Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends and blog readers. Even though today is only Wednesday, it feels like a Friday. Many of my friends are off today and here I sit in this office writing in my blog. Holidays are an exciting time as my family is all in town. My twin brother and little brother both got in today, so we will be catching up tonight I’m sure.

The pressure is on tomorrow morning as well. I have committed to preparing the Enke Thanksgiving Turkey in my new Turkey Fryer. Yes, it’s the Midwest, that’s how we roll. Cans of Miller Lite and Turkey Fryers! I will be going to my Mom & Dad’s tonight to inject the bird with a creole butter garlic marinade.

I will see if I can get some pics of the family this weekend. I bet many of you didn’t know I had a twin brother.

I have also rescheduled my trip to California. I’ll be leaving Sunday and returning Wednesday. My dentist told me had I flown this week with all the pressure that my abscessed tooth had, I would have probably wanted to kill myself on the plane. Looks like I made a good decision.

Two quick Wednesday rants. So I call United Airlines twice in the last two days to reschedule my flight and I am almost embarrassed for them. The last few times I have flown have been International and with International carriers. With KLM, Quantas, and BA, I have had nothing but great experiences all around. All the U.S. carriers however are shit now days and so broke that you are lucky to get a bag of peanuts and a $5 set of headphones that actually work. Their financial struggles have directly resulted in their lack of customer service also.

So I call United and it took me 5-10 minutes just to get through the automated system and talk to someone real. In any automated phone system, when someone pushes “0″, for the love of God just transfer them to a real person. THIS IS WHAT THEY WANT 100% OF THE TIME! Someone please tell me, in such a competitive market, why do companies make it so difficult to speak with a real person?

Anyhow, I finally somehow get through this monkey shit system and connected to a real person. I am fairly confident I was connected to a call center somewhere in the middle of Pakistan. Nothing against Pakistan or India, but I am trying to reschedule a UNITED flight, not Pakistan Air. I would prefer to speak with someone in this country. So we finally get past the language barrier and my debit card to an account that has $XX,XXX in it doesn’t go through. The gentlemen questions if I have proper funds on the card.

When I tell him the card is good, he gets rude and says I will need to use another card. Dude, run the fu**** card again. There’s a good chance you misunderstood my English when I gave you the information in the first place, so NO I am not going to use another card.

It’s bad enough I have pay a $100 change fee due to a medical condition. But then I also had to pay a $20 surcharge just to book over the phone instead of online. I tried to book online, but there is no field to enter my change # and get the credit I had. Furthermore, if you’re going to charge me an additional $20 bucks just to make a phone call, at least let me talk to a hot girl named Heather somewhere in Texas.

Bottom line, U.S. air carriers deserve to be bankrupt providing the shitty service they give both on the ground and in the air now days.

I hate to end a blog post with something negative, so Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone! I know I have so much to be thankful for.

Okay now that my week long tooth saga is over, let’s talk some business. A few thousand dollars later, and several milligrams of Codeine and Vicodin, Operation Root Canal is complete. (In Al Sharpton’s voice) —–> Can I get a AMEN MY BROTHA! I feel a million times better.

So let’s go ahead and open up a can worms. About once every two weeks you see a new affiliate posting either over at PAW, CAP, PAP, or GPWA on how they are getting screwed by Party on their CPA’s. Anymore before I even read the entire post, I already know the story. Because every story is the exact same bullshit. The latest CPA Scammer with complaints in the forum is this guy, but it is actually with Mansion and not PartyPoker this time.

I’ll preface this by saying that in rare occurrences, the free money schemes by affiliates do give value to the rooms. 95% of the time however they are nothing but fraud and a way for the affiliate to make a quick CPA score.

The successful affiliates that do incentive marketing are sites like PokerSourceOnline. These guys drive hundreds of players via incentives each month. But their traffic is coming from word of mouth, a huge database, and more importantly the search engines. Likewise, they have negotiated deals with the poker sites that take into account lower player values. When you are sending xxx-xxxx players to one site however, you can afford to have some bad players.

Most of the affiliates you see getting pissed off in the forums and not getting paid however have a business plan that resembles the following:

Typical CPA Scammer Business Plan

1. Sign-up for a large CPA program with lower requirements. And then make no mention to the affiliate program that you are doing free 50’s or incentive marketing.

2. Call all their buddies and offer to transfer $25-$50 to them as long as they do the following; Play micro limits and make sure they don’t bust before playing X amount of hands or earning X amount of FPP’s (depending on CPA requirement)

3. Hop on messenger and contact everyone you know, even some people you don’t know with the same offer.

4. Build a storefront website so it looks like you’re actually marketing. Don’t worry if there is no Alexa or Pagerank, or even if it is no where to be found in the SERPS. No one will question how the 4 page site is sending 50+ players a month.

5. Log in, check stats and get excited seeing the CPA balance going up up up everyday.

6. Collect money, take the profit, and repeat with the same people and a different room the next month.

And there could be a #7 that most of these clowns don’t include in their plan. This involves getting the dreaded email from the affiliate manager.  Usually the email states their player value is terrible and that they are getting moved to MGR or not getting paid at all. Then make sure you run to the largest poker affiliate forum on the net and state your case. I’m sure the people that spend 50 hours a week on SEO, or spend thousands of dollars on marketing or development will have sympathy for you.

