Introduction

Betfair.com was the World’s first betting exchange, opening it’s doors to online punters in June 2000. What sets Betfair apart from regular bookmakers is that customers chose their own odds and whether they want to back or lay an event. This means that at Betfair you are betting against other customers in what can best be described as the sportsbetting equivalent of a stock market. As payment for organizing thousands and thousands of bets between customers every day Betfair charges a 5% (and less for valued customers) commission for each winning bet.

The people behind the betting@Betfair site have realized the demand for an online community for all the Betfair customers and thus created a portal with background and supporting information for all the betting activities that take place at Betfair. Of course these days you won’t find a sportsbetting site that doesn’t also offer poker to its customers. Betfair is no exception and therefore betting@Betfair also has an extensive poker section which will be the main topic of the remainder of this review.

Betting@Betfair/poker has a pretty impressive line-up of featured poker writers including Annette Obrestad, Sorel Mizzi, John Tabatabai and Peter “Zupp” Jepsen who each run their own blog through the site. Most of the really good articles on the site come from betting@Betfair/poker’s in house poker expert, Marcus Bateman, who I must say knows what he’s talking about. You can also follow the progress of the small stakes poker player Matthew Pitt along with other selected Betfair poker bloggers.

Poker Bloggers and articles

To give you an idea of the selection of poker articles available through Betting@Betfair/poker I have selected my top 5 articles and listed them below:

• Rocket Science, by Peter “Zupp” Jepsen. From 3500$ to 65000$ in 50 minutes…..now how sick is that?
• The re-re-steal, by Marcus Bateman. If you can master and time the re-re-steal move you will have gained a powerful weapon in your pursuit of winning poker tournaments.
• Pot control, by Marcus Bateman. When you’re deep stacked in a tournament and up against another deep stack,  practising pot control will save yourself from losing a big portion of your stack with a strong, but not super strong, hand.
• Funny situations from recent live games, by John Tabatabai. I love reading tales from high stakes games where the pros get bad beated and make mistakes just like the rest of us
• Attacking the big stack, by Sorel Mizzi. Don’t be afraid to attack the big stack in poker tournaments as there is often a good amount of chips to be found here. On the other hand if you have a hard time playing a chip lead, read this article and think about what you can do to defend against people attacking your stack.

Annoyances

• The betting@betfair/poker site has accumulated a large number of good poker articles, but it is almost impossible to get an overview of the themes they cover. This is due to the fact that articles are solely arranged on the site by the the people who wrote them. As a consequence say you want to find an article about bankroll management, you then have to look through the list of articles posted by each writer to check whether it’s there or not.

• The left menu seems to have a mind of its own in certain situations. For example when Peter Jepsen’s blog is chosen, many of the menu items disappear. And if you click WSOP, the sequence of left menu items changes and new menu items appear. This is all a bit confusing.

Suggestions for improvements

• Improve navigation of article themes by adding a TAG or theme category system

• The “More about Betfair poker” section doesn’t contribute much. It contains old, and my opinion irrelevant, articles and might as well be removed from the site or remade into a page that adds value to the users

• The “Poker Video Vault” section is intuitive to navigate, but a lot of the videos are quite old. Maybe there should be a time limit on how long videos can stay online.

• The organization of the left menu is not intuitive. It feels quite unorganized and does not aid the user in navigating through the articles. I think the left menu would improve by having some overall headers such as “Featured Poker Pros”, “Featured Poker Bloggers” , “Articles” , “WSOP” etc. When clicking the header, a drop down list of the sub menu points should appear. For the “Articles” header it would be really nice if the drop down list contained links to the different poker themes covered on the site.

Conclusion

Betting@betfair/poker contains a large collection of really good poker articles written by people who know what they are talking about. All the site requires from you is a little patience to navigate through the articles and I’m sure you will find one that will improve your game.