Wes Cutshall

Full Tilt Poker has an affiliate system that allows you to get paid on new player registrations. I won’t get into the affiliate payout structure in this blog, but it can be profitable to be an affiliate if you can successfully convince players to register and deposit money on Full Tilt. This blog post is specifically dedicated to one of Full Tilt’s affiliate tools, the private affiliate tournament. I ran into some issues when I tried to create my first tournament so I thought it would be helpful to share some information that you can’t find on the Full Tilt affiliate website.

Tournaments as an Affiliate Tool

The concept behind the private affiliate tournaments is that you can offer a private tournament that you can advertise on your website. Affiliates can use this tournament to entice players to register on Full Tilt in order to play in their special tournament. Because your goal as an affiliate is to get new players to sign up, one of the best ways to use tool is to offer a freeroll tournament where you fund the prize pool. This will entice new players to register with intentions of playing in your tournament with no risk. After they have a good time playing in your tournament the hope is that they consider depositing money in order to play in other tournaments hosted by Full Tilt. This is where you can start to make money as an affiliate.

Create Tournament

After you create a Full Tilt affiliate account you can request an affiliate tournament through the affiliate console. Simply sign in and click the Online Marketing > Tournament Request menu item. You have a few options when requesting the tournament such as game type (Texas Hold’Em, Omaha, etc) , Turbo/Non-turbo, 6-max, etc. This part of the setup is straight forward. If you are hosting a freeroll be sure to click “Money Added” and enter your Full Tilt username. You will need to have the amount in your account at the time that Full Tilt gets your request. Be sure to click “freeroll” or else the tournament will need a buy-in amount. After you have requested a tournament and are contacted by Full Tilt you will have a decision to make. Choosing a registration format is where the headaches began for me.

3 Tournament Registration Options

Tournament ID and Password

Full Tilt offers affiliates 3 ways players can register for private tournaments. The first option is a tournament ID and password that you share with your potential players. This sounds like a very secure option but I assure you it is not. I found out the hard way that there are websites dedicated to listing nothing but freeroll tournament ID’s and passwords. Players (or someone else?) leak tournament details to these websites and you can have hundreds or thousands of uninvited players register in your tournament. Since you can’t make money off of already registered Full Tilt players, this is not what you want as an affiliate. I don’t recommend this option for registration as it seems to have a large hole in the security. My first tournament had 500 (what was set as the max) players register overnight before I could even fully advertise the freeroll to my potential players. I’m not sure who leaked the information, but the first registration process definitely didn’t go as I had planned. Luckily I was able to have Full Tilt recreate the tournament with a different registration method. The Full Tilt support was good but most responses took 24-36 hours.

Affiliate ID Registration

Full Tilt offers a method of registration tied to your affiliate ID. This sounds like a great feature, but it’s implemented in a way that makes it not very useful. Since this type of registration is web-based, I assumed that only players who had clicked my banner ad, and therefore were assigned my affiliate ID in their cookies, would be able to register. This would prevent tournament ID and password scraping on other websites since the way these websites work is that they have their own affiliate ID’s that they are trying to push with their list of stolen ID’s and passwords. But, this is not what this type of registration is. Affiliate ID registration instead restricts the registration to only players who were associated with your affiliate ID when they signed up with Full Tilt. So this tournament can only reward people who have already signed up for Full Tilt after clicking your banner ad. Although it would be great to be able to fill up a tournament with 100% newly registered players, offering a freeroll tournament only to people who are willing to set up new accounts probably won’t show much success. I feel that it can be much more successful if you offer a freeroll to anyone affiliated with your website and just hope that a percentage of these players will have to register in order to play. Host a tournament that appears to be a reward for a long relationship with your website instead of looking like an out-right sales attempt.

Username Registration

The most secure method for registering players for your affiliate tournament is for you provide a list of Full Tilt usernames to the Full Tilt private tournament support staff. You will have to collect usernames and email them at least 24 hours prior to the tournament. Luckily when you request an affiliate tournament the staff does contact you through email so you will then have a way to contact them if you have any questions, or when it is time to supply your player username list. This is the registration method I now use because of all the problems I had with the other methods. If you can, send the list in a full week early so that any mistyped usernames can be discovered and corrected before the tournament.

Suggestions

The affiliate tournament request form allows you to request a standard tournament where players pay their own entry free or a freefoll tournament that is funded by your Full Tilt account. I can see how a website or business with tens of thousands of dedicated fans could run a monthly tournament where players are expected to fund their own buy-in. Maybe this is related to some type of poker league, or maybe a special bounty on an individual is offered each time in order to entice players. For most websites they will have to offer a freeroll tournament in order to get people to play in their special tournament. With the availability of tournaments at any stakes on Full Tilt you’re going to have to offer something special in order to get players to play in your game. I suggest putting a bounty on yourself and advertising this bounty to your players. Since your goal is to get new sign ups, and not necessarily to win the tournament, offer a $100 bounty for whoever can knock you out of the tournament – encouraging all players to gun for you. Find a creative way to inform your players of your Full Tilt username that they will need in order to gun for you. I recommend integrating Facebook “likes” in order to reveal your username so that you can get dual benefit from this tournament. Not only do you get a chance to sign up players for your affiliate account, but you can increase your website exposure through a bunch of new “likes” in your Facebook page from people looking for your username. You’ll need to learn a little bit about Facebook development to implement a fans-only tab, but it’s not that hard.