Review of Poker Mashup .com
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UPDATE – March 2007. PokerMashup has made the following improvements to their site:
1) they now accept any format for location: zip, city & state, full address, etc.
2) users can add poker rooms & once verified show up in 24 hours.
3) users can drag the map around to re-display search results
4) they now show more than 10 results, users can scroll through all within 300 miles.
5) users can now search by name
There’s not much to it: enter your zip code and it will display a map showing the nearest poker rooms in its database. As the name suggests, the database only includes casinos with poker, not casinos with only slot machines and blackjack, for example.
Look
Poker Mashup uses Google Maps to display the information, so it looks and feels exactly like Google Maps. It does have Google ads, but they’re unobtrusive.
Content Quantity / Quality
The acid test was putting in my own zip code and seeing what came up. Although the tagline says “find poker near you”, all the casinos that came up were nowhere near me. I’m in Oklahoma City, with several casinos with poker not too far away, yet all the results are in neighboring states. The closest result was Harrah’s Prairie Band Casino in Kansas, which is 279 miles away! You can use a form to submit new poker rooms (or provide other feedback), so I did my part and submitted a few about a week ago. They still don’t show up on the site yet, but they might.
For a second test, I tried a zip code of 90210, which is the border of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. That yielded much better results, with the closest being 11.6 miles away, and the furthest casino (out of 10) being 54.5 miles away. Of course, there could still be other casinos that are closer than some of those in the list.
Of course, this situation may change in the future, as more poker rooms are added.
Unique Pros / Cons
What this has over other sites to find poker rooms is that it uses Google Maps, so you can see exactly where the casino is. That’s not going to be much use if all the listed casinos are too far away, of course. If you need complete information, or you can’t find any poker rooms near you, you might do better consulting a typical online casino directory.
Bottom Line
It’s a nice concept and it may blossom into a great resource. Currently, it falls pretty short of its goal. But for it to become a great resource, people have to use it and contribute to it, and I encourage doing so. And hey, it’s free, so you could at least give it a try.
