Is Poker a site we should keep around?

Question

I'm a community manager here at Stack Exchange, and part of our jobs here on the Community team is to periodically review sites in beta to see how they're progressing. Part of this involves encouraging periodic self-reflection, and part of it involves just looking at the site: the questions being answered, meta activity, traffic numbers, active users, etc.

It shouldn't surprise anyone reading this that, while there is a core group of members here, there are not very many - and the daily traffic and number of questions being asked does not indicate there will be many more any time soon. Those of you who are here are doing a fine job, but with only about half a dozen people with more than 500 reputation on the site regularly, there's a real danger that quality could head downhill in a hurry.

One concern we have to address is in moderation: one of the Pro Tempore moderators has all-but stopped visiting the site. Moderation is a volunteer activity and moderators are free to come and go as they please, but on such a small site, moderation is particularly important when there are so few people who can perform any kind of housecleaning. We definitely don't want a lack of leadership to mark the end of the Poker site, so I need someone to step up and volunteer to help out in that area.

When we launched this site into beta, there was some concern that it was unnecessary given the game was already on-topic on Board & Card Games; you've surpassed the traffic on that particular tag, but that's not saying much - and on a dedicated site, you miss out on the review and moderation support that comes with being a part of a larger community.

To be clear: we don't need to shut this site down right now. But I have to say, the writing is on the wall, and if y'all do want to keep doing this, I'd like to hear that and - more importantly - hear why: is Poker.SE doing anything to fill a niche in the poker-playing community, is it in any way "making The Internet better"?

...and if so, how can we avoid this turning into a complete ghost town?

Answer 1

Yes.

n.b. Answer best read whilst listening to Hans Zimmers "Time" ;)

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I believe this site avoids something that puts off so many people from using other more established forums. Noise.

Experience counts for so much in poker, and that's what makes this place unique. More signal. Even 2+2 tried to implement a basic reputation system through vBulletin a few months ago but it failed because of the software. Supposedly, one of Poker.SE's biggest competitors wanted what we have here!

Poker is such a big, diverse topic that it's not even niche. It's Epic. Put aside the people who fill threads on other forums with meaningless comments and tenuous answers and you've got the inner workings of the human mind in ALL it's glory. Maths, Psychology, Logic, Emotions, Creativity, you name it, it's here! We just need people.

Admittedly, Poker.SE is a small site, but as a moderator being privy to the traffic data, we are growing, slowly.

"I walk slowly, but I never walk backward." - Abraham Lincoln

The last time I looked, and I look everyday, I'm pleased. I see the numbers going in the right direction. It may not be enough to have StackExchange keep the site alive, and that's understandable, but we're moving in an upwards direction. We're getting stronger, slowly.

Looking at the success of many other poker forums, I have little doubt that the content is there to constantly fill the pages of Poker.SE. All of the sites I know have had to dedicate threads within their sub-topics to cater for those that just want to chat, and still they generate Hundreds's if not Thousands's of new questions, valuable questions, every day!

Poker.SE's problems aren't content related, they're traffic-related. B&CG generated just 24 questions with a poker tag since October 2010, if that's up to date. Poker.SE created almost 10-fold that, 230, in 11 months (Jan 2012-Dec 2012).

Poker.SE can make the internet a better place as you say, but a goal that big needs time to achieve it. People have tried before with this format and they've not succeeded. It's a pity, because clearly when this gap in forum format arises in the poker community, people see the need to fill it. I don't think there's any doubt that it's valuable, but making it catch on is apparently the difficult part. I also don't believe there has been an implementation of this format for poker that's better than Poker.SE.

It's not all my thoughts, but it's a start.

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If I had to point out just one thing that would help a lot, is that we don't have a dedicated hand-history converter. FlopTurnRiver.com takes requests for new formats to be added to their HH converter here: http://www.flopturnriver.com/reports/Report_Bugs.php?type=format. If people want to push that forwards, as I have, make a request for Poker.SE

Answer 2

Not sure.

Isn't part of the goal of this site to make long-lasting, useful, canonical answers? I see very little of that on this site, and most people who talk about poker on the Internet have never been encouraged to have a goal like that.

Most hand discussion is, importantly, discussion: often the participants comment on many different features of the situation. Relatively infrequently is the best play derived from anything like first principles. Moreover, discussion of specific hands is the sort of thing that is difficult to work, SEO-wise. It's not clear that the most similar hands will share many keywords.

I've played poker for a decade, I co-host a poker podcast with thousands of listeners every week, I'm a long-time 2+2'er, etc. I'd really love it if this site were something different and better. But I'm not sure how we can encourage people to do things in the Stack Exchange way--I've never seen it done before, and I certainly don't think that it's being done here so far.

Answer 3

Yes.

I am not very good at the game yet. I've only been playing about 8 months. And at my age I sometimes have trouble remembering the hand history to properly post a question which may explain why I haven't posted that many. That said, this is the best place I've found for asking questions and getting good answers. I'll volunteer as a moderator if that helps.

Answer 4

YES

I think the twoplustwo format is essentially flawed, and that a stack-exchange-type system is much more suitable for hand review at least. I believe that the main place for discussion poker will be a SE-type place within a couple of years. poker.SE seems like a great place that will fill this goal when the time is right. It also has the advantage of being community-oriented, non-commercial and not for profit, unlike many of the other sites. As others have said, I think this just mainly needs time -- people will flock here in the end.

Answer 5

YES

To be honest I have only just discovered the site myself, but I use StackOverflow pretty much daily and will probably start doing the same on the poker site.

