I am getting married on September 20th, my company is constantly undergoing changes, being challenged, and adapting. This is great, but at times it can be overwhelming and the pressure can really build. My fiance, Ann, is freaking out about the wedding and all the crap that goes along with throwing a party for the day of your marriage. This is by no means a pity party, I am thrilled with my life, business, fiance, and realize I am EXTREMELY lucky to have these problems. I wanted to get myself and Ann unplugged from our lives for a few days. I found a cabin in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin about a 3 hour drive from the Twin Cities. The place had no internet, no tv, and was just a tiny log cabin in the middle of the woods!!! This is right up my alley, my plan to destress Ann may have backfired though. I think no TV or internet may have added to her stress Well done Chris(A for effort though).

We got there Saturday and had a little fire with marshmellow roasting and a trivia battle. We love to read Trivial pursuit cards to eachother and keep track of who answers the most right. She almost always kicks the crap out of me

On Sunday i got to do a little fishing. Pretty nice small mouth if i do say so myself.

This is my dog finley, i am obsessed with her, and if I take to writing in this blog about my personal life more, you will undoubtedly hear about her, she rules my existence and every one in the office and my future wife are sick and tired of hearing about Finley and watching me fawn over her…..hahah

In owning my own business there is very little separation between my personal life and my work life. Work is ALWAYS on my mind. There have been times when I am working in one or another every waking hour of my day. This is really not a healthy way to live, for me personally, and at some point my business will suffer as a result. There is some point of diminishing returns and there is a lot to be said for having a healthy balance of personal life and work life. When I strike that balance I find my work is output is of a much higher quality and my personal life is extremely pleasurable. Anyways, unplugging over this past weeekend was great for me and enabled me to come in fresh for the upcoming weeks fires that would inevitability arise and need to be put out.

We wanted to have a system that offers turnkey rakeback sites, turnkey free bankroll sites, non-incentivized poker affiliate marketing campaigns and much more up THREE MONTHS AGO! Then we revised it to September 1st. Guess what – there’s not a chance we’re going to make that deadline either.

Why? And more importantly, why am I telling you?

I’m telling you because we want to share with our partners, friends, and the poker affiliate marketing community what we struggle with. We want to publicize our statements to each other. We want to have a record of all the effort that went into building the first true poker affiliate network.

Why isn’t it up yet? Plainly, because we have no idea what we’re doing.

Oh, we know marketing and we know software and we know code. We know how to make money online and we know how to help others make money online. We’ve been building successful online properties for years. We currently have 200 publishers and they all have working systems. Many are making real money.

What we don’t know is how to completely work together as a team to produce feature after feature and add one huge project on top of another. It’s one thing when it’s two guys building a startup out of their garage. It’s another to have 75 employees and thousands of partners. We’re somewhere in between.

So we, as management, put a ton of pressure on tech. Get it done! Do it! Why doesn’t this work? Should we just outsource this whole thing?

We pressured them into rolling out a huge upgrade three months ago. It was too early and it took weeks to weed out the bugs. After it was live. Won’t do that again.

We threw Chad into the role of project manager, responsible for the whole thing. He didn’t have any experience in project management, but we saw his potential. (Still do, most days ) Who doesn’t love a good trial by fire?

Management of this company wants it all and wants it all now! That’s what keeps us ahead of the curve. But how to get there isn’t a straight line. It’s trial and error.

To our credit, what we put out is quality. It works and it makes people money. A LOT of money. We just don’t put out enough and don’t do it quickly enough. Last Thursday, for example, the new and improved publisher dashboard was supposed to be live. Today is Tuesday. WHERE IS IT? And obviously I assume this pushes back the whole roll-out schedule?

Chad, in his response, is going to provide his perspective.

Bottom line, we will reach our goals, and we’re going to keep getting faster and more efficient as we go. We guarantee it. Hope you enjoy reading about our screw-ups along the way.

-mgmt

Hello Everyone!

My name is Danielle and I am one of the Affiliate Managers for Chipleader, The Affiliate/Marketing program that represents two outstanding poker brands Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet. Chipleader has worked closely with Chris for quite some time now and we wanted to get the word out about our upcoming platform merge to Pokersolutions members first!

