have him get my wifes vehicle cleaned up as well. Basically he will be my bitch for the day.

Now if Karl wins —- He owns his own manufacturing business sweat shop where they run wire machines, lathes, presses, and a bunch of other things I have no clue about. But I will have to show up first thing in the morning, slap on some dickies and a work shirt and do janitorial work all day. I imagine I will be cleaning the shitters, all the offices, and probably a handful of other grunt work.

Although this bet does not include any cash exchanging hands, there is some pride to be lost here. I enjoy bizarre prop bets like this better than cash bets all day long. This should make for a nail biting experience however while watching the race on Sunday.

Aside from the race, I’ll be sure to get some good pictures from the entire weekend. I imagine becoming intoxicated and seeing 250+ lb. Fat Chicks flashing is all but inevitable…… I mean hell, this is a Nascar race we are going too. Hopefully I make it back with all my teeth.