By Kevin Felix | April 26, 2010

The biggest online poker room in the world just keeps getting bigger. Yet its newest growth spurt does not come from the absorption of other poker rooms or the addition of new players. Rather, PokerStars announced last week that it has purchased three popular poker websites, a step towards becoming not just a destination to play poker, but a destination for players to spend every waking moment reading about all aspects of the game.

The three sites – PokerPages.com, PlayWinningPoker.com, and Poker-Babes.com – are three of the most well-respected “old school” sites in the industry. Each has been dedicated almost solely to providing poker fans and poker players with good, solid poker information since the beginning of this century, bypassing much of the glitz of more polished websites.

A bit slicker looking now than it did when it launched in 2000, PokerPages.com is the grand daddy of poker information sites. It is perhaps best known as being the go-to resource for land-based tournament results, both in North America and worldwide. If you needed to find who placed 4th in some random tournament in 1998, PokerPages was the place to look. It also has a sizeable poker article database and has been the online outlet for players and writers such as T.J. Cloutier, Lou Krieger, Tommy Angelo, Mike Caro, and the late, great, Andy Glazer. Before competitors came in and paid boatloads of money for exclusive rights to the biggest worldwide tournaments, PokerPages was also the premier source for on-the-scene tournament reporting, highlighted by industry mainstays Amy Calistri and Mike Paulle. Financial troubles forced PokerPages.com shut down in October 2009.

When you visit the next two sites, you may ask yourself, “People actually visit these sites?” Well, despite their extremely basic, amateur looks, both PlayWinningPoker.com and Poker-Babes.com have attracted poker fans for years.

Poker player and author Steve Badger is the man behind PlayWinningPoker.com, as you will see upon first visiting the site. Says Badger about PlayWinningPoker right on the front page, “It’s about strategy, and none of that resume stuff guarantees anything anyway! Keep in mind this site’s principal lesson: if you want to be a winning player, you need to think and decide for yourself. Creative, logical, sensible, situational thinking is key to winning. Even more, it’s the key to winning big.”

PlayWinningPoker has as many or more poker strategy articles than you will find anywhere on the internet. And they are quality, as well. In fact, this writer learned some of his first poker lessons from PlayWinningPoker, and has continued to go back for more.

Poker-Babes.com began as way for former Bicycle Casino cocktail waitress and prop player, Shirley Rosario, to get the word out about the talented female poker players that had been long ignored in a game dominated by men. Over the years, the site has developed into a source for some poker strategy and information, but its strong suit is the immense supply personal profiles Rosario has written about dozens of poker players and personalities. The beautiful and extremely friendly Rosario has befriended more poker players than most of us have even heard of and provides readers glimpses into their personalities in her bios. More than just providing stats on each player, she lets us know who these people are.

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