Karma can be a real bitch. If you treat people like shit, it can come back to you 10 fold. You should always treat other people how you want to be treated. So, be nice to your fellow human beings, and good things will come to you!

On a side note, I noticed something funny today happened to Snaps. Tough break pal on your recent troubles with the big G:

This should be a reminder to everyone that if you are going to buy links, don’t be stupid about it!

Dear Spin32Poker/Spin32Live/Spin32Casino/Spin32.com/Whatever the hell you call yourself,

Stop spamming me. This morning I replied to your email asking to be removed from your mailing list. In case you can’t remember what email I am talking about, it started off:

“Dear %Name%
I visited your website %Website% and wondered…”

And, came from a campbell@spin32.com. Sure enough, about 10 minutes later I received another email from you guys with my information in it (which you obviously bought or stole from another site as I have never given you my email address.

You obviously didn’t learn anything when it was first brought up in this thread. I have heard all your crap about how you are a small site and can’t afford to hire multiple people to send emails all day, but why the hell would I want to work with you if you can’t even take 2 seconds to look at my site and send a personal email (not just some cookie cutter crap).

One of the funniest things is that you are even sending these out to people that own <establishedpokersite>bonus.com. Are you guy’s that retarded? Why would someone advertise spin32 on something like pokerstarsbonus.com?

If you really want to build relationships with affiliates do it on a personal level, but its already too late for you guys. Hopefully some other sites out there will read this and learn why SPAMMING DOESNT WORK!

Honestly, do yourselves a favor and just shut down your affiliate department right now. Nobody is gonna want to work with a bunch of spammers that use shady marketing tactics!

And, now that I have gotten that off my chest, lets end this on a positive note…

I decided to write about the topic of respect because there are far too many children getting into business that seem to lack basic people skills entirely. Let me tell you a story of what happened last night with an affiliate that I thought I got along with pretty well (for the sake of identities lets just call him SNAPS - because snapping in a situation is completely retarded, especially if you are trying to get something resolved)…

So its late, I am about to go to bed, when suddenly this message pops up:
21/05/2008 2:51:08 AM SNAPS : you are a total douche
21/05/2008 2:51:49 AM Graham : ?
21/05/2008 2:51:58 AM SNAPS : think before you talk
21/05/2008 2:52:32 AM Graham : whats the matter?
21/05/2008 2:53:07 AM SNAPS : you’re an absolute twat
21/05/2008 2:53:15 AM SNAPS : why don’t you think before you post bullshit on PAP
21/05/2008 2:53:18 AM SNAPS : and mention other peoples domains
21/05/2008 2:53:21 AM SNAPS : that can land them into trouble
21/05/2008 2:53:22 AM SNAPS : idiot
21/05/2008 2:53:34 AM Graham : what domains?
21/05/2008 2:53:50 AM SNAPS : bye graham

At this point I honestly had no idea what SNAPS was talking about, but figured it had to do with something that I posted in a thread that I had been heavily involved with on PAP (and had actually defended in the thread without mentioning names). In the thread I had randomly listed off a bunch of domains as examples (ie. xsitebonuscode.com, xsitereferralcode.com) not really pointing fingers at the owners of those sites, just making things up off the top of my head. It was then that I realized that one of the domains I had used as an example redirected to SNAPS’ site.

Sure, I screwed up, but it was completely unintentional. But, after being called an idiot, douche and twat by this individual I also wasn’t too eager to go back and fix the post either. All this person had to say was “hey man, that site you mentioned in the post is mine, can you please remove it”, and it would have been gone immediately. Instead, this person thinks that it will be more effective to talk to me in a condescending and disrespectful tone to get the problem resolved…. WRONG! I find it funny that people can have such big mouths when hiding behind their computer, but I guarantee they would not say these things face to face. Anything I post online I would gladly back up in person.

Hopefully you have learned something from this experience that it is better to treat your fellow affiliates with respect than treating them like a dog. Don’t be so quick to overreact as a lot of the time people may not know what they are doing that is so wrong. People will be much more willing to accommodate you when talk to them like normal human beings rather than a piece of shit!

So, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently went to Monte Carlo for 10 days.  The main reason for the trip was to watch my brother play in the EPT Grand Final, but also just to get a little bit of a break and clear my head.  Ever since quitting my job I have felt a little overwhelmed and hard to focus, but I think I am finally getting over that.  On the plane I listened to a great audiobook called Getting Things Done, and I think that over the next few months I will try and implement a lot of the things it teaches to get myself more organized.

