Now, more about affiliates than you probably ever wanted to know…

A poker affiliate is a company or person that receives a commission for sending new players to the poker sites that they work for.  For the most part, affiliates attract new players through online marketing efforts.  Their commission can either come as a one-time up-front payment or a percentage of the action the player gives the site for as long as they have an account.

Many markets have affiliate programs, but according to pokeraffiliate.com, “Online poker is without a doubt one of the most lucrative affiliate markets available. What started simply as a ‘refer a friend’ program escalated into what is now providing a full time income for thousands of people with multiple revenue streams.”

Affiliates bring in new players, which is good for the poker community.  They deserve to be compensated for the work they do to get players to sign up. The only problem with the poker affiliate system, in my opinion, is that at some sites, the host site and it’s affiliates leave the player out of the initial contract negotiating process.  This causes new players to be unknowingly forced into unbreakable contracts that are not in their best interest.

At Full Tilt, new players that sign up for a poker site with a bonus code from an affiliate enter an unbreakable contract with a third party.  Some players have even been linked with an affiliate just by  visiting a site which attaches a cookie. Once a player is linked to an affiliate on Full Tilt, she can never terminate her relationship with the affiliate or switch to another affiliate.   Theoretically, a player could negotiate new terms with their affiliate, but that is only if the player can contact her affiliate, which is very difficult to do in most cases. And even then, the affiliate has little, if any, incentive to offer the player a better deal.

So that means, if you signed up for Full Tilt long before you’d even heard of online rakeback, forget about getting it now.   If you’re frustrated that Full Tilt won’t tell you the name of the third party making money off of you, tough.   Want to sign up with an affiliate that will offer you free use of a training site? Too late.  This may seem like a non-issue for most players, but if someone plays a good amount of hours or at high enough stakes, the rake they miss out on is substantial enough to force them to extreme measures.  Many honest players that have held accounts on Full Tilt for years are forced  to choose between continuing to feed the affiliate black hole, breaking the rules by creating a new account, or leaving Full Tilt all together.  Many, many players are trying to negotiate this frustrating situation, and if you don’t believe me, just visit this thread on 2+2 on this topic.  As of now, it’s had over 64,000 views.

It doesn’t make sense for Full Tilt to prioritize relationships with affiliates over players.  Many of the posters on the thread mentioned above told Full Tilt that they would leave unless the terms of their affiliate deal were changed, and Full Tilt let those players walk out the door. The lack of options frustrate me as a player, and it would make me mad if I was an affiliate, since affiliates lose money when players stop playing.  No one wins when players are forced to leave a site, and I wish Full Tilt would correct the situation.

In the next post, I’ll talk about what players can do to protect themselves from an unsatisfactory affiliate deal.