In the old days prior to the UIGEA, affiliates were getting away with this type of promotion. Not that it was right, but it was adding player liquidity and sign-ups. For rooms like Party who were literally swimming in cash at the time, this was fine. All the new sign-ups and depositors looked good to the shareholders.

This is a new era however, and that shit isn’t going to fly with any room. If you’re offering free money while on a CPA plan, you should almost expect to get shut down.

99 times out of a 100, people that get a free twenty or fifty bucks will never rake the equivalent of the CPA the affiliate is getting paid.

Keep in mind, there is a reason they are taking your free money….. Usually it is because they don’t have their own, or they have no way to deposit on their own. Or more than likely because you implemented steps #2-#3 of the plan above.

Affiliates might be able to get away with this on a limited basis doing CPA’s. But if you are looking to be in this business for any type of extended period, this is a shitty business plan with no long term potential. This is of course unless you are a big outfit like PSO. However I can tell you from running a network of my own that most Free 50 guys or incentive marketers are nothing more than bottom feeders and scammers. Most of these guys could care less about player values or developing relationships. They just want to get their big CPA check and move on to the next room with the same players.

Feel free to comment…… This should be interesting.

Well, I didn’t end up going to California this weekend. When I woke up on Sunday morning my face was swollen up like a chipmunk and I was experiencing a fair amount of pain. Being the trooper that I am though , I actually got in my car and started heading for Ohare. About 10 minutes into the commute however I had a moment of clarity and realized this was a bad idea.

At the time my pain was about a 6 on a scale of 1-10. I saw images of myself on a plane and being in excruciating pain once we started climbing altitude. Not to mention, trying to conduct business with a massive tooth ache or on vicodin is not very smart either. I am going to the dentist in about an hour, and will be re-scheduling the trip for next week. What a miserable weekend.

Lately a lot of people have been starting their own personal blogs. I found a really cool directory of literally hundreds of WP-Plugins. Here is the link, you should bookmark it.

WordPress Plugin Database

Here are some of the Wordpress Plugins that I used or have used in this blog:

Jeremy’s Plugins

I will probably be adding a few more plugins this week though.

With no dental insurance I also found a really great dentist to help me out.

Tomorrow morning I am leaving the cold weather in Chicago and going to California for a few days. I have a couple important meetings out there early in the week. Don’t fear though, I will be home in plenty of time to deep fry the Thanksgiving turkey.

As it turns out, the Hyatt I am staying at in Orange County is also just a few miles from where Greg Powell lives. I can only imagine the trouble him and I are going to get into in the evenings. I’ll be sure to bring a camera and document the shenanigans. I’ll still be online during the day, and the good news is the PAW Network payments have already began going out. This is relieving after the delays last month………….it’s very frustrating as I am not the one that processes these.

This week I came down with a pretty bad toothache that doesn’t seem to be getting better. I went to the dentist on Tuesday and they did a few things, but nonetheless it still hurts. I think I might need a root canal. Fantastic, I can’t think of a better way to spend $3k -$4K. I wonder if my homeboy Dr. Moore will accept payment via Fulltilt transfer?

Actually I am a bit nervous about traveling with this going on as well. I can’t imagine being at 35,000 feet is a good idea in this situation. Honestly I’d rather break a bone or have to get stitches than have a severe toothache. I called my dentist today and he gave me a prescription for Tylenol/Codeine plus a prescription for penicillin. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it is a minor infection and this works. If it gets bad while I’m out there, I’m pretty much fuct. GG Jeremy……….I am a dumbass.

Now onto more exciting things such as this weeks Parlay bets. This morning I met my buddies at a local coffee house for sports talk, smack talk, and to place our bets. Below is what we came up with. Oh, and I also did show up with the sweat sedo on. Play on playa!

Barring a fiery plane crash or a toothache induced suicide attempt, I’ll see you all on the flipside.

7 Team Parlay #94219076 Football - NFL Lines (Game) Total

NFL - WEEK 11

(405) Kansas City Chiefs vs. (406) Indianapolis Colts Over 42 Sun@1:00p

Football - NFL Lines (Game) Pointspread

NFL - WEEK 11

(406) Indianapolis Colts -15 Sun@1:00p
Competitor: (405) Kansas City Chiefs

Football - NFL Lines (Game) Pointspread

NFL - WEEK 11

(427) New York Giants -3 (-105) Sun@1:00p
Competitor: (428) Detroit Lions

Football - NFL Lines (Game) Pointspread

NFL - WEEK 11

(411) Pittsburgh Steelers -10 (-105) Sun@4:05p
Competitor: (412) New York Jets

Football - NFL Lines (Game) Pointspread

NFL - WEEK 11

(429) St. Louis Rams -3 Sun@4:15p
Competitor: (430) San Francisco 49ers

Football - NFL Lines (Game) Pointspread

NFL - WEEK 11

(419) New England Patriots -16½ Sun@8:15p
Competitor: (420) Buffalo Bills

Football - NFL Lines (Game) Total

NFL - WEEK 11

(419) New England Patriots vs. (420) Buffalo Bills Over 47 Sun@8:15p

Risk $80.00 to win $7,653.07