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.

I played a cash game at a friend’s house on Halloween night. It was a blast, even though I lost money. It was a group of friends that I don’t get together with very often. I have a few different groups of poker players that I play with and these were one of the first groups I played poker with. During the game the hand below came up. I was on the long end of luck, and maximized it.

Poker, specifically No-Limit Texas Hold’Em (NLHE), is such a intricate game that you can easily find yourself in a predicament and have no idea how you got there. You can be in the Big Blind (BB) and feel “forced” to call a min-raise with Ace-Four, telling yourself that you’re only going to continue with two pair of better, and suddenly you find yourself at the river, all-in, because each step of the way you convinced yourself to take one more step. Flop – “Well I have top pair…” Turn – “Well now I have a flush draw, too…” River – “Well sure I’d be all-in if I called, but it’s only 1/2 the size of the pot…” And as you get knocked out of the tournament with A4 you sit back and think, “How did I get here? Didn’t I warn myself not to play a big pot with Ace-Four?”

I recently had a hand that really brought the point of sticking to the plan to the front of my mind. In this hand I did not stick to my plan. I made a plan, tried to enact it, and when the other player disagreed with my plan…I went along with his plan. His plan seemed OK. In NLHE this can get you into lots of trouble.

If you want, you can view the hand at – http://www.holdemhandhistory.com/play/5126/

In the BB I had 78s. Blinds were 300/600. A player raised to 2,200. This same player had just taken down the blinds with a raise of 2,400 (4x the BB). I wasn’t sure what the change in betting size meant, but I felt that even if he had a huge hand I could do some damage with my suited connectors. I wasn’t happy that I’d have to play the hand out of position (OOP) but I figured I had to gamble a bit if I was going to do anything in this tournament. I had been playing for an hour and a half and still had about a starting stack. So I make the call and we go to the flop heads-up. The flop comes K 8 4, rainbow. I make second pair. The King obviously scares me. I check with the expectation to call a reasonably bet, and fold to anything outrageous. I’m checking here for pot control. We don’t want to play a big pot with second pair, but we can’t just give up second pair every time. The preflop raiser checks too. The turn is another 4, completing the full rainbow. No real straight draws, no flush draws on the board. I check, again expecting to call a reasonable bet. Nope, he checks. When the river is a 3 I’m pretty sure that I have the best hand. Checking both the flop and the river, when in position, heads up, puts my opponent’s hole card range in either something ridiculously good like KK, for a full house, or a complete miss like AQ or AJ (or worse). I’d say that 50-70% of the time second pair is the best hand here. I cannot rule out the player making a bet large enough that I have to fold the best hand, so my plan was to make a blocking bet so that we can go to showdown for an amount I decide. I bet 2,000 into a pot of 4,700 – I’m trying to set the showdown price of 2K because I don’t want to call a pot-sized bet, for example. Without much hesitation my opponent raises to 5K. This is where my plan goes out the window. I specifically bet 2K so that I would not have to call a 5K bet after checking. But here I am, calculating my pot odds, looking at calling 3K to win 11,700. I end up convincing myself that I have to call, and the guy flips over KQs for a flopped top pair (we both had two pair by the turn when the board paired). WHAT?!

Now, I’m not even going to get into how poorly he played the hand, because I’m trying to improve my play, not his. But this is exactly how in NLHE you can get to the river and wonder, “How did I get here?” Preflop you could have told me, “You’re going to get to the river with second pair, and it’s going to cost you 7,200 total in chips to see if your second pair is the best hand…do you want to do that or fold now?” I’d fold 100% of the time. But when you allow yourself to inch further and further without remembering what your own game strategy was, you end up sticking 1/3 of your chips into a hand that you knew you should be playing differently. I knew that putting in a blocking bet of 2K was the correct play, but I allowed myself to negate that play by calling a sizable raise. Folding preflop is not necessarily the correct play for 78s, you should fold it many times and call a few times, but in this hand, folding the river when the opponent finally makes his move is definitely the correct play. That is, against most players that I face at the levels I play. For the record this was a $60 buy-in 3 table tournament, most of these guys aren’t thinking past level one.

I released my first iPhone app last week, Hold’Em Hand History. With lots of help from my brother and his company, HHH was developed because it is a product that I myself wanted for my own poker development; and assumed others would like it as well. I’m competitive, so I take most things seriously, even games. For many many years I played basketball at least once a week. In recent years nagging injuries have kept me from playing basketball, and after being introduced to poker it became the perfect fit for my competitive nature. So naturally (for me), I take poker seriously, even if it’s just a hobby.

To become a better poker play you have to be active. There are many concepts that you just won’t learn without reading books, reading magazines, watching poker on TV, or talking to people who have done all of those. Discussing hands you’ve played with peers is one of the best ways to develop your game. Hold’Em Hand History is a tool that allows you to record the details of live poker hands in order to discuss and share the hand with friends. You can record every detail of the hand, and then send an animated replay to friends of yours.

If you’re not discussing hands with friends, you’re not getting better at poker.