Seven years ago today, I pressed publish on the very first post of the PokerStars Blog. On that day in 2005, I’d been playing poker my whole life. I’d been blogging for six years. I’d been blogging about poker for almost as long. There was no reason to be nervous. And yet I was. As I sent the first PokerStars Blog story out into the ether, I wondered, “What is this going to turn into?” I had no way of knowing how big it would get.
Today, we here at the PokerStars Blog celebrate our seventh anniversary. In the seven years since that first post, we have grown from one guy with a notepad and a camera to an entire team of writers, photographers, and tech gurus that we like to think has no equal. How we got there is a road so winding, I don’t even remember all the turns. The long version of the story is told in a post I wrote last year chronicling our story for PokerStars 10th anniversary: How the PokerStars Blog got its start. If you’re interested in how we grew, that story tells it in a really big nutshell.
Today, there are more than a dozen PokerStars Blog outlets in just about any language you need. We have writers all over the globe who work tirelessly to bring you the best PokerStars online and live coverage there is. Our readership has grown exponentially since 2005 and we welcome millions of readers to this page every year.
How?
Well, I think there are a lot of reasons. First and foremost, PokerStars’ eye for and dedication to innovation has meant a great deal to the PokerStars Blog. There is no arena PokerStars enters that it doesn’t strive to be the best, and the PokerStars Blog is no exception. There is a top-down philosophy that mandates the people of the PokerStars Blog work to be the best at what we do. Despite our admitted and transparent bias toward PokerStars, we maintain the strictest of standards in our reporting efforts. We aim to not be a machine that spits out press releases. We actively work to offer you the most accurate, entertaining, and comprehensive poker reporting available (you can also read how that came about in this post. If our readership is any indication, we feel pretty confident we succeed most of the time.
Furthermore, over the years, we have all kept our eyes open on new innovations and technologies to help us better report the news. In the past few months, we have expanded our live coverage team such that we now can report all the hand-by-hand action while simultaneously providing the best color and features on tour. Here’s a look at a day in the life of a PokerStars live blogger.
It goes beyond that, however. All the philosophy in the world won’t matter if we don’t have the people to execute it. Fortunately, over the years, we’ve put together a staff of people who know how to report the news and tell good stories. A majority of the people who work for the PokerStars Blog were professional storytellers before they turned their focus to poker. Our staff is made up of former newspapermen, broadcasters, novelists, English professors, and top bloggers.
The result is what I consider to be the best team in the business turning out some of the most interesting stories around. In the end, we turn out hand-by-hand action of live events, in-depth features and interviews, and breaking news as it happens. Even when you don’t have time to read us here, we update the PokerStars Blog Twitter feed.
If you’re new to the PokerStars Blog or haven’t been able to read us daily, here are a few stories from the past few years that have stood out to me as representative of what we do and how we do it.
There are many, many more that I could list here from the likes of Rick Dacey, Martin Harris, David Aydt, Jennifer Newell, Kevin Mathers, Marc Convey, and the long, long list of other writers who contribute here. They are people who put their hearts and souls into blogging for us, and we’re lucky to have them on our team.
So, today we celebrate our seventh anniversary. It’s a happy day for us, and we’re looking forward to many more years of making the PokerStars Blog even better.
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