Jaime Staples Questions GGPoker Advertisement Technique on Poker Subreddit

What Did Jaime Staples Find on Reddit

On March 20th, 2025 GGPoker and myimportantthoughts, moderator of subreddit r/poker, announced a new partnership between them. After the announcement, the moderator pinned two GGPoker promo threads making them the first things people see when going to r/poker.

Staples drew attention to another not-so-obvious change on this subreddit: the same moderator added four threads to the “Where to Play Online Poker” section:

Everything seems fine until you open them and see that each one of them led to the r/PokerInfo thread, promoting GGPoker once again.

This situation outraged Staples because r/poker was always an open forum with over 300k users who will now receive exclusively advertisement from GGPoker but not other poker operators or their affiliates:

Reddit Poker is an unowned open forum of 300k people and one of the mods has got two pinned affiliate promos, and the very prominent sidebar links to affiliate deals to sign up at GG.

It isn’t if they own the forum (like their r/ggpoker forum) But it has been completely unowned on its build up to 300K users. Which affiliates, poker sites, training sites, etc get to advertise to this pool? The ones that buy off the mods? Or infiltrate the community?

It was a general forum not owned by any site. And the rules have been no promoting poker sites with affiliate links for ever. And now some mod (or groups of mods) is getting paid for every sign up (likely 50K plus for this promo alone.)”

What Are the Subreddit Rules For Room’s Advertising

It’s important to clarify two things here.

First, Jaime’s statement “And the rules have been no promoting poker sites with affiliate links for ever” is not supported by the current version of the r/poker subreddit rules. Even posts from GGPoker and moderators about the “Goes to Vegas” promotion are subject to the new partnership between the operator and r/poker that is not even mentioned in the rules. This promotion also doesn’t go against subreddit rules about advertising, as the only thing they prohibit are advertisement, promotion, and discussions of “your pppoker/pokerrrr2/upoker club or other “social poker” clubs”.

Second, multiple threads from the “Where to Play Online Poker” section of r/poker weren’t published directly on r/poker, so they don’t fall under the subreddit rules. The moderator myimportantthoughts published them on another subreddit — r/PokerInfo — that was created on March 14th, 2025 and doesn’t have any other threads or even rules for publishing. Moreover, this new subreddit isn’t even added to the “Related Subreddits” section of r/poker as of March 21st, 2025.

Even when the moderator added links to these threads into the r/poker “Where to Play Online Poker” section, this didn’t technically make them subject to r/poker regulations because (again) they weren’t published directly on the r/poker subreddit.

This decision is curious because the r/poker subreddit has a rule against excessive use of threads:

“Posting multiple threads a day in excessive use. This includes any: non-relevant posts to poker, shilling your news site, shilling your YouTube channel, excessive shit-posting, and continuing to post content after you’ve been specifically warned not to by the mod team.”

And this situation is definitely about multiple threads per day: five of them were published in a row on March 14th, 2025 between 11:55 and 12:00 UTC.

So, if they added these threads directly into r/poker, this would have been a violation of the rules of the subreddit. And using the newly created subreddit r/PokerInfo allowed them to avoid breaking the rules.

Reddit Rules for Poker Advertisement

Poker isn’t specifically mentioned in Reddit’s policies but it technically can be regulated by Reddit Ads Policy: Restricted Ads’, specifically section Gambling and Gaming Related Services:

“Advertisements that promote any game of skill or chance, including lotteries, where money or other items of value are exchanged or at stake are classified as gambling.”

which doesn’t make a distinction between poker and gambling, as both are taken as games of skill with monetary exchanges. However, even then, poker promotions coming directly from poker rooms or moderators aren’t prohibited as long as they follow a specific set of rules:

1. Comply with applicable local laws and regulations, licensing requirements laid out by your regional gaming authority and industry advertising standards laid out by your regional or country’s gaming authority
2. Only be served on communities permitted by Reddit
3. Include terms and conditions of all games, including information on odds of winning in creative or on the landing page
4. Avoid targeting or appealing to minors or support-related subreddits
5. Do not encourage or glorify gambling or gaming
6. Contain unrealistic claims or guarantees of winning
7. Do not display imagery of sensitive, vulnerable, or impressionable groups as well as controlled substances such as alcohol, tobacco and others

If we’re looking at these rules,

Why Jaime Staples Thinks the Situation Is “Shitty”

PokerListings contacted Jaime Staples to gain an exclusive comment on the situation: