Internet Events, Facebook Advertising, Internet Marketing and SEO

I am blogging from the Wynn hotel restaurant at the Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. What a night! The tournament lasted almost 6 hours, with the final showdown dropping chip by chip till the end.

Tons o’ pictures coming over the next week.

We even got a song from Tony Clifton, until the Poker Director took the mike away from him.

Greg from BOTW put a side game together with folks who didn’t make it to the final table.

The winners in the money, were as follows.

(Names not spell checked due to it being 3:41 am)

9. David Lawlor who won $290

8. Scott Skinger walked away with $387

7. Ben Hun doubled his entry fee with $484

6. Merrick Lozano had a nice pot at $581

5. Ben Davenport threw $678 in his pocket.

4. Jon Roy walked out nicely with $774.

3. Rob Schmid proke into the thousands with a take hom eof $1355

At one point, and you will see this in the photos to come, Jeremy Schoemaker, had a pile of chips as tall as the Palms Hotel. In his own words he later said if he had just gone all in on every hand he very possibly could have won just on that.

In the end, Dan Perry chipped away at Jeremy’s pile until it dwindled and just evaporated into thin air. Dan told me that he had only played poker once before at his uncles house, but had watched it a fair bit on T.V. It was a nice way for him to break into the game.

In the end Jeremy Schoemaker took a nice second after a 5 and a half hour chug to the end, and walked away with a nice $1936 for his nights work.

The winner, who was a little less known than Mr. Shoe was Dan Perry who beaming ear to ear walked out to go pack and fly home with $3195 in his hand.

Just before he went out the door, he asked me to take a $500 chip from his winnings, and give the money to the wife of the fire fighter who died in the fires.

Ben just stopped by our table to say hello, and with that I would like to thank all of the players, the sponsors, and my buddy’s at the Venetian for one of the times of my life.

Left to Right, Jeremy #2, Me just stoked!, and Dan #1, our first ever Purposeinc, Pubcon, BOTW, Planet Chiropractic, SEOish, Chipotle, SEO Poker Tournament winner!

There is more to come, stay tuned!

dk

Tonight is the night. I am trying to get a little sleep after last night. I met some of the amazing new crop of SEO’s at their first Pubcon, here to take on the world!

The T-shirts have arrived and are ready for the entrants. We still have 20 seats left in the tournament as of 1:45 this afternoon.

Notices!

1. Sign up here now if you want to play. You can not sign up at the time of the tournament.

2. Go join the Venetian Players club now, as you can not play without having signed up there first. It is free, and only takes a few minutes.

3. Be there at 9:00 tonight.

4. Thank our sponsors who made it all possible,

PlanetChiropractic

SEOish (Who was up an amazingly large amount of money last night, so

a. ask him if he is still up, and

b. ask him to buy the drinks!

BOTW Try to list your sites with them, I did and they did! For a small fee you can be listed in one of the oldest and most respected names in the industry.

Chipotle Try one of their burritos. The reason they sponsored it is that I am one of their best customers!

Spectators are welcome if you are part of Pubcon, a friend of someone at Pubcon, or someone hot that one of our players wants standing behind them to make them look good at the tournament.

Have way, way, way too much fun tonight!

And if you haven’t met me, come up and say hello!

dk

Every hat I have ever owned off to Rand Fishkin for pulling off one of the absolute funnest things I have ever done in my entire life. This will truly be one of those events that literally for the rest of our lives people in the SEO will say either they were there, or were not. This made Pubcon the must do event of my year!

If you weren’t there, this blog will not make any sense, but you can still enter the Poker Tournament for Thursday night.

Here are a few of the photos from the event. I am so tired, that I will post the rest of them here over the next week. For now, I just prepared a few, and will post them here with a quick note on them.

First Rand had to school everyone on how to play. I failed this portion.

Matt Cutts rolled in late in style in the Google Limo, arriving in his usual fashion.

More early schooling by Rand about how to keep your head down.

I have  your card Matt Cutts!

The players learned the game and were off.

We each got a deck of the cards to keep. Very cool.

A black hat trying very unconvincingly to state his innocence.

For one game we formed an alliance, Survivor style, and picked off the other people one by one. Oddly enough none of us were the black hat.

This is a photo of Matt Cutts trying desperately to state that someone else was the Black Hat. A few moments later the truth came out, that Matt is a Black Hat.

Not too long after the last picture, Matt Cutts was doing that funny 90’s swinging head and body dance singing, “Black Hats Rule” “Black Hats Rule” “Black Hats Rule” This may or may not have been caught on video. Keep your eyes open to see if it appears.

There are tons more pics that I will post here in the next weekish.

Rand, Thank you so much for one of the funnest things I have ever done. There was so much strategy, intrigue, hilarity, and down right stupidity that it was amazing!!! If I was major sponsor looking for publicity, I would pay Rand a million dollars to host more Werewolf tournaments.

Want More Games? Come play poker at the tournament Thursday night!

Player number 47 is Tony Clifton. I thought this was a joke. I did a little research, and A, he is in Vegas for the week as he is friends with Chris Kata of Spark. Tony also appears to still do some consulting for them.

He used to be a big performer in Vegas back in the day. He is quite a bit of living Vegas history, and I am thrilled he is coming to the tournament.

Whew! Today has been moving!

WARNING – You must join the Venetian Players Club by Thursday night.

They can do it in about 2 minutes. Go to the Players Club which is by the Sports Book in the Venetian any time between now and tomorrow night, but since there will be so many players please don’t wait till the last hour. 🙂

So far today I have met tons of great people for the first time, and we have gotten a bunch of new entries.