Back to the vacation…. We landed in Nice for a few days before heading to Monaco.  The weather was pretty shitty, but hey, I was in Europe (I love it over there).  We hit a few pubs there and pretty much just did the tourist thing (walked all around the city).  Here are a couple pics from Nice:

After a few days there, we were on our way to Monte Carlo AKA Ballerville.  This place was insane!  Every other car was practically a Bentley or a Ferrari.  I have never seen so many of them in one week in my life!   Here are some pics of the constant car show:

But really, the cars above were nothing.  The one that really caught my attention was this one, the Bugatti Veyron:

At over 1.12 Million Euros, in the words of Jeremy Enke, that is “Certified Baller“.

Monte Carlo is a beautiful city, but really expensive so if you go, bring lots of cash.  With some restaurants charging as much as $8 for a can of coke, you can go broke pretty quick.  Here are some pics of the ports:

The big boat dead center is insane!  17th largest yacht in the world.

As you can probably guess… I love yachts and nice cars.  I did a ton of walking in Monte Carlo, and even took one day to go to Italy (small town called Ventimiglia) to eat some pasta and pizza.  The pasta I had in Italy was awful, but the pizza was pretty decent.  The best part was the Cappucino’s…soo good.

So as I mentioned before the reason I was there partially was to watch my brother play in the EPT.  Unfortunately he went busto at the end of day 1.  He got crippled with KK twice, once into AA and another time with 4 callers.  He managed to make a huge laydown against the AA, but it left him pretty short.

It was cool to meet many of the players that I write about all the time face-to-face.  I had many elevator rides with people like Daniel Negreanu, Freddy Deeb, and Barry Greenstein.  I also got to play Gavin Griffin heads-up in the Pokerstars Lounge for charity, which was lots of fun.

While there, I also went to try and find one of the members of one of my forums, Glen Chorny.  If you followed the event, you’d know that Glen went on to win the whole tournament, which was awsome because I had been cheering for him for several days.  His parents took us all out after to the club at the hotel where we polished off a magnum of Cristal, magnum of Dom, along with 2 regular size bottles of Cristal.  Here is the group of us after the tourney:

I ended up getting back to the room around 6am, and almost slept through my flight back.  Fortunately I had set my alarm two days prior and I heard it in time to get up.  All in all, it was a fun trip, now back to work so I can get my own Bugatti!

Tomorrow I will be heading to Monte Carlo for 10 days to watch my brother play in the EPT Grand Final and I can’t wait!  I have always wanted to go to Monte Carlo and this is the perfect opportunity to do so.  We will be staying in Nice for 2 days then heading onward to Monte Carlo on Friday.

I think this vacation is what I need right now, as I feel my head is very cluttered since leaving my job and I just need some time to relax and start thinking creatively again.

I find that I come up with the best ideas when I am on vacation and I am sure that seeing all the ballers of Monte Carlo will help provide some good motivation.

I’ll try and take lots of pics and post them when I get back.  So if you are looking for me online over the next week or so… that is where I will be

I hope everyone enjoyed their holidays and New Year celebrations, but now its time to get back to work. I have been really lazy with work over the past few weeks (mostly due to all the rich food, and good wine), but all that has to come to a stop now. Its 2008, a new year full of tons of amazing opportunities. All the mistakes I have made are now in the past, and I can only look towards the future.

I think this is gonna be an exciting year for me, and I expect it to be a crucial year for me in my overall life. I plan to stop being so complacent in my life and start DOing a lot more!

I have already bought a few books, which I plan to have completed by year end. I will write more about them as I read them, but right now I am on The 4-hour Work Week.

I plan on working on all my sites even more, including a few redesigns and reviving some projects that were put on the side.

I plan to start responding to my emails more, as I have been getting pretty lazy responding them all. To accomplish this, I purchased a new Blackberry.

I would like to start giving back more. This idea still needs to be worked on how I will do it, but hopefully I can inspire some people on this blog.

There are probably a few more things that I am leaving out, so I will add them later as I think of them.

Its a new year, and I can’t wait to play this one out!

Happy new year everyone!

I have been kinda letting this blog slip lately, because I have either just been lazy, or busy working on the sites that actually make me money

Anyway, for those that care, I recently reported Moneybookers had said they were gonna pay me some of the money back.  Well, it has been over a week, and there is still no sign of the money.  So if they every jack any money from your account, put it this way, you have been warned!

I tried to run my first freeroll on the weekend, and it failed miserably.  I didn’t want to use a password because I was worried it would get leaked so I asked my affiliate manager if I could send him the players list on the Friday before the tournament.  Well I did just that, but apparently my Friday, was his Saturday (as they are in Australia) and he did not receive the player’s list in time.  So, I had to deal with all the angry people in the forum, but will be re-running the tournament next weekend.  If you want to play, drop by the Fuzion Poker Forum.  I would love to have some fellow affiliates in the tournament.  I am pretty sure that Jeremy is gonna show up, as well as Kyle.

