The following is a paid review.My Holdem Tips (MHT) is a community website devoted to the subject of My Texas Holdem poker. It differs from the previous poker sites I've reviewed in one important way: it's a web 2.0 site.
Previous poker sites I've reviewed contained articles and reviews by the site's owners. As a Web 2.0 site, MHT has all the familiar features you would expect from a community and social media site:
- User logins - Sign in to the site, comment and email content.
- User contributions - The content on the site was primed by the site builders, but the bulk consists of uploaded content from users.
- Ratings - User's content is tagged and rated by the users.
- Forum - User to user communication.
User content contributions include videos and articles.
Videos
Videos on the site are currently divided into 8 categories. The videos include instructional videos, clips from online poker play, and commercials and music videos featuring video content. Videos can be sorted using the same techniques Youtube uses: by rating, most popular, most commented, etc...
The videos contributed by MHT itself are simple and useful. The basic ones are incredibly basic ("a deck of cards contains 52 cards ...") but the more advanced ones cover Holdem topics well.
Since the videos are contributed by the user, there's no guarantee that they're useful, helpful, or even Texas Holdem related. From what I could see, so far most of them appear to have something to do with poker.
As a result, some are salacious, covering topics like strip poker and such. Some of these include actual nudity. So be warned. Others are poker humor, commercials, and so on.
Articles
The articles follow the same categories and format as the videos; there are currently somewhat less articles than videos.
Some of the "articles" are simply notes someone wrote, while others are complete articles about strategy and so on. Some of these articles are from competing poker sites, complete with links back to their sites. ;-)
Forums
The forums are really basic, allowing you to enter a subject and text with smileys. If you're logged in, your user name is automatically applied to your post. Otherwise, the user information in the forums is divorced from the user information of the site, and anyone can post using any user name. And there is no way to delete or correct anything you've written.
Right now, the forums are empty of content, except for two of my test messages.
Resources/Lessons
The Resources link on the navbar leads to a ten step lesson plan in Texas Holdem, integrating videos and articles from the site and instructions on how to slowly step up into serious poker play. These steps include creating accounts at other poker sites, so I didn't follow them through.
This content was all provided by MHT and looks pretty sensible.
Reviews
Ratings are one of MHT's weakest areas.
Only 21 poker sites are listed, and there doesn't appear to be any way of adding any more. Each site uses only numerical ratings along ten or so categories. I'm not sure where the sum total ranking number of a site comes from.
Ratings are purely user based. On the other hand, like the other sites I've reviewed, it is obvious that MHT makes affiliate money from directing people to pay sites, but there is no disclosure to that effect or how it affects the site.
Terms and Conditions
Speaking of which, the bottom page of every site contains a blanket copyright notice, while the terms and conditions of the site specify that uploaded content is still property of the uploader. By uploading, the site can use it in any way they want, so long as the use is related to the site, until you remove the content.
The terms and conditions claim to also set out the privacy terms of the site, but I couldn't find any such terms.
Conclusion
If you are interested in joining a Holdem community, as opposed to simply visiting yet another guy's slick poker site, My Holdem Tips looks pretty nice. The videos are useful and/or entertaining. The site is smooth and easy to navigate, and the web 2.0 aspects are nice. With more users, it could become a hopping site.
Yehuda
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