Poker bankroll management, building and strategy – online poker guide

The PokerBRB leaderboard concept

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | Poker Freeroll, Poker News | No Comments

The PokerBRB leaderboard concept is simple. If you finish in the money (ITM) in our selected monthly freerolls and tournaments you automatically receive points for our leaderboard. The more ITM finishes you achieve, the more leaderboard points you will receive.

At the end of each competition month the top 20 players on the PokerBRB leaderboard will receive exclusive entry tickets to ALL our monthly finals.

If you for some reason for example only play our tournaments on Poker Nordica, but do well enough in them to finish in the top 20 of our leaderboard, you will receive a ticket for our Poker Nordica montly final as well as all the other finals we have arranged on other poker sites.

Of course we can only issue tickets to players who have a registered account on the poker site in question. Therefore, if you are good enough to achieve a top 20 leaderboard finish, make sure to register an account on all the poker sites who host our monthly finals. This way you will get full value for your efforts.

See you at the tables!!!!

Tags: Poker Freeroll, Poker News

Our new PokerBRB point system will be introduced in November’s tournament competition

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | Poker News | No Comments

Up until now the PokerBRB point system has rewarded buyin tournament players with a 1 x buyin point bonus. From now on this point bonus will be 10 x buyin instead.

We have done this to acknowledge that it is often harder to finish in the money in buyin tournaments.

Here’s an example of how the new point system works:

If you finish in 1st place in a 1000 player freeroll you receive 99,9 points – 100*(1000-1)/1000. With the new point system you will receive 199,9 points if you finish in 1st place in a 1000 player 10$ buyin tournament – 99,9+10*10.

Hope you enjoy it!

Tags: Poker News

November’s 45$ refer-a-friend competition hosted by PokerBRB

Monday, November 2nd, 2009 | Poker News | 2 Comments

We will be kicking of November’s freeroll competition with a 45$ Refer-a-Friend Competition.

The rules are simple. Tell your friends about the PokerBRB freeroll league and if they sign up, remind them to add your forum username in the “Referred by” field on the sign-up page.

In order to count towards the refer-a-friend competition standings your friends have to become active players. This is done by  registering at least one Poker Site username in the PokerBRB database and participating in our freerolls.

The competition will start today November 2nd and run until the 31st of November. We will keep track of the competition standings on the PokerBRB forum. The player who refers most friends over the  period will receive 25$ payed into his Poker Nordica account at the end of the competition. The runner up will receive 15$ and the 3rd place 5$.

Best Regards
Your PokerBRB team
Mark, Artur and Michael

If you have any questions regarding the competition please feel free to contact us on support@pokerbrb.com

Tags: Poker News

How (not) to deal with the slow customer support at UK2net

Sunday, November 1st, 2009 | Off topic | 19 Comments

October 27th the pokerbrb.com domain was up for renewal with our host UK2net. Somehow UK2net managed to screw up the DNS for the domain which resulted in our site crashing for 5 days until now. In the process they have managed to charge us 3 times for the domain renewal. This short summary sets the scene for the 5 days of frustration we went through until our site came back online today. I’m writing this piece because I do not want you to make the same mistakes we did when dealing with the customer support at UK2net.

The customer support at UK2net works through a ticket system which they seem to be very proud of. McKay Howell from the technical support team at UK2net explained to me in a very nice way how the system works:

“I would like to take this quick opportunity to remind you how our ticketing systems work. Our support technicians answer requests on a first come, first served basis which means that when you first submit a ticket it will be at the very bottom of the queue to be answered and gradually work its way to the top. However, each time you submit a response before we can reply to your ticket just causes it to be pushed back down to the bottom. We are very rarely getting a chance to even look at your ticket because you have replied numerous times hour after hour and this just sends it right back to the bottom of the queue. We recommend that you simply submit one request with all of the relevant information at once in order to get the quickest response.”

So basically you are supposed to send in a ticket and wait patiently until they answer. This could be in hours or days…there’s really no way of knowing because there is very rarely an online live support available. I forgot to mention that if you by mistake (or simply because you did not know any better) send in a ticket to a wrong department you have to wait until the ticket is passed through the elaborate Uk2net support system to the correct department. In the meantime your site is down and you are losing customers and potential income every minute that goes by. See how frustration can build up?

