Editor
I’m pleased to announce that as of this month, I have become the managing editor for PokerScout, a site that has both a long track record in this industry and a special place in my heart.
I’ve been writing about the gambling industry in one form or another for over a decade, having published my first article in the second half of 2014. Being offered this position seemed appropriate and a little bit funny, as PokerScout has been the one constant through the twists and turns of my career in gambling journalism. The site itself has had a meandering path as well.
Until now, my involvement with PokerScout has been indirect, but it has always been there one way or another. Before I get to PokerScout, however, I’d like to share a bit of personal background.
Before Gambling Journalism
Prior to joining the gambling industry, there were few constants in my career at all. In university, I studied astrophysics, but elected to pursue other interests rather than continue on to postgraduate degrees. For two years, I taught English to elementary schoolers in South Korea–first in Gwangju, then in Suncheon. It was there that I started to develop an interest in writing.
I came back to Canada and dabbled a bit in graphic design and journalism. I worked in a photo lab, color-correcting school photos. A Korean translation company hired me to edit engineering documents. I designed board games and had a few published. I made digital games too, though the obsolescence of Flash has since consigned those to the dustbin of the Internet.
On and off, I supplemented those various revenue streams by playing online poker. The best period for me was around 2012, when I switched from sit-and-go to multi-table tournaments and had a good run on PokerStars.
The following year, however, my son was born. Parenthood meant I no longer had the time for long tournaments, and I had no intention of becoming a full-time pro.
I knew I needed to stop dabbling and pursue more stable work. A friend from the poker forums, Steve Ruddock, was already making a career for himself in poker writing. He told me to expand some of my forum posts into articles and that he’d help me find a buyer.
That proved to be a life-defining moment. It’s also where PokerScout first came into the picture.
Getting Started in the Industry
Eleven years isn’t that long for a person, but it’s an eternity online. Most specialized media sites don’t last nearly as long as PokerScout has.
The first site I wrote for was called Part Time Poker. It’s long gone now, but it was a cozy little site that had, at one time, a thriving staking community for mid-stakes players.
During that period, PokerScout didn’t publish much news. Rather, it was one of the industry’s most highly-regarded news aggregators. My first article at Part Time Poker was an analysis of rake increases at PokerStars. PokerScout picked that up. Delighted, my editor almost immediately gave me free rein to write what I wanted, as long as it was with the goal of additional aggregation by PokerScout.
I became pretty good at producing the sort of industry analysis PokerScout was looking for. Maybe too good from Part Time Poker’s point of view: A little over a year later, PokerScout stopped picking up my stories and picked me up instead.
As I said, PokerScout wasn’t publishing much of its own news on the site at that time. Behind the scenes, however, it produced a newsletter using proprietary poker traffic data. The readership of that twice-weekly publication was small but elite, comprising most of the industry’s executives and poker directors. The site’s owner, Dan Stewart, had been writing the analysis himself, but brought me on to collaborate with him.
Together, we used his data to paint a picture of trends in the industry, player behavior, and the response to promotions and other changes to the products.
From Online Poker to Online Casinos
Eventually, Dan ended up selling the public-facing portion of PokerScout to another company. The two of us continued our work under a new name, GameIntel. That provided an opportunity to overhaul and expand the newsletter, and experiment with new ways of gathering and processing data. My graphing and forecasting skills grew strong during those years.
In late 2019, another opportunity for career advancement presented itself. I was offered a position by, somewhat coincidentally, the same company that had bought PokerScout.
I wasn’t sent to work on PokerScout at that time, though. Rather, I went to Online Poker Report, another longstanding brand that had emerged in the years immediately after Black Friday. Its focus had been on the efforts to bring regulated online poker to the US following the exile of the unregulated operators.
However, by that point—late 2019—the hype around online poker had started to fade. Instead, the repeal of PASPA in 2018 had shifted focus onto US sports betting and, to a lesser extent, whether online casinos would come along for the ride. Those iGaming angles became the focus for Online Poker Report.
Unfortunately, it meant that the brand was no longer a good fit for the content, so we folded Online Poker Report’s news content into another site: Bonus. After running the news at Bonus for a few years, I became the editorial manager for over a dozen sites in the same network, including another industry flagship, PlayUSA, and its associated regional sites.
The direction of those sites had begun to drift away from my specific skills and interests, however, so another change was called for. Once again, I ended up following PokerScout.
The Future of PokerScout
That brings us to the present, and my editorship here. What does the future look like for PokerScout?
To me, the PokerScout brand has always been about numbers. That happens to be one of my strengths, so you can expect that a lot of PokerScout’s coverage will take a look at the poker world through the lens of what’s quantifiable.
At the same time, I want to reach as wide an audience as possible. I’ve learned in my career that data-driven journalism in a field like gambling can be a little too much inside baseball if you’re not careful.
PokerScout is not going to be a site by and for industry insiders. It will be poker by the numbers first and foremost, but we’re going to cast a broad net and apply the same kind of thinking to topics across the gambling space and beyond. I want to see our coverage entertain, as well as inform.
What that means in concrete terms will depend a bit on you, our readers. I’ll be keeping an eye on what resonates with the audience, and that will shape this new chapter for PokerScout and for myself.
