Tournament Poker Edge Celebrates Third Anniversary

Time flies, as it has been three years since Tournament Poker Edge successfully launched into the world of poker training sites.  Derek “Killingbird” Tenbusch, founder of Tournament Poker Edge, took time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about his site.

For those of you who don’t know, Tournament Poker Edge is a cutting-edge poker training site for tournament players only.  Its top-line instructors include Casey “bigdogpckt5s” Jarzabek, Andrew "foucault82" Brokos, and Daryl “aaaaaaaaa” Jace.

PokerSoftware:  What gave you the idea to found Tournament Poker Edge?

Derek Tenbusch:  I was working in the music business at the time and knew that the business was in a downward spiral. But, I have always had a "figure out what you love and find a way to get paid for it" mentality when it came to careers.

My business partner Diego and I had become really good friends and would talk poker hands and stuff all the time and we decided we wanted to start a poker-related business.  We probably brainstormed 20 ideas (some of which other people have since done), but decided there was a real opportunity in the MTT training market.  Plus, we were both MTT players, so we essentially set out to create a training community that we would want to be members of.

PokerSoftware:  Can you let us know what it took to launch your site in April 2010 and how much time it took from deciding you wanted to start an MTT training site to it going live?

Derek Tenbusch:  I would say from the initial idea to the day we launched was six months or so.  A lot of the process was incredibly boring stuff like setting up the company from a legal standpoint, opening bank accounts, making contracts, and so on, but the rest of it was a blast.

I still have a ton of the early notes about site design and it is pretty cool to look back at what we envisioned and where we are now.  I handle marketing for TPE, so a good deal of that six-month period for me was spent putting together a marketing plan and figuring out how the hell we were going to get this thing off the ground.  Another aspect that really developed during that time was who we were going to bring in as pros for the site, and that included bringing Casey "bigdogpckt5s" Jarzabek on as an owner of the company, which of course helped us jump-start the whole thing to a good degree.

PokerSoftware:  What are some of the aspects you have improved upon in the three years you have been running?

Derek Tenbusch:  One of the things we did early on was make all of our videos compatible with mobile devices.  We quickly realized that was something our customers wanted.  From a content standpoint, we have really tried to listen to our members as far as what types of videos they want.  It's a challenge because some people like live sweats, some people like theory videos, and some people like hand history reviews.  So, it took us a while to figure out a good balance.

Of course, you can't make everyone happy all the time, but I think our content mix is much stronger now than it was three years ago.  Shortly after launching the site, we also started the Tournament Poker Edge Podcast and that has become one of the most popular aspects of TPE.  It's another great opportunity to share knowledge with our members and we continue to look for those kinds of tools.  Finally, we implemented the TPE Chat Room, which is really popular.  It's a great way to share hands and discuss strategy on the fly.  It gets pretty busy, especially on Sundays.

PokerSoftware:  What can we expect down the road from Tournament Poker Edge?

Derek Tenbusch:  We plan to continue to find more ways to teach people how to win poker tournaments.  It's hard to say what form that will take exactly, but we definitely want to add some new methods of teaching.

You will also see more efforts from us in terms of community building.  One thing we are incredibly proud of is how supportive all of our members are of each other and our pros.  We want to find ways to facilitate that even further.  Lastly, you will definitely see some new pros added to the roster.  It's important to us that we continue to offer a variety of styles of poker and to do that, we think it is important to have a diverse group of pros who play and teach differently. We should be making some very exciting announcements on that front very soon.

Be sure to follow TPE on Twitter at @TournPokerEdge and you can follow Tenbusch at @derektenbusch.  Visit Tournament Poker Edge for more details.

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