I’m afraid to say that in my case I was not very patient and in fact this caused delays in fixing our site as McKay Howell points out:

“In the future PLEASE only submit one ticket on the same issue. You are correct in saying that this is very confusing for our technicians. You have also submitted tickets on the same issue to numerous departments and this causes even greater confusion. Please note that it does not speed the resolution of these issues any further and indeed actually takes longer for us to solve as we have to track several tickets to determine if another technician already replied to you.”

Sorry Uk2net…my bad. I can see how the slow process of fixing our site is totally my fault. In addition I would also like to apologize for some of the childish support tickets I submitted during my mental meltdown…..brace yourselves this might get ugly.

I started my dialogue with Uk2net mildly agitated, but still relatively calm

Shaheen

When can I expect this problem to be solved????? I am completely at
your mercy here and hove no way to fix the problem myself. You have
made a mistake that is costing me money every minute. Where’s your
sense of responsibility for your customers? I cannot believe it can
take this long to solve the problem. Do something!!!!

Mark

I would really appreciate if you could tell me what I can do to speed
up the process of activating my domain. We run a league and today is
the start of November’s competition. It is critical for our success
that our site is up and running again.
You have made a mistake…please fix it.

Mark

Then after a few days of downtime for our site things started to escalate. Especially because UK2net assured me the problem was solved which is obviously wasn’t. Guys seriously, do yourself the favor and go the the site url before you claim that the problem is fixed.

Hi

I was told my site www.pokerbrb.com would be up and running again this
morning. As this is clearly not the case I would like to know when it will
be up. I am amazed you have taken this long to solve the problem. Your
customer service sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mark

On the 4th day I finally lose my mind and go mental on the UK2net support system

My site is still down. It is absolutely critical that I get it up and running tomorrow. WHY IS IS SO DIFFICULT FOR YOU TO FIX THE PROBLEM????? WHY DON*T YOU ANSWER THE TICKETS?????

FIX MY SITE!!!!!!!!!

You’re responsible for my site being down for 3 days now. Do you have any sense of responsibility? FIX IT NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How fast can we fix the pokerbrb.com website….doesn’t that sound like a fun game to play?

LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA ……I want my site fixed, I want my site fixed…I will not use you as a host anymore, I will not use you as a host anymore LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA

You cannot seriously mean that is takes you in excess of 3 days to update the DNS of my site. Get you act together for fucks sake. You are supposed to be a support not a bunch of headless amateurs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When looking back on the incident I cannot help but feel a bit ashamed. I mean these guys are just sitting there trying to do their job the best they can and then some basket case owner of site which has only been down for 5 days starts spamming the support system with angry messages. Sorry UK2net. I will end this article with my final feedback to UK2net and just want to say that if anyone from UK2net find their way to my blog I hope you take my feedback seriously and implement some systems to improve your support so you don’t have to deal with people like me in the future.

Hi McKay

Well it was about time you fixed my site. I cannot believe it has
taken 5 days to fix a simple DNS error. I recent the fact that you try
to push the blame of the slow fix back on me. It is YOUR
responsibility and only YOUR responsibility to fix sites that are down
ASAP. People lose money every day when their sites are down.
When people’s livelihood is on the line they get frustrated when the
problems do not get fixed. This is amplified when the only way to get
into contact with you is a support ticket system. And even more so
when it seems that all that is happening is you guys bouncing tickets
back and forth between your different departments.
I do not see anywhere on the support website that one should only send
one ticket. Hence the most obvious reaction to a severe problem is to
send as many tickets as possible to wake you up.
You say that it takes longer time to fix the problem when people send
multiple tickets but I do not buy that. If one of your technicians had
taken the responsibility they owe to their customers and checked up on
my site on a regular basis then this problem would have been solved a
lot faster.
I am not the only person who has experienced problems with your
support. For one of my friends it took 30 days to get his site back
online.

IMO the biggest problem with your support is that one feels completely
powerless when the only thing one can do is sit and wait for a ticket
to be answered. In addition one feels resentment because you make
people pay for mistakes you make. This does not paint a positive
picture of your company.
You would benefit SOO much from having a 24/7 online live support
system where technicians can be contacted directly.

I am sorry to say that this whole incident has left us with a very
negative feeling about UK2net and we are currently discussing our
options regarding changing host. Sure our site works now, but what
about next time you make a mistake….will it be offline for weeks then?

I hope you send this email to the person responsible for support and
customer service. You owe it to yourself to improve your company.

Mark

Tags: Off topic