I even met one famous search marketer who said he was kicking himself now that he didn’t sponsor the tournament when he had the chance. 🙂

I want to talk more about our sponsors as I have a second, but here is the simple rundown.

We are busting our ass right now trying to get T-shirts done for the tournament. Since this was only planned over the last 3 weeks, they may or may not be done in time.

The sponsors have generously put up the dough for the T-shirts. They are not going to be cheap. If they come out the way they are supposed to, they will be collectors items that will be the must have in the SEO community for decades to come.

So super huge thanks to our sponsors, and I will keep pushing the process of getting the shirts produced and perfect by Thursday night!

I spoke to my buddy at the Venetian Poker room just now, and he is going to arrange for there to be a dealer there for the three hours teaching people how to play Texas Holdem at no charge. If you take advantage of these free lessons, please tip the dealer as they make their money mostly off of tips. You do not have to be a player to get the lessons, they are for all of the Pubcon crew and their guests.

Groupies! Spectators will be welcome for the event. Come and watch and cheer on your favorite SEO, SEM, PPC or whatever guy!

I realized a lot of people don’t know what I look like, so I am putting a photo of myself here so you can come up to me at Pubcon. Don’t be shy of me, I look like the Russian Olympic wrestling coach, but am actually quite friendly. (No offense to the Russians)

This was me doing chiropractic on San Diego fire fighters last month during our big fires.

If you want to learn Texas Holdem Poker, go to SEO POKER TABLE (dot) COM, but don’t link to it. It is free to practice there.

There still are tons of people I am running into, who don’t know about the tournament yet, so please let everyone your know, know!

And huge thanks to BOTW . They have been around for forever in the internet world. They actually review sites the way Matt Cutts has described a good directory should, and they don’t approve every site. They put up big bucks as sponsors, so we all owe them huge thanks. Go by their booth at Pubcon and say hello. Greg also did a ton of promotion to his friends about the tournament.

Huge thanks also to PlanetChiropractic.com

Mike the owner is a great guy and a great chiropractor. He practices in the Western Beach area of Los Angeles near Venice California. Not only do I know him from the SEO world, but I have sent him lots of patients when they move up to Los Angeles. He is very apreciated for his sponsorship.

Our third sponsor is SEOish, In my conversations with Pat, it really sounds like he is sponsoring the tournament simply to give back to an industry that has been really good to him. Like me, he has been befreinded by some very knowaldable people who have helped him to become very successfull in this area. He has done very well, and would now love to give a little back.

Our fourth sponsor is Chipotle. I personally consider them to have the finest burritos in the world, and have developed a close tie to the company. They provided me with hundreds of burritos to feed the firefighters when they were not receiving sufficient food due to supply lines not being fully put in yet. Iam great friends with Kevin Kupper who is the manager of one of their San Diego stores. They have provided me with free Burrito playing cards, that are worth one full on gargantuan burrito. Their is a Chipotle about one half block south of the Venetian. All players will get a free burrito card. It also looks like a playing card.

I am heading over to the conferance in a few minnutes. If you see me there, give me a hoot. I want to make as many friends as possible.

Much Love,

dk

Thanks to all those that sold out this Pubcon event in two weeks.

I was just able to release more seats.

I still think that most of the Pubcon attendees have not heard about the tournament yet.

If you have not heard the story yet,

Everyone is invited!

Spectators are welcome!

Read all about it here.

These are the rough drawings I am sending off tonight to the t-shirt producer.

The finals will, if god is willing be ready on Thursday for the Pubcon Event, but no promises.

Feel free to put these three images of the T-shirt on your blog, but don’t make any promises. You can just say they are rough drawings that are on their way to a T-shirt manufacturer. The time schedule is so tight putting this Pubcon Event together, that there is no way to say for sure what will happen as far as the T-shirts go. 🙂

The works in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

I have gotten quite a few requests for graphics that people can put on their sites.

The works in this post are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.Simply you can copy them and put them on your site, just don’t change them, and I still retail the copyrights. Otherwise, feel free to post these up all over the place!

Here is a directory of all of the graphics you can download and use. The numbers in each file name are the width of the graphic. Here are a selection of some of them.

A little thinner one.

A tiny one,

Another one similar to the ones we are putting on the back of the playing cards we will hand out Pubcon week, (Provided it is o.k. with Brett.)

A smaller size,

A tiny one,

There are other widths and sizes of each of these. Have fun with them!

Here is a rough mock up of the graphic for the T-Shirt for the SEO poker event. I am looking for feedback. I would like feedback from sponsors, players, and anyone in the SEO community.

I still need permission from the Venetian before I can make these widely available. Then I plan on having different versions in different sizes that people can post on their blogs.

For some reason in some of the earlier postings it stretched her out and made her taller.

We need to collect all of the money from the sponsors by Monday night, otherwise there will not be t-shirts. Any money paid by sponsors will be returned to them if we don’t collect enough to make the shirts.The shirts will be all black, long sleeve, with the logo on the back.

I also would like to hear if people prefer a thicker t-shirt, or a thin one.

Sponsors should also send me high quality large graphics so the resolution comes out perfect on the final shirts.

This is the second possible graphic for the 2007 Purposeinc Pubcon Texas Holdem poker tournament t-shirts.

Look at both cartoons and Sphinn the one you like better.

You can see the first entrant here called clubs.

This one is hearts.

I am experimenting with Sphinn as a way to survey.

Just look at both drawings and Sphinn the one you like better.

The t-shirts will be long sleeved black and will have on of the graphics as well as the announcement of the tournament and listings of the sponsors.

Feel free to give any other design ideas in the comments section.