Good news, fellow poker players! Rather than having this blog just be a complete waste of your time, I've decided to use the blog as a way for you to get some tangible benefits. I'm going to start contacting the people who bring you some of my favorite poker products and see if I can get you a group discount. Less than 10 of you bought waaay overpriced cub scout popcorn, but I think we'll get better results when it's some of your favorite poker products. I just got the idea while I was contacting the makers of NoteCaddy Advantage about doing a guest post (post to come in the near future). Nilay was gracious enough to offer a 10% discount to you guys (not valid on past purchases). And then the light bulb went off. Why not contact the people who make all the software products I like using and get a similar discount?

I'm not a NoteCaddy Advantage user, but I recently started playing around with NoteCaddy and it's an incredibly powerful tool. I think most of you will be too lazy/busy to program all the custom definitions yourself, so having Alan Jackson (Bluefire coach) and Nilay do most of the work for you can be super +ev. The badges feature is especially slick - you can get an icon show up on your HUD if a player (including you) does anything "exploitable" - folds too much to cold 4 bets, folds to a check-raise, river bet sizing tells, etc. NoteCaddy also has a lot of other features, which I'll let Nilay tell you about. This product is the next big thing in HUD technology. You may not end up using it, but if you don't know how it works and what it says about you, you may get left behind.  Even if you don't use the product in-game, it can be pretty helpful analyzing your own leaks, because some of your competitors will be looking at the same thing.

Anyway, I'm going to contact a few other vendors and see where this goes. If you have any suggestions for products, let me know. I'm probably only going to do this for products that I find useful. I don't want this to be a hodge-podge of random products. I may be a whore... But I have my principles.