The Best Poker Blogs
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011Recently, I’ve been searching the internet looking for the best poker blog. I was going to do a top ten list of blogs, but I discovered there are a lot of sub-categories of poker blog, so instead I’ll just focus on the best of each. Here are the three basic categories I found in my search: online site’s poker blog, news poker blog, and player’s poker blog.
A poker blog about an online poker site should be informative, entertaining and focused on their promotions and their customers. It’s easy to do one well, but to do them all is a hard trick to pull off, and as such there is only one that makes my best of list. No online site’s poker blog does it better than the bwin poker blog.
If it is a blog about an online poker site the blog should cover the poker world as a whole and also get down to specifics about the site. Looking through bwin’s blog there is general coverage of an event like the World Series but that will be coupled with focused coverage on their players that have won seats to the Main Event. The blog also has a listing of promotions for that week and does a good job of building their community by covering the action from their online tournament tournaments. Compared to some of the other sites, their poker blog seems to get it right most of the time while the others are scattershot at best. Even if you aren’t a player on their site, there are tidbits you’d enjoy.
In the next category of poker blogs that slant more to the news this was harder to judge. You don’t want to compare them to poker news sites because most blogs don’t have that scope. They fill more of a niche or are a window to one man’s (or a few men’s) view. There are four poker blogs/sites that seemed do a good job of tackling the poker world as a whole, and scratching out a niche of their own in that world. My comprehensive search across the Internet, which may have involved using one search engine repeatedly, turned up these guys: Wicked Chops Poker, Gulf Coast Poker.NET, Pokerati, and BJ Nemeth’s insider look at poker. They are all now on my bookmarks list and daily reads.
Wicked Chops mixes Maxim magazine with the poker world. Sometimes they get investigative, often times they are sarcastic, and other times they are just a good news source and link dump. Oh and they have pictures of pretty people which never hurts. Gulf Coast Poker.NET also covers poker news in a funny and straight to the point kind of way. They always focus on their corner of the poker world first but it’s a great read no matter where you live if you like poker. Pokerati is great about covering big stories and always seems to be in front of poker legislation and legalization topics. BJ Nemeth like all these blogs comes from an intelligent place. He’s not as light as the other three but he’s still a great read and somehow manages to generate a fresh perspective even though he’s a poker industry insider.
The players’ poker blogs cover the spectrum of success. The big names are Tony G, Daniel Negreanu, and Doyle Brunson. Tony G and Negreanu don’t ever sound like they are pulling punches and even better they aren’t shy about covering controversial topics. Doyle’s poker blog is at its best when he’s reminiscing about the old days. Two lesser known pros that have a poker blog worth checking out are Will Souther AKA the Poker Monkey and Terrence “Not Johnny” Chan. Will Souther dishes about anything under the Sun and absolutely nothing is off limits. If you ever wondered what a poker player that lacked a filter would write like just read his blog. Warning, it can be scary but always entertaining. Terrence Chan has a good sense of humor about himself, and a style of writing that makes you come back for more. Shannon Shorr would be in this category too, but he seems to have stopped updating his blog of late. Anyway, check out the selections if you haven’t already next time you need a poker blog fix.