I dont mind volunteering to be a moderator.

Answer 6

YES

A userfriendly SE Q&A infrastucture will allow Poker.SE to replace a lot of forums. As it happened earlier with another SE sites. It's important to involve the active players and professionals, but that is a slow process. We need some patience.

And, yes, availability of convenient hands converter is critically important because most of the questions will eventually concern the analysis of specific hands

Answer 7

What I would like to point out is that the whole structure of Poker.SE fits perfectly with the needs of a poker Q&A website. This formula that StackExchange websites rely on can very easily (and should !!) replace more established poker forums.

Like Toby Booth said: the website is perfectly structured and works fine. However, its problem is the lack of traffic and small members count. I mean, it does have these things but it's nothing compared to the gigantic StackOverflow.

If we could find a way to somehow draw the crowds here, it would just be perfect.

In the meantime, I believe the best choice is to keep waiting and monitoring it. I don't know how the traffic is evolving, but I visit the site daily and I can sense that slowly but surely the activity is going up. This is why I suggest to keep the site around, at least for now.

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As for the moderation requirements: I'm totally available. Like I said above: I visit the site daily and there's very little chance that will change. I checked now out of curiosity and I see that I have the 5th highest reputation, which is very good I believe :) . Also, I do have some moderation experience that I made on a website, so I do have diplomacy and know how to deal with general problems that users (especially beginners) may have. In addition to this, I now learned how all the StackExchange mechanics work (reputation, flagging, close votes, reviewing, editing, migrating offtopic questions etc.) by being active on other StackExchange sites (like StackOverflow).

Answer 8

I'm Not Sure

I like Poker, but wonder if it meets the SE guidelines for viability. Poker averages something like 0.4 questions a day, versus a guideline of 15, and 150-odd visits a day, versus a guideline of 1500. Poker also has only 12-13 users with over 500 rep, and six of these are also on Board and Card Games including yours truly. (I used 500 as the cutoff because that's what's needed to cast close and reopen votes.)

And if we are short on moderators because of the limited number of high rep members, that could be a problem. Maybe we're better off pooling our moderator (and other resources) with Board and Card Games.

Answer 9

YES

I use Stackoverflow almost every day because of my work. And when I started to play poker more professional, I looked for something similar like Stackoverflow for poker and then I found this SE.

And yes - we need people. And they will come as soon as we get the good questions and good answers. I think there will be two types of questions.

First of all there are hand discussions. And like Toby already mentioned, a tool to implement hand replays would give us a good boost. Same as a short-cut to display cards in Text like [As] for ace of spade.

Second are questions around poker - about rules, tournaments, bankroll questions and so on.

I'm working for one of the world wide biggest customer support companies as a programmer/product-manager and imho there's nothing on the market that is as good as SE format. It's just a question of time and our small community here until more poker player realize that SE is by far better than any forum software.

I'm in close contact with some major pro poker players - maybe I can try to get their eyes on poker.SE - so YES we need this poker.SE!

Answer 10

Maybe no.

There is really nothing very exciting here or even all that useful. The number of users is flat, the number of visitors is flat. The site has no growth and this is not likely to change. It may very well be that the question/answer format is not a good fit for poker.

The quality of answers is good, but the quality of questions is rather low, most are kind of inane. I find it troubling that most of the experts do not really post many good questions. Poker is a game that is never really mastered and experts should be asking questions for the other experts about their game. These are really the kind of questions that would add important material to the dialogue here and go very far in making this site worthwhile. It does not speak well for this site that the experts (including me) really do not find it to be a worthwhile resource for improving their game. There is a lot better content about the game of poker at other places on the Internet. If we ask ourselves if this site is improving the internet (for poker players) it is hard to say that it is doing much.

Answer 11

I am relatively new to this site. But I have and been active in other SE sites for a few years.

Like any site the challenge is the wide range of expertise. This is compounded by on the surface poker is simple but on the high end a very complex game.

The site seems to be advancing.

What I have seen in some site struggling for survival is accepting question with no or little research just to get volume. Close trivial questions.

There is another struggling site where one of the moderators posts way out there questions just for volume and I have told him and SE I did not think it was proper.

I would volunteer to be a moderator and I have been polite here but be aware I can react to repeat stupid in negative way and have had to serve time outs on one other site.

The trivial questions on what hand is better seem to get a lot of traffic. Maybe poker should tolerate them for traffic.

Answer 12

Yes.

Hello from 2016. I think this site has very much to discuss regarding Poker. There are tons of books written that could be discussed about in an objective, theoretical way.

I like this site although I am relatively new and, despite the community having a questionable, anti social, attitude like other SE sites, I think this topic has very much to do and we can make it a -honestly- better place.

Poker is like Chess: it is not the last word said ever. Books are written everyday, poker styles are created every day, and poker questions are asked every day.

Perhaps we should encourage participation in this site by other means, since today most SE sites are visited by people which comes from SO, and SO is for programmers. Most programmers have good math knowledge and they feel there is no need to ask questions in a site when they can calculate the answer mathematically with sophomore-level knowledge.

We should:

• Try to not be *sses. We are all humans and commit mistakes. There should be no place for rudeness.
• Try to promote the site in, perhaps, other Poker sites, out of the StackOverflow already-cast shadow. Most of the times a Q&A site will not compete with other Poker sites since those sites provide, perhaps, detailed articles or even a game server.
• Increase the topicness, e.g. book recommendations, asking about what certain famous player said in TV in channels like ESPN or PokerSports regarding their strategy, ...