I am a beginning poker player myself. I play only play money games in Facebook’s Texas Holdem poker, but I never play for real money. I know how to bluff a little and the main principles of poker strategy, but I still cannot be called a real poker player.

Guess what is the best gift for the beginning poker player like me? A free bankroll that wouldn’t be too small (some rooms give $5 and brag about it as if it was a pile of gold) would be a great start.

Some time ago a friend had transferred me $20 to one of iPoker rooms. I have played some SnG’s, participated in a bigger tournament and made about $250. I then lost it playing stupid casino games. I should have stayed with poker, as I was winning sometimes.

I think my story looks familiar to majority of the beginning poker players. If you guys want to start your poker carrier, start from small stakes. If you have no money or ways to deposit – no problem! PokerNews have just launched a generous money give away. They are transferring $25 to every new PartyPoker player who signs up using the bonus code PN50FREE and submits their data in a simple registration form.

 

It's a pity I cannot participate in this promo (as I am a PokerNews employee), but I promise that this is one of the best promos on the internet. Some other sites are also doing it, but the real value comes with time as PokerNews has a bunch of PartyPoker huge value freerolls (there were a few freerolls for PokerNews players when the winners got entries to the WSOP 2009 main event + some travel expense money). Party Poker is one of the biggest online poker rooms in the world (was the biggest before US Government closed the door to online poker), so there is no reason to worry about the credibility of the room. It’s a pity that US players cannot participate in this promo as Party does not accept them.

So if you still do not have a PartyPoker account, please go to http://partypoker.pokernews.com and claim your gift. It is waiting for you.

Those who use Gmail and other Google services, especially iGoogle – customized start page – already know about the possibility to add some interesting gadgets to it. PokerNews provides a couple of them:

Poker News gadget

 

A simple and nice gadget provides the news from Pokernews.com. If you click the “Settings” link, you can select some categories if you do not want to see all the news. You can also set the number of news to be shown if you have more space or if your space is limited. To add the Poker News gadget just click the Google button below.

In the nearest future we will make the multilingual version of this widget, so you would be able to add the poker news to Google in Dutch, German, French, Russian, Portuguese and 20 more languages.

Poker Term Of The Day

 

Click "Add to Google" button

Learning is the main key in poker professionalism. One of the most important issues in poker life is the specific vocabulary and jargon used among poker players. Beginners should add this Poker Term of the Day widget in order to learn at least 1 word per day. (It took me 3 days to understand what GG and NH meant at the online poker room table chat). The widget is simple and easy to understand.

You can also add this widget to your Gmail's left side column by the XML URL - http://www.pokernews.com/gadgets/news/pngg_news_re ader.xml
Here is the detailed instruction how to add any Gadget to Gmail by custom URL. You may also add this widget to your blogger.com account. Here are the instructions how to do it. Please remember to use the keyword "pokernews" when you search for a gadget by the keyword, so that and you would find the list of all the Pokernews gadgets to select from.

In the future we will add more widgets as we are still working on them. PokerNews has also got some other Poker Tools for webmasters and bloggers - free Texas Holdem poker odds calculator among them. I have also wrote about the first Adobe Air Odds Calculator desktop application for Windows Linux and Macintosh.

Great news! WSOP 2009 will be covered in PokerNews Live Reporting section AND Twitter!

Some poker media companies use Twitter only as a tool for spam. PokerNews does not and will never do so, as we hate spam and spammers . We use @pokernews in Twitter to provide quality information for as much people as possible. Poker is the game of fun, so everybody should know all the interesting issues and events happening in poker world .

I am very proud to announce that WSOP live updates of ALL the events will be broadcasted directly to Twitter even if 5 events are broadcasted simultaneously.

Everyone should follow @pokernews_live account to get the latest live reporting updates on their phones and other devices or applications.

If you are already following PokerNews on Twitter, please let all your friends know about it by retweeting any of the updates.

We will also implement this automatic update feature on all the other PokerNews sites (Dutch Pokernews in the first place with @pokernewsnl account).

After the WSOP is over we will continue to use this Twitter account for PokerNews reporting, including EPT, WSOP Circuit events, PokerNews Cup etc. So this is not a one-time venue. We will do this as long as Pokernews will do the reporting of live poker tournaments.

P.S. Our TV hostess Gloria Balding will be using this account for her personal updates as well as for the WSOP 2009 videos.

RSS saves your time, folks! Indeed, you do not need to visit the website every time you want to see what's new. It is brought automatically to your RSS reader, so you are always aware about the new content.

My.Pokernews.com has got lots of blogs written every hour. In order not to get lost, we have updated our RSS feed and created a special RSS feed for blogs according to their language.

If you would like to subscribe to English blogs only, please use this RSS feed URL:

http://my.pokernews.com/blogs?lang=en&rss=true

If you want the blogs in another languages – no problem! Please insert your desired language abbreviation (languages are only the ones that have a pokernews site) instead of EN in blogs?lang=en particle of URL and you will have your language blog list. For example:
Dutch blogs can be subscribed to by using http://my.pokernews.com/blogs?lang=nl&rss=true
Portuguese - http://my.pokernews.com/blogs?lang=pt&rss=true
Estonian - http://my.pokernews.com/blogs?lang=ee&rss=true
Hungarian - http://my.pokernews.com/blogs?lang=hu&rss=true
Japanese - http://my.pokernews.com/blogs?lang=jp&rss=true
Russian - http://my.pokernews.com/blogs?lang=ru&rss=true

And so on.