What else is going on in the blogosphere…

Congratulations to Justin Goff for kicking ass and making some big bucks last month.  Justin went from $7796 in October to $12,827 in November!  That is a massive increase.

Jeremy had a great post today about his “balling” father.  I like reading these kinds of posts because it makes you slow down to reflect on the things that are really important in life.  As much as we love to chase the almighty dollar, it isn’t everything.  One of my favorite quotes of all time is from the movie Blow where Fred Jung (Ray Liotta) says to his son George (Johnny Depp), “Money isn’t real, George. It doesn’t matter. It only seems like it does.”

Also, I was checking out Kyle’s blog and came across an interesting post about how Nintendo have suspended their advertising of the Wii because they don’t want to fuel demand.  I have been trying to find a Wii for the past few weeks now, so I can understand why they would do this.

I have also been reading the Earner’s blog a little more lately.  They have some great info on their blog about online marketing in general.  Definitely worth checking out!

So its been a few days since I last updated about the whole moneybookers account hacked situation.  Basically they have been ignoring my emails and avoiding my questions about how transactions can possibly take place in under 3 seconds. I have tried calling, but everytime I get stuck on the phone with one of their RETARDED (I am not kidding… and I do not mean to offend anyone out there, but these people seriously have a few screws loose) staff that keep telling me to email.  They have no phone manners, talk over me all the time, and yell at ME the CUSTOMER!  Fuck you moneybookers!

Anyway, I finally got them to respond to an email this morning, but I have no idea what this means.  Anyone care to take a stab at this:

“Dear Mr. Rowlands,

We are contacting your with regards to your Moneybookers account. Please be kindly informed that we have received a confirmation back from the company that received the payments, sent out of your account without your authorization. You will receive a refund to your Moneybookers account, however, it will not be the full amount that was sent out. Please be advised that this is the best we could do, having in mind that there was a possibility that our requests were not granted. Moreover please be advised that it will take at least 7 business days, starting from today, for this refund procedure to be completed, due to the specific internal regulations of the company in question.

We hope you’ll find this information useful.

Best regards,

[Theodor]
The Moneybookers Team”

Notice how they still say nothing about the 3-second transactions!  I have emailed them for clarification.

Either way, I am gonna hold out on my smear campaign for now and wait to see what they have to say.  I could start posting the story everywhere, but I don’t want to jeopardize any chance of getting the money back just yet.  Regardless, protect yourself, change your moneybookers passwords regularly, if you don’t NEED moneybookers, don’t use them, just don’t let this happen to you!

I am going to run my first freeroll on my forum.  Its strange to think that I have been doing this poker affiliate stuff for almost 2 years now and have never done a freeroll.  I am running it over in my Poker Forum, so if you are interested in playing, drop by.  I will post whether it is a success or not after it is done.

As for the Moneybookers situation…. still nothing yet.  The last response I got from them was yesterday stating:

“We would like to kindly confirm that our Security Department has been notified of your case and we are now making all necessary efforts to return the funds on all transactions that were not authorized by yourself.”

This came about an hour after I found the email for the CEO and Head of Marketing / PR and copied them on one of my complaints, but still haven’t received anything from them today and the money is still gone.

I logged into my Moneybookers account randomly last night to find out that it had been HACKED!  This account is brand new (1 month old) and I have only given out my account email to two people (affiliate managers at Pokerheaven and Euro Partners) so I am very suspicious about who could have done it.  Also, I never open suspicious emails, so there is no way I got caught by a phishing scheme.

Anyway, there were 6 transfers done to moneybookers@globe7.com (some online phone company based in India) all for around $117.  I immediately tried to find a number to call them, but they don`t even offer after hours support!  What a joke that is!  I emailed their security department last night, and called them (long distance! - no 800 number) first thing when they opened this morning.  When I called they said they would forward the request on to security.  It has now been almost 24 hours, and still NO RESPONSE!  I even emailed the support email at globe7.com, but they were completely useless and told me that I should contact moneybookers when I asked them who owned that email address.  I am so frustrated because it is basically a waiting game now, and this whole situtation kept me up really late last night.  I will give them the benefit of the doubt for now, and hope they will help out, but if they do not I will be voicing my opinion of their service like crazy!

I will keep everyone posted on the outcome, but for now I will keep it low key and off the forums.  My only recommendation to everyone is be careful, because when something goes wrong, there should always be someone there to help.  I shouldn`t have to wait around like this!  This is one of the reasons why I did not even want to open an account there in the first place, but these sites said this was the only way that they could pay me.  If nothing is done in the next day or so, I guess the next step is to go to the police, but I wouldn`t even know where to start.  Anyone ever had something like this happen?