5 Sources For Quality Poker Information

Sometimes most popular search engines disappoint us very much. How come the best search engine we use every day suggests us pages that have nothing to do with the information we are looking for? The first places at the search result page are occupied by websites that are absolutely useless and have no actual value. The web garbage is all over the place so we have to spend some time to choose between the gold and the ashes.

Every market has a part of information which is absolutely useless. The markets with big money involved usually have more garbage than the others. The poker information market is one of them. Just by entering a simple keyword in the search engine gets millions of pages. In most cases the old trustworthy websites just don't show up.

How can then people get quality poker information?

Source No. 1. Reliable and long-living poker information websites such as PokerNews.com and Pokerlistings.com provide information which is useful to all the poker players, fans and people who are simply interested in poker issues. Also any other poker-related website which has been around for a considerable amount of time usually provides quality information. Some of them use the popular magazine format. The best-known of the kind are Cardplayers, Bluff magazine and Poker In Europe (European poker issues). These websites have been on the market for quite a long time, therefore there is no need to worry about their credibility and information quality.

Source No. 2. The main principle of information search is "Ask". If you do not know something, just raise the question at some busy community site and you will get the answer. 2+2 is the biggest poker forum where people may ask any poker-related question and get full directions and explanations. Some of the other big poker forums are Cardschat, PocketFives, FullContactPoker etc. There is no need for asking the same question in all of them. To participate in at least two communities is more than enough.

Asking questions at the poker social networks such as PokerSpace, Railbirds, PokerDIY, PokerNations is also a good idea. They are quite busy with advanced poker players and community members eager to help people in search for quality poker-related information.

Source No. 3. Some industry news and views are best described in the most popular poker blogs. A lot of professional poker players write their blogs, but usually they are associated with some big poker brands, so the commercial aspect is also very important once we speak about quality information. The most popular and trustworthy poker blogs are Tao of Poker, Guinness & Poker, Las VegasVegas Blog etc. The blogs provide unofficial information, which is based on the opinion of the writer, therefore the reputation of the blogger guarantees the information quality. Not the website's credibility, nor its appearance on Google.

Source No. 4. The independent encyclopedia edited by thousands of people is the perfect source for the unbiased poker information as well. Wikipedia is the most popular information source on the internet, however some of the alternatives such as Google Knol, Citizendum, Encyclopedia.com (collection of published encyclopedias and dictionaries) should also be taken into consideration. Another interesting and trustworthy source is Answers.com which provides the information in Questions&Answers style.

Source No.5. If one is looking for poker industry news, the best source is the general news magazines and newspapers online - New York Times, CNN, BBC, MSNBC, FOXnews etc. These sources are very selective and provide only the most important news from the poker industry. Sometimes they are too selective and do not cover all the local issues, therefore it is suggested to search for the poker info using the Google News or Yahoo News search, which gather the information from a lot of trustworthy sources by using certain keywords.

It is always useful to have at least 5 different information resources for a person with the basic information selecting abilities. A larger amount of sources could be used by those who can easily detect the information which should be trusted and the one that should not.

However, there is also a need to highlight the information resources that should not be considered trustworthy. They usually contain a lot of useful information, but it must be extracted from a pile of garbage. The unreliable information sources are:

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other biggest global social networks, because they are widely used my the marketing people to promote their brands and deals
Press release and article directories are also used for marketing purposes, as it is impossible to check the quality of every submitted piece of information.
Link directories usually contain links to the garbage sites which are submitted in order to gain the value for some small ugly website with few pages and questionable quality content.
Questions&Answers directories answer all the questions about poker, but resources of these answers are of a very poor quality. In most cases they are used for marketing some brands and deals.
These online destinations are very popular and it does not mean that people searching for poker information should avoid or abandon them. These sources have valuable content which only needs to be found. Information search is a skill just like fast typing, wood cutting, sewing, knitting or any other and must be developed over the period of time. Teachers should provide such classes at school so that children could learn searching and information selection skills.

Marius is the author of Poker 2.0 Blog, which analyzes the connection between poker and the social media phenomena. He has been working in the poker information market for 5 years now.