With that being said, We are pleased to announce the new launch of the CEREUS network, Absolute poker and Ultimate Bet’s new integrated software platform.  CEREUS is the result of more than 18 months development and delivers a secure, responsive, and flexible online poker gaming experience.

The development team has worked hand in hand with infrastructure architects to create a scalable environment with negligible downtime: ensuring that client software can be updated with very little impact on the end users.

CEREUS combines and enhances the best features from both the Absolute Poker and the UltimateBet client software. Poker fans will enjoy more tournaments, increased peak-time player volume, and expeditious customer service response.  Please keep in mind that the brands will still stay completely separate, they will just operate off the same system.

Here are just some of the advantages that you will get from this massive integration:

*Liquidity on both AP and UB will be instantly double
*BadBeat Jackpot will constantly hit $1M (largest in the world)
*Promotion offers, loyalty offerings and conversion rates will spike tremendously

We anticipate the launch to happen in the first week of August,  please feel free to contact the Chipleader crew with any questions or comemnts;  Danielle@chipleader.com, Marcela@chipleader.com, and Diego@chipleader.com.  We look forward to working with you!

Cheers,
Danielle / Chipleader Team/ AP/UB management

PAS had a company outing to Vegas last week. There are a few guys who work in the Nashville office who hadnt met some of the guys who work in the St. Paul office, it was a great time meeting everyone. Seeing people away from the office letting their hair down was a nice change of pace.

Dinner at Aureole in Mandalay bay:

Top left to right:

Herb(inthacup), Byron, Chris(morgant), Chad, Ryan(RT)

John(pokeraddict), Arthur, Craig, Chris, Loffi.

It was the second trip organized for my company, and it was a smashing success. We went out to dinner with Karim(raketherake) and for those of you who havent met him, he is quite an amusing chap, thanks for picking up the tab Karim!! We had another meeting which was very promising. I hope to have more to report here about it in several weeks. One of our Russian affiliates, Akim(raketracker.ru), came to stay with us for a few days and it was nice to finally put a face to the name.

I ended up playing PLO at the Wynn quite a bit. My last night found me in a 10/20 PLO game. I sat down with $4k folded one hand and then this happened; I limped 3345 with 5 other limpers. The flop came 3, 9, Q with two hearts. I have the 3,5 of hearts. The BB lead out for pot and i repotted, he went to the tank then pushed and i called. He had top two with a gutter no flush draw. Turn was a Q and i drop 4 dimes before i can blink an eye. This is why I am an affiliate, i shouldnt limp that garbage hand to begin with, and getting my stack in there, while right at the time, is dodgy at best.

I rebuy for $3k and played so weak tight i am sick writing about it. Brad Booth comes to the table drunk as a skunk and entertaining us and most tables near us. I whittled myself down to about $450 which cant even let you see a flop in this game. I had some garbage on the button and decided this was my hand. Myself, Brad and the BB saw the flop and i was allin. Brad kept saying ‘dry side pot’ to the BB, which is total crap in my book. He was telling him to check it down so they could take my chips. The BB didnt listen and bet pot into Brad on the flop. He immediately repotted by throwing in aobut 10 yellow chips, which as about 7 too many! BB promptly folded and Booth offered me a deal; i could get $500 of the pot if i folded. I immediately took it as i was booking a sure ~$50 profit.

Anyways, over the next 3 hours i took that $500 and turned it into 6 dimes!!! God, PLO can be so great……..sometimes.

We are happy to announce that Players Only has joined us at Rake Tracker. They are a member of the Cake Poker Network. The rakeback percent is 33% and the first deposit bonus is 100% up to $650. Players Only is even U.S. friendly! For more information please check out Players Only Rakeback.

i want to do a cannonball

That is not a small fire.  Initial reports are saying that no one is hurt or trapped.  Hopefully that holds up.

I couldnt resist and had to do overnight shipping. Hopefully i will get this setup soon and take some pictures of my setup.

I had the number four put on this bad boy to represent my bantam league soccer number.

Raketracker.com, YourPokerCash.com, AffiliateEV.com, Checkraised.com and all of the rest of our properties have been around years. Raketracker, the business was born in 2003. Raketracker, the website, began back in 2004.

All the work we have done for years has come together in Poker Affiliate Solutions. If you are a poker affiliate, it’s a site you should know about. And we are also interested in opening up a window to our company. That’s why we started this blog.