How to monetize a play for fun poker site?
dazzawazza: Before I comment let me qualify this with the fact that I worked on one of the big poker websites as lead engineer.There is a big difference between free and raked poker. The betting patterns in free poker are erratic and make the game MUCH less fun. Because no one buys in to the hand (literally and figuratively) no one cares if they win or loose. So there is always some idiot who just goes all in on every hand clicking the 'more free chips' button when it goes wrong. They ruin ALL the free tables on all the poker sites.To make games more fun you could consider:private tables: people pay for the right to create private tables that they invite friends/family to play on (eliminating the free play whores). Maybe with a subscription you can create a private table for 10, without it's limited to 6.limited chips: people can only get new chips once a day (or what ever period suits your traffic). You can get very clever with this allowing bad beat loosers to get more chips buy reckless players get penalized.I wish you luck but it's an industry flush with cash and corruption so you'll need to be very canny. There are sections of the community (such as students) who are looking for a good time on the cheap. They are also prime candidates for beer advertisers so there is an angle there. You might want to consider splitting your site in to students.domain.com and family.domain.com so you  can target the respective audiences more accurately.