blonde Live Updates - your opinions needed please.

[TightEnd]

i had a few of kev's cards and got rid of the lot

not sure if we got any sign ups from them

i have been asked for a card many time and/or cd

i would love to give these out

even if its to some passing mad taxi driver

but have been told this aint the best way to advertise

business cards are a waste of time. Instead.......

advertising cards are c£130 for 500. Difficult to measure effectiveness but ours combine cardroom on one side and forum/update url on the other

The plan was that every time an updater snapped a player on an update they would give them a card. This has been an easier concept to follow in theory than in practice due to access problems/pressures of time etc etc



you'll be pleased to hear more are currently on order and a batch will be sent to you

[snoopy1239]

I have blonde poker business/advertising cards and hand them out whenever possible. However, it should be noted that the blonde poker updaters work exceptionally hard, often skipping meals and breaks, and don't always have much time to spare for heavily promoting the sight in this manner. Also, I am, admittedly, a very poor salesman.

[TightEnd]

I have blonde poker business/advertising cards and hand them out whenever possible. However, it should be noted that the blonde poker updaters work exceptionally hard, often skipping meals and breaks, and don't always have much time to spare for heavily promoting the sight in this manner. Also, I am, admittedly, a very poor salesman.

Yes this is what I was referring to re the "time" problems of asking the updaters to do this..the "journalism" and the update is the main priority and will remain so

[danafish]

Yes, I don't think anyone is suggesting a full-on spamming of the masses at events, just that it would be good if we could have a few on our respective persons to hand out when people enquire, or maybe leave in the bar where possible. CDs would be excellent, I think business-size cards with the cardroom details and Loyalty Bonus (sorry!) details on them would be particularly excellent owing to how nicely they fit in one's pockets (CDs are rather too big and square to carry around all the time, they really spoil the line of a hoodie), but I personally would be delighted to take a few of any promotional items to an update and hand them out to anyone who expresses an interest. No-one ever told us that such things were available...

[Djinn]

That's because you're just a temp - you don't get your own and I didn't think of sharing since you're usually with one of us.  Temp. 

[danafish]

Don't you call me a temp. Quitter.

[Djinn]

Touche.

[TightEnd]

No-one ever told us that such things were available...

sorry, this is completely and utterly wrong. You may not have known I accept, but I am 100% certain that the "old timers" had cards..I remember long email discussions about asking updaters to use them

Anyway, another batch is on order and thanks for the offer to hand them out!

[Irishdenis]

Anyone who wants Cd's please email me and I will arrange for a small truck to deliver...... While the cards are OK, the beauty of the Cd's is that we can track and measure how effective we are.  We can measure specific events or affiliates etc. It also allows us to REWARD updater's etc who make this effort.
   This is where you can reply saying I want to be an affiliate etc. Or as Jen told me in Ireland "you are the sexiest man in his forties since I watched Brad Pitt in that action film"    dream on Denis
Our aim is to not have to allow advertising on the site. We want people to relax and not be bothered by pop up's etc. It is also true that we will not charge for access to updates or force people to sign up to view.  The real truth is that if we all made an effort to play a little on the cardroom it would help a lot.  We want to cover all the events. We want to have all sorts of events on the site...freerolls, guarantees, Sat's to live events, etc.  I for one feel great when I turn up at an event and see folks in a Blonde shirt who have qualified on Blonde. The answer is simple play more and we can give you more. This is not us trying to make money. Tikay Dave or I as the largest shareholders in Blonde have never taken a penny from Blonde for the work we do. 

[AlexMartin]

With the changes in festivals next year due to the GUKPT im not sure how many of the regular domestic festivals are worth covering.

Id be interested in knowing Snoopys opinion on the recent main event at Luton.

Personally i wanna see the GUKPT events.  dtd festivals. Vic and Dublin EPTS. Irish Open. Broadway festival. WSOPE.

I think thats it, prob missed something out.  i happy without the ept/wpt/wsop

  this is what i want to see. People who are "reachable" in the poker world. Dont really care about the Scandies or septics.

[RED-DOG]

 like a tonne of bricks

Nah then Phil! Gone all metric as tha?

[booder]

That's because you're just a temp - you don't get your own and I didn't think of sharing since you're usually with one of us.  Temp. 

[bobby1]

 like a tonne of bricks

Nah then Phil! Gone all metric as tha?

lol, I was gonna say a shit load of bricks.

[NoflopsHomer]

So after 16 hours of sleep, I can finally reply to this thread, but it's more an amalgamation of jumbled thoughts than any really specific opinions. As Snoopy says, I think this debate is fundamentally skewed in that it features exclusively core members of the forum. How I see the updates is that we tend to get a more member-based viewership during UK threads whereas with overseas ones, we tend to get high amounts of guests and people who have just signed up for the forum specifically for the updates. During an update, it becomes, like Jen said, basically a balance of mixing of getting specific news on certain people for those with a vested interest in the tournament, and producing an overview of the tournament for everyone else.

With regards to solo updating to reduce costs, I don't think it would be efficient even if I believed one person could do the job on their own. Most hotels now tend to charge the same for a twin room as they do for single, and dropping one updater would halve the efficiency but I don't think halve the cost when travel and wages are taken into account.

I'm actually not sad about us removing the WSOP from our calendar, the truth is that when we went earlier this year, I was incredibly excited and Jen and Snoops warned me that it would be an absolute nightmare. Foolishly though, I believed somewhat naively, that everything would be well done and updating would be daunting, but not too difficult. How wrong I was. Having been sheltered by the mild-manneredness and organised friendly members of the press from the GUKPT's and EPT's, the WSOP was absolute shock to me, the so-called 'big names' whose celebrity aura allowed them to go anywhere made a mockery of our press pass access. Some of the pokernews people did kindly help us out now and then, but ESPN and Harrah's people would not give two seconds of their time for a chip count or hand recall, but I'm going off topic and you get my general point...

The WPT, I contacted the Cardplayer bigwigs about the possibility of doing an update at the Grand Final but we were given a polite but firm "no".

What hasn't been mentioned yet is that while Pokerstars have been adding a couple of new places to the EPT tour, they've actually reduced the number of events which will be filmed due to the expensive cost, so it's not just blonde feeling the pinch of updating costs. Perhaps our updates should be concentrated on the non-filmed ones, though I don't think that the EPT Live Feed has impacted our 'hits' as much as we'd thought. The threads simply become much more discussion-based or in the case of someone we know on the final table, (a la Thewy in Baden) the feed most likely helped increase the viewers of the update.

I believe that the viewership of the live update is entirely dependent on those people who are playing and that it's much more blonde community based when it's someone who we know, but even in the case where it's not, the viewers will often come from somewhere else. People can say that they're not going to read an update on a final because they don't know many or any of the players, and that's fine, but the truth is that most finals are going to be like that! In fact, if you look at the recent Midlands Medley that Rod and Dana covered, that was a small event densely packed with the cream of British poker with a final consisting very much of the who's who of the UK and the hits were much lower than some of our EPT's filled with final tables of people that most would claim not to know.

[snoopy1239]

Can't disagree with any of that. Nice post.