We will also create a widget for webmasters like Poker News Widget, so that every blog owner would be able to add it to their blog or website.

You probably also know that you can subscribe to a single Blog by clicking "Show More" and choosing The RSS 2.0 link at the right column actions box. Of course, you can also subscribe using the internal My.PN notification system.

 

Actions Box

Hopefully our "All language blogs" RSS feed will be helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions by writing comments to this blog post – let everyone know what can be done better.

Hello, folks. As you have already noticed, main PokerNews.com site has changed the design and layout. Some new features are launched as well. Pay some attention to new Online Poker section. There you will find some new sections such as Latest Gossip and Rumors, Online Poker Blogs, Head to Head Interviews, Hands of the Day and of course Room reviews. Also new section about Texas Holdem has been launched. It is for beginning poker players in order to get them acquainted with wonderful game of poker .

What has been done? The column was moved to the left. Now you can see the submenu in the left column as well as top reviews and some special promos. Right column remained for tournament calendar and room reviews. The textual field now is in the middle. i am sure the reviews design will change soon, but shhhh... this is a secret.

I would like to ask you to examine the new design and some pages and tell me your opinion in a simple way - using Poll. If you use Twitter, please RT it.

Thanks a lot. Your opinion is very valuable to us.

http://twtpoll.com/g3ngw0

UPDATE. Here is poll results after couple of days after the poll was started.

 

Poll results March 20th

As You can see more than a half liked the new Pokernews.com design, however some of people still feel nostalgic about the old one That's normal as it takes time to get used to changes. More than quarter thinks we could have done better. Sure, we can never reach the perfectness I am leaving this poll open in case you haven't voted yet and want to vote now.

The latest internet hype is undoubtedly simple service allowing to post 140 characters about everything one thinks, feels, recommends, dislikes, wonders and endorses. This service is micro-blogging derived from status updates and following what your friends are doing. If still not clear what I am speaking about, here is the hint - Twitter.

There are thousands of articles in the media about Twitter with x10 advices how to start and succed, so I am not going into it. Just can tell one thing. If you use email, IM and can read&write, you MUST use Twitter.

PokerNews Also went on twitter some time ago. In the beginning our account @pokernews was registered by some guy who just wrote his email. Probably he wanted to trade the password of this account, so Twitter closed it and gave us the default password in February 4th. Today is February 18th - 2 weeks from the start and today we have 235 followers. That's really good achievement!

@pokernews provides the information what's interesting in PokerNews group of the sites. There are few Twitter accounts which are automatic generators of the tweets (from RSS feed), but they are not live. Pokernews writes live, reacts to questions, sometimes writes some humour or does not understand jokes (remember, I am not native English speaker), makes lots of grammar mistakes, but it is 100% live. I think this is our advantage and we should exploit it in future. PokerNews is a huge information factory with lots of sites and lots of originally written information, therefore we will always have what to share with all poker lovers .

Also @pokernews does not spam. There are some sites which provides really shitty content, but advertise it as if it was 8th wonder of the World. Only sometimes we provide links to the news stories about special PokerNews promos - mainly freerolls which are one of the biggest added value promos in the market. Everyone should agree

Enough boasting. You should be following us in Twitter and will see yourselves. That is really easy and exciting. If you still do not have account, please create one and tell about yourself to all your friends.

It's been some time since my last post about Pokernews features. Something has changed now. I will continue introducing the features, only not inside, but outside Pokernews. Now I work as social networking manager, therefore my main focus is on most popular social networks. Let's start from Facebook.

 

Facebook now is booming. It is translated to 36 languages, therefore there are no more language issues (as some features are really complicated, so difficult to understand for not native English speakers). There are lots of activities for poker players in Facebook. The main one is playing the Zynga poker application Texas Holdem Poker. It is really intersting to see who has got the bigger rankings among your friends...

Facebook has got a very nice feature - being Fan of some pages. So you can be a Fan of Pokernews FaceBook Page and get some updates without visiting Pokernews every day. Now there are no many fans, but once we reach some more, i will organize some added value tournament. We had some in the past and people loved it.

Also we have a couple of Facebook groups with more people
Main Pokernews Group
UK PokerNews Group
IT PokerNews Group for our Italian readers (you all should know that Italian government made poker as not quite legal activity and ISPs ban the rooms' websites)

Some time ago we even created PokerNews application, but i will not tell about it as it needs some rework

If you are on Facebook or would like to go there and looking for some activity, please always remember that PokerNews is there. Or myself. I am always glad to make new friends. Check my personal Facebook Profile or search me using my real name - Marius Kuitniauskas.

With great pleasure I can introduce one more feature in MY Pokernews - leagues.

Poker Leagues are one of the best ways to get into various tournaments because pokernews makes only big ones. If you look at the present list you will see that we offer the entrance to EPT Prague, Deauville, Budapest main events as well as PokerNews Challenge Slovenia seats (9!) and Budapest Open. Soon we will introduce more leagues in all the languages. Please make sure you are informed about the possibility to participate in them.

Informing that we have launched a new Team Pokernews page - PokerNews Cup Australia 2008.

As WSOP team it contains lots of tournaments where you can play and win the entry plus travel accommodation to Melbourne - Crown Casino.