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Lorinda's Affiliate Site Reviews

Pokercritic

The first thing that alerted me to the existence of this site was someone at Empire poker telling me the standard spam line of something like "Hey, have any of you guys been to Pokercritic, they really helped me."

This resulted in an argument (predictably) about affiliate sites and I figured that I had better go nd take a look to make sure that my guess of cheapo spam infested site was actually correct.

The first part of this assumption was actually wrong.
The site is quite pleasing to look at, and well laid out. The person writing is polite to his customers and articulate.

Unfortunately, the first standard check at such a place is the Party/Empire service write up. This is usually as clear an indication of total bias as you can get. Party scores 8/10 while Empire scores 10/10, interesting as they have the same support and although it is possible that Empire gets some kind of priority treatment (although incredibly unlikely) both sets of support are actually crap, so even that argument wouldn't hold up. The phrase "The service at Party Poker is second to none." scares me.

His grading system in general appears to be well explained, but actually there is a lot of cross-over allowing him to pretty much give any score he likes in any category. Predictably, way too many sites get 10s for all kinds of things.

His write-ups are very good, although rather out of date now. "No one on the web has as many games going all the time as Paradise poker. " is at least six months out of date, as, at the time of THIS page being written, Paradise is #4 in that area.


Bias

Although this site has a reasonable proportion of true statements, the ridiculous high rankings for almost every site in every category are a huge turn-off.

I nearly gave the site a benefit of the doubt 25 here, but the fact that so much of the info is out of date prevented that from happening.

Bias = 0/50



Looks

Can't argue here. The site is pleasing on the eye, easy to navigate and the banners are not too "In your face".

Looks = 9/10



Size

The reviews of the sites are detailed and there are quite a few reviewed (You would review quite a few too if each click earned you money!).

There is a decent amount of content though and reviewing the site took a reasonable amount of time.

I have not yet posted to the forum that is provided to find out what it is like, but it does only have 8 registered users, and at least one is Empire Poker.

Size = 7/10



Articulation

Plenty of good writing and easy to follow. The grading (ranking) system is very convoluted however and makes for a messy read.

Articulation = 8/10



Spam

Being told about an affiliate site whilst I am playing poker is NOT what I want.

They have also used extensive link swapping to boost their ranking, which although some might argue as essential in the current environment, is still more needless clutter that we are going to encounter.

Spam = 1/10



Originality

Poker reviews, high rankings for all categories at all sites, zzzzzzzz. Saved by having a forum and being a fairly old site. (This format may have been more original back then.)

Originality = 5/10




TOTAL = 30%