I just had a trackback from a site I didn’t recognize. So I look it up and find that it’s one of the “zombie-blogs” popping up left and right. What is it all about? It’s providing “poker news”, namely taking parts of content from poker blogs, slapping some ads on it and that’s that. Then I go ahead and the server admin is telling me something along the lines of “if you don’t want your content available around the net, just stop pinging search-engines” – errm wtf?
The site in question, which shall receive no further link love through this post, is a clear case of content scraping in order to monetize other people’s content. The only thing that it’s keeping it from being outright 100% content theft is that it’s providing a “read more” link leading to the original authors blog, but does this make it any better? So you get a linkback, but the thing is that it’s still using the content in order to slap ads on them.

Anyone got some hands-on experience with similar sites? What’s your opinion on such sites? Does a linkback make something like this legit in your eyes?

Logged on to find a triple shootout to sunday’s million guaranteed played on shorthanded tables. Groovy, so you need to take down the first two tables and finish 3rd on the last table to get a ticket. Nice. I’m sitting at the first table with one aggressive player and 4 weak/tight players. Sure enough the borderline maniac hits card after card. So once we’re headsup I’m down 1.3k/7.7k. Another 35 minutes later I’m sitting in the commanding chiplead 6.6k to 2.4k. We donk around a little and I’m sitting a 6k, he has 3k. Then one of the “groovy” RiverStars ( 😉 ) hands comes off. I’m seeing the flop with QJo, a queen hits the board and I decide to set him all-in. He calls with A5o…what happens next? To quote Barry Greenstein’s book cover “Ace on the river…”. Nice, another friggin three outer headsup…hmmm…tasty. So he’s up 6k to 3k now. Damn it. Another nice hand later (Trip treys with a flush draw not enough as the flush hits the turn, but no four-flush for me). So I’m back to square one: 1.3k I push again with trips and a flush draw…he insta-calls…because he flopped a friggin straight…oops…and I’m out.

Summary:

1. I’m very satisfied with my play, especially headsup. I came back from a 1.3k/7.7k deficit with only one coinflip (AJs vs 55 which I won). So I grinded out quite some chips by playing an aggressive post-flop game.

2. I’m still annoyed about the one hand that cost me the chiplead and ultimately the table-win. It happens, but come on…why always on the friggin river.

3. I did something that I don’t normally do: I wished him good luck with the footnote that he would need it…it’s true obviously he had no post-flop skills whatsoever…but still I would normally keep that comment to myself…

4. This rant has been brought to you by the letter “g”…gimme a